|: The Mouth that Speaks Freedom
I have probably ordered or bought (this year alone) more books than I am able to ingest, but I keeping doing it anyway, promising myself that someday (very soon) I will make the time to read them. Well, it doesn’t quite work that way. It is a balancing act that I may never perfect, and I will find myself schizophrenically devoting time to several books on a weekly (or daily) basis. Some of my books actually have long-standing, semi-permanent bookmarks in them. This is actually a good thing: I surprise myself by opening to a bookmark and being able to jump right back into the gist of a chapter after two weeks of neglect.
This month the book in question is one I may/may not have mentioned before, entitled Sacred Therapy by Estelle Frankel. Just today at lunch, as I was waiting in my car for my pick-up order of Kung Pao Chicken to be ready I managed to squeeze in a whopping two pages.
Mrs. Frankel makes it beautifully and amazingly clear the premise that nothing in mysticism or Kabbalah acts or functions independently. Everything corresponds to or is associated with something else. And in many instances (instances that have kept me coming back to Kabbalah for several years now) factors somehow tie together or, I think, reflect an important spiritual principle. It’s all good. And, it’s all related.
There are patterns within patterns in Kabbalah, and at the heart of all mystical study is the One Being or Force that we all seem to be circling, orbiting or (ultimately) gravitating towards. A very simple definition for something that cannot be defined: G-d, in my humble opinion is simply the most irresistible Force in the Universe, and the Desire of all desires.
In the two pages I was able to read earlier, Mrs. Frankel reminds us of what slavery (exile) and freedom truly encompass. She states that exile is often characterized by the one in exile being or becoming uncommunicative – unable to express their true feelings, or inhibited in some way from coherently expressing them (in other words, “The slave has no voice”). Using her own “anonymous” clientele from psychotherapy sessions as examples, Mrs. Frankel explains how self-expression, particularly truthful self-expression about one’s feelings can free an individual from being controlled (or enslaved) by that feeling.
What’s fascinating are the facts she shows as analogous. For example, in regards to the Passover or Pesach, the Hebrew term itself is actually a play on the words peh and sach which means, “the mouth speaks.” And, because the Israelites of the time of the Exodus were enslaved, they were incapable of (or inhibited from) expressing what they truly felt about their lives at that time. They had no voice. The being sent to rescue them, one of the Great Shepherds, Moses, surprisingly (and ironically) had a speech impediment, and originally did not, if you remember, want to “speak” before Pharaoh. And even though his brother Aaron may have initially spoken on Moses’ behalf, I like to believe that gradually, Moses began to speak directly to Pharaoh more and more – as both he (and the Hebrew nation) spiritually adjusted and grew in confidence and in faith.
Yet another correspondence Mrs. Frankel cites regards dibbur, the Hebrew word for speech. The root of this word (dalet-bet-reish) is shared with another Hebrew word related to this time period – midbar: desert. The Israelites were redeemed in the desert, and received the Torah in the desert. It seems as if this is telling us that in the silent expansiveness of the desert the Voice of Sinai spoke. The solitude and silence of one’s personal midbar must come before one’s true dibbur – the speech of the Soul.
One final note. The Haggadah is the prayer book used specifically for the Passover Seder. The word Haggadah itself means, “the telling.”
