The Great Crocodile
Dear friends,
Imagine yourself being invited into the unknown by some gentle voice. Imagine that what you hear in that voice is the voice of your beloved, or maybe your mother, someone you trust beyond everyone else. They take your hand and walk you into one room, then another, each room going deeper and deeper into some beautiful, majestic home. After many wonderous rooms you enter the largest one yet. A few stairways spiral upward, all leading to the same place, the seat of The Great Crocodile.
This is the Zohar’s depiction of the first verse of this week’s Parasha, Bo:
God said to Moses: Come to Pharaoh.
When Moses, with the Holy One’s gentle guidance, arrives at these stairways, he understands a few things: The creature at the top is an expression of Pharaoh. The crocodile is divine, a feature of God. Moses can see that Pharaoh and everything he represents is מִשְׁתָּרִשׁ בְּשָׁרָשִׁין עִלָּאִין, rooted in the high realms. He also knows that he is supposed to walk up those stairs and confront this crocodile. But he won’t. He is too scared, paralyzed by the ramifications of what he has seen.
The Zohar is neither scared nor paralyzed. It isn’t interested in a comfortable notion of divinity, or a neat and pleasant idea of good and evil. It isn’t looking for the Torah to be clear-cut and self-affirming. It is actively seeking out the challenge to its own ideas of right and wrong. It’s not only Pharaoh and the Egyptians who thinks he is a god, but Moses and the Jews can see the truth in that too. Moses enters into God and finds Pharaoh there.
God, like us, is not only good. I’ll repeat that. God is not only good. Godliness is inclusive of every aspect of existence, every possibility of our imagination, every dark wish. Every lie exists therein. Every selfish act, every expression of chaos, every tweet and every feeling of despair; everything is included in God. How could it not be, in a system in which God is understood to be the creator of everything, the life-source and death-source in whose image we live?
What you hate is part of you.
Who you blame is inside of you.
Your oppressor is not absent in your oppressed self, nor even in your liberated self.
Acceptance of reality is important. Without it we are shooting in the dark, or groundlessly dreaming. The Great Crocodile can be a beautiful teacher.
“The mystery of the wisdom of ‘The Great Crocodile hanging out in his river’ has been demonstrated to those seekers who know the mysteries of their God,” says Rabbi Shimon in the Zohar.
And yet, this does not mean that we are supposed to accept reality quietly. The lesson may well be about when to confront the earthly expressions of the crocodile, and how to beat and subdue it.
When Moses is standing there frozen in fear of the reality he has just learned, God steps in.
“When the blessed Holy One saw that Moses was afraid, He said to (the crocodile) ‘I am against you, Pharaoh king of Egypt, the Great Crocodile hanging out in his river…’ The blessed Holy one, and no one else, had to wage war against him…”
God must wage war against pieces of God’s-self, and so must we. This is true on a personal level, a societal level and a global level.
This evening we will have a special Shabbat, in which Rabbi Jim Ponet and New Shul co-founder Ellen Gould will help us think and sing through what we have to learn from, and how we can confront and subdue The Great Crocodile, on the week of the anniversary of the insurrection.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha