Rachael Posted:

It’s been a while since I had a chance to sit and update my blog but trust me, so much has been happening.  Most of it is good though there are some troubling moments.  Yesterday a woman who studies with me shared her most recent experience at the Wailing Wall, the Kotel in Jerusalem.  She said that ever since the Six Day War, she has made it a point of going to Israel and visiting the Kotel.  To her it is very special because she had lived in Israel in the 1950s and remembers with longing that they could never go to Jerusalem and the Kotel was not quite real to her.  She never takes it for granted and always visits and makes sure to place her hand against the wall making it physically real to her.

This last time she visited Israel and again made her way to the Kotel.  She mentioned being a bit hesitant because of all the politics around women and Torah reading and arrests etc.  In spite of it all she made her way to the Kotel and wove through a packed women’s section.  She politely said excuse me repeatedly (after all, still Canadian even in Israel), and finally was close enough to touch it, having to reach her hand over the heads of some young people who were sitting on the ground right at the Kotel.  She told me she was pushed, stared at and had to endure glares “as if I was from Mars!”.  For the first time she felt like a foreigner.  She walked away saddened reminding herself that these are the very stones and steps her ancestors touched and walked.  It was that thought that saw her through.

I want to share her story with everyone.  If we are foreigners even to each other, how much more so to the strangers in our world.  Politics are the arena for argument but a holy site and a wish to pray are not!

There is a wonderful concept that comes through the learning of Jewish Mysticism called ‘Tzimtzum’.  It is the concept of pulling inward into yourself.  It is slightly different in process from self-constraint since self-constraint involves an imposed discipline of limitation.  ‘Tzimtzum’ on the other hand implies drawing inward in order to allow room for the other – space for growth.

I believe this concept is key to many of our interpersonal relationships in allowing room for partners, parents, children, friends etc.  If they get too close to us without our engaging in ‘tzimtzum’, then we feel they have overstepped but if we prepare ourselves by pulling inward, we have created the space for them to draw near to us without intrustion.

I’d like to bridge this concept into Jewish environmentalism.  Rather than viewing sensitivity toward the environment and limiting consumption as a negative thing (negative in the sense of something I’m NOT doing), I suggest we view it as the positive behaviour of ‘tzimtzum’.  By not needing to extend myself onto and into everything around me, I consume less, I discard less and I impose less.  I have an effect on the environment because I exercised my power to withdraw inward and I have thereby created space for the environment and for growth.

A colleague of mine told me that her kids were telling her what they studied at school that day. These are two brothers, one is in middle school and the other is quite young in elementary school. The older son told his mother that he was learning about Oedipus Rex and the Complex and now he’s worried that he won’t be able to find anyone to marry. Neither the son nor his mother said anything else about it.

At that point the younger son entered the conversation and said: ‘I don’t know who this Oedipus guy is but I’m not worried one bit about who I’m going to marry. When I grow up I’m going to marry mommy!’

Need we say more?