CROSSING THE JORDAN

“For you are about to cross the Jordan to enter and possess the land that YHVH your God is assigning to you. When you have occupied it and are settled in it, take care to observe all the laws and rules that I have set before you this day.”  (Deuteronomy 11:31-32).

Our ancestors were about to cross a major boundary (the Jordan river) into the Promised Land, a land flowing with milk and honey.  And there they were to become who they truly were meant to be, a people grounded in a particular place, acting in alignment with the divine. 

There are many possible ways to interpret this passage near the beginning of this week’s Torah Parsha Re’eh.  I’m going to offer a heavily metaphorical interpretation that uses the metaphor of crossing the Jordan to stand for spiritual maturity.  Spiritual maturity is when you become who you are meant to be, in alignment with a human community, the divine and the more than human world.

My view of spiritual maturity is largely drawn from the theoretical framework of Bill Plotkin in his wonderful book Nature and the Human Soul. Contrary to Plotkin, I believe that in our world this is both a human centric developmental wheel and what he calls an ecocentric developmental wheel.  That is, we are faced with a maturation process that occurs within a human centric context because we live in a world where we humans have managed to psychologically divorce ourselves from the broader context of the more than human world.  We are also faced with a maturation process as humans when we turn our faces to the more than human world, of which we humans are a part, but only a part.  We are not, though our modern society would like to think we are, dictators of that world who can simply tell it how to behave and exploit it for our own ends without any consequences.

One of the questions I will ask in my class for this part of the parsha discussion.  You are about to cross the Jordan and come home.  What are your gifts and with whom are you sharing them? If it helps, look at your gifts and community in both a human centric and an ecocentric perspective.   

I find that I answer these questions very differently if I look at this from a human centric perspective compared to the ecocentric perspective.  From a human centric perspective, I have a gift of being able to run things as I use my abilities to listen deeply and toggle between the whole and the parts, paying attention to both.  My communities here are my business and the non profits on whose boards I have served. 

This ability to run things has little to do however with my purpose of being on earth, of what is the promised land for me where I hope to become who I was truly meant to be.  Listening deeply and going back and forth between the whole and the parts are in common, but being a teacher of earth based Torah and a steward of a particular piece of  land are really different than running an organization.

So what are your gifts and with whom are you sharing them?  If it helps, look at your gifts and community in both a human centric and an ecocentric perspective.