Naso
What can we do with our foreign thoughts?
Reflection by Carrie Watkins, US Community Manager
"In his commentary on the first verse of Naso, the early Hasidic Master the Meor Eynaim engages in a delightful and elaborate play on words. In the verse, Hashem instructs Moses to:
'נשא את ראש בני גרשון גם-הם לבית אבותם למשפחתם' (במדבר ד:כא)
`Take a census (literally: lift the head) of the Gershonites also, by their ancestral house and by their families` (Numbers 4:21)
Sometimes, when a person is endeavoring to engage with and focus on Torah study or prayer, the Meor Eynaim shares, foreign thoughts (machshavot zarot) that are not about Torah or prayer arrive in our minds. Heaven forefend that you should think they’re only here to confuse you! Do not reject or judge these thoughts. Rather, he says, elevate them back to their root. For the root of even these thoughts is Godliness.
And here he brings us to our above pasuk. He takes the second word, the often overlooked `את` that always precedes a direct object but has no direct translation into English, and reads it as `א-ת` alef-tav, in other words, the entire alphabet. Is it not the case, he asks, that even our so-called foreign thoughts are made up of letters, and that letters are holy and godly and were used to create the Torah and the world? And so he re-reads the verse: lift each letter to the head, up, so that the letters that fell (Gershonites becomes nitgarshu, meaning were banished) can rise back up to their ancestral house, to their place of honor.
When we sit in meditation, in Torah study, in prayer, we can easily fall into the very natural tendency to judge and attempt to get rid of the thoughts that bring us away from our intended anchor. As we know from our practice, and as the Meor Eynaim so playfully and brilliantly reminds us, our practice is actually about doing something close to the opposite. When we instead, in the Meor Eynaim’s words, `put all your strength and life-force into the letters . . . you will elevate them to their root.` When we infuse even those foreign thoughts with all our aliveness, we cease to see them as separate and wrong and instead see them as part of the sacred Oneness that is all creation. Our practice is to meet everything that arises with loving and living awareness. `Distractions` are not a distraction from the practice; they are the practice itself."