Parshah Moment
A Land Beyond Toys

Reality. Something real. I can touch it, see it, feel it. It exists.

Unless you start getting into quantum physics kind of stuff.

Which I don't need to: I have enough real things around me.

Especially toys: big toys because I'm a big kid.

And lots of toys, because "the one who dies with most toys wins" and I want to win.

As long as I have enough toys nothing else really matters. People call me lucky.

As long as I'm sleeping a sweet dream nothing else matters. People call me lucky.

As long as I'm drunk, high, spaced nothing else matters. Unless I wake up.

And because I might wake up, those who aren't drunk and high feel sorry for me.

Are they right, or am I?

"Reality is an illusion brought about by the lack of drugs," a student of mine (a jazz player) quoted to me.

So then, if I stop feeling good because of all my toys, I am... lucky? Well yes, maybe.

Because there is something other than toys.

Whether they are dangerous, bad toys, (drugs, self-mutilation, gang-violence);

Harmless toys (sitcoms and now, some insist, body-piercing);

Or even vaguely worthwhile toys, whose main job is to keep me happy.

If I break through my toy-induced contentedness, I am lucky.

Now I wake up to a whole new world.

Whole: I have seen beyond a fractured, dimensional room to a seamless, timeless life.

New: even if this life was here the whole time, if I just noticed it, then it is new.

Not "new to me": new. My perception counts. Not for a little, but for everything.

He created this whole galaxy-filled, continent-filled, anxiety-filled, strife-filled existence only that I should be able to see through it all and see something different.

Something new.

(Torah speaks of the "new moon," not because the-ancients-believed-that the-moon-actually-disappeared on-a-monthly-basis-and-came-back, but-now-we-know-better thanks-to-the-telescope-in-my-backyard, but because if people, particularly Jews, specifically the Sanhedrin, say something, pronounce something, determine something, then from a Divine point of view that pronouncement, that determination, becomes reality.)

Sometimes I wake up to this whole new world by thinking deeply into it--something stirring inside of me. Often because one of my toys broke, forcing me to look elsewhere.

This week's entire parsha speaks of tumah, tahara, and mikvah. If you translate them as "impure," "pure" and "ritual bath" then you are sticking them into a toy world. They only resonate in a land beyond toys. And languages other than Hebrew and Yiddish don't operate as well in this other world. In this supra-rational view from above.

But I don't have to wait for a world transformation before getting to know taharah and mikvah; just rubbing shoulders with these concepts helps rub off the murky film that shrouds from view everything but toys.

Because, as the Kabbalah insists, we aren't superficial or dimensional. We only think toys are us. Just shake yourself a little and the real you wakes up. To the real world.