Is your life made up of a many disjointed pieces, or is there a continuum to it all? Are your choices being made by other people’s expectations of you and the circumstances around you, or do you feel that there is an underlying script beneath the surface of your life? Are you being torn in different directions by all types of forces demanding your time and attention, or do you determine what direction your life takes? Is your life a journey from one point to the next, leading to a destination, or is it a bunch of disconnected fragments?
Do you ever feel that your life is like a roller-coaster? With unexpected twists and turns, highs and lows? Sometimes you feel all motivated and enthusiastic; a moment later the inspiration dissipates. What is going on? Why can’t we find an equilibrium?
This week’s Torah portion – which closes book four of the Bible — consists of a combination of two chapters, Matos and Massei, Journeys. This chapter reviews in detail the forty two journeys that the Jewish people traveled on, from the moment they left Egypt, until they arrived (40 years later) to the Promised Land.
The Baal Shem Tov teaches that these forty-two journeys in the wilderness reflect the forty-two psycho-spiritual phases that each person experiences throughout life. “These are the journeys of the Israelites, who had left Egypt” on the way to the Promised Land: All the 42 journeys are about freeing ourselves and transcending the constraints and limitations (Mitzrayim) of our material existence which conceals the Divine, subduing and sublimating the harsh “wilderness” of selfish existence, and discovering the “Promised Land” – a life of harmony between body and soul.
This idea – that your life is a journey consisting of 42 steps – can literally transform your entire life. By examining the cycles of your life you can discover the 42 different phases you have experienced and will experience. Imagine being able to trace the steps of your life and connect the otherwise random dots – seeing how they all are part of one journey leading you to your promised land?
The definition of a journey is: Movement with direction. Like the captain of a ship, each of us needs a compass that allows us to navigate the twists and turns, the ups and downs, the swells and storms of our lives. By studying the 42 journeys in this week’s chapter, you can learn how to align your life, with all its ups and downs, to the compass of a higher rhythm, and create a strategy that rides and taps into these rhythms. It allows you to discover how to synchronize your life journeys to the Divine coordinates that “lead the footsteps of man.” It’s like having an inner compass that senses life’s internal tempo, being able to pace your outer movements by your inner rhythms.
When we feel that every detail of our lives – both the highs and the lows, both the trivial and the important experience – are part of a larger journey, it infuses life with a new exhilarating feeling; you wake up each day knowing that you are on another leg of your journey and that you can determine the trajectory of your own destiny.
Go here for a detailed breakdown of the 42 journeys, and see how they reflect in your life.
I had the dream that the Dali Lama, just like Moses did not make it into the promised land, I was filled with despair and anger about not reaching ones destination. Until today, now I realize that Moses was working through Joshua, and the Dali Lama will work through his main disciples weather on this land of malkut or in the higher planes of divinity. I realize that this love, pure love, unconditional love is so great and abiding that both men have for humanity it superseeds achieving the goal in the what seems to be the here and now. Love transcends and this energy unites with all divine energy and guides those still left here. WE are not seperate, it is a pure illusion. Rather we are riding a continuum of events that will continue to unfold lead by the divine mother who is active in the universe. She is merged with all that is holy and righteous. So there is no end to the Journeys ..it is infinite…Lakshmi
I was actually in tears at one point, because it hit every single part of my journey, from pre-cancer of the cervix, to marriage to moves, to my husbands surgery, to finally building our house in Manahawkin, to a divorce and all the moves that happen after a divorce, to the ups and downs trying to get my son through his primary schooling.
Absolutely amazing!
I hope you make this a book, like the Spiritual Counting of the Omar.
Im to level 34.. Ive been wondering for the past few years if this is like the path or pattern that we all go through, and you have proven to me, that I was correct in that assumption.
Thank you for writing this up!
May Hashem bless you
I would like to add a bit of levity to this op ed. I wonder if Douglas Adams is Jewish. The number 42 is, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”, calculated by an enormous supercomputer named Deep Thought over a period of 7.5 million years. Unfortunately, no one knows what the question is when the computer gives the answer.
It is a sci-fi classic which is very funny imho