Lech Lecha
An Impromptu Sunday Sermon
God said to Job (40:11): “Scatter wide your raging anger.”
Before my brain had time to wonder about its meaning, this verse struck me as beautiful, like poetry,
Scatter wide your raging anger
and relevant for today, as if God is telling me to take the rage we feel hoy en día and scatter it all around our world.
Put it into your work, into your steps, into the songs you sing and the poetry you write. Put it into the way that you fiercely love the work you do, into your family and community.
Scatter the rage over everything you see and hear and touch, and like alchemy, the rage you feel against the injustice you witness will transmute into gold –into Love.
If you feel anger that makes you tremble, use it.
Use it for the good.
But meaning aside, I would like to consider how my brain works, and why the line I found beautiful just by the sound turns out to have deeper meanings. Maybe poetry is important because the more beautiful the language, the more that is hidden underneath it. Maybe writers know intuitively the profundity of a line, an image, an incantation, even if they are not yet putting it into thought.
In a beautiful verse, you can go deep. You can perform what the mystics call exegesis, to dig into the text and uncover hidden meanings.
Intuition is your mind sensing what it can’t yet put into thought. Your intuition hears a beautiful verse, whether in your own head or in a poem you’re reading –or even in the voices you hear in the distance. Your mind will later catch up and see why it was so beautiful to begin with. Trust your intuition about poetry.
I didn’t know why that line struck me so much when I first heard it, but here is the entire verse:
Scatter wide your raging anger
See all who are proud, and bring them low
This second verse adds a lot of meaning to the first. Bring them down low? Who is them? Who is the proud?
Obviously, it depends on what community you ask, but there is a Kabbalistic concept known as Lech Lecha, and it tells us that when we enter deeply into a sacred text and uncover what is hidden beneath the language, we are entering into ourselves, into our own consciousness. We are uncovering our own priorities, spirit, physiology. Whatever we get from that verse will be filtered through us, shaped by us into meaning.
For people who love to go deeply into a text, they will uncover their own essence.
They go into themselves.