As of this week we have we have entered the Hebrew month of Kislev and we have done so in such a dramatic way. After a month of Cheshvan awash in atmospheric river, the sky is now clear. The new moon has been racing Venus to the horizon, while Orion the hunter holds the zenith. It’s thought that this month of Kislev might be named after the constellation Orion, which in Jewish antiquity was called K’sil. Making Kislev the month when Orion rules the night sky.
It’s a good time to have a beautiful night sky, because in Kislev the night is so very long. Long nights, well suited to dreams. And in fact, most of this month’s Torah portions involve dreams, starting with this Shabbat’s portion, Vayetzei, in which Jacob leaves home and, under the starry dome of the night sky, he gathers stones as a pillow and goes to sleep. Soon he is dreaming of a sulam stretching from earth to heaven, with angels ascending and descending. Sulam is often translated as ladder, but we don’t quite know. This is the only time the word sulam appears in all of Torah. For me, a ladder has always felt a little rustic for a glorious prophetic vision. In my imagination I see a grand, curving staircase, something more like Georges Guétary in “An American in Paris,” singing “I’ll build a Stairway to Paradise,” with the steps lighting up under his feet as the choreo takes him higher, hat and cane in hand, while the angelically feathered and bejewelled showgirls descend on heels of dizzying height.
But I’m getting away from myself.
Jacob is dreaming. Angels ascending and descending a staircase. And then it says, v’hinei Adonai nitzav alav. An enticing and ambiguous phrase. “Behold! Adonai was settled, perched upon it.” Creating the picture of some perhaps human-looking God at the top of the staircase. But the phrase could also mean, “Behold! Adonai was positioned next to him.” Now reimagine the scene that way – Jacob looking at this spectacle of angels on staircases with God at his side, speaking to him. That’s a very different feel, at least to me. Side by side with the Divine as opposed to below, neck craning to see. This way of imagining feels a bit more like my own theology, to the extent I have one, that prefers the Divine being in us and around us to a God literally lording over us.
But the habit of verticality is a hard one to break. This idea of the Divine dwelling above, of holiness and oneness being located somewhere overhead, it comes so naturally to us. Maybe it is an instinctive reaction to the shackles of gravity. We long to be aloft, free as birds, free of what binds us. So we make the heavens the destination in our mystical practices and our prayerful imaginings. We ascribe to angels wings, to suggest flight, when there is no reason they should need the gift of flight at all. When we are moved by sacred ritual we describe ourselves as uplifted. When we achieve transcendent states of consciousness, we say we are high. The prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah give us some of the grandest visions of the Divine – the Chariot and the Throne – and those visions are celestial, all taking place up there.
My teacher Rabbi Shohama Harris Wiener suggests that the metaphor, while a metaphor, is still valuable. We want to climb, to scale the heights. And we each find our way of doing so.
So what is your staircase, your sulam? How do you ascend? Is it in meditation? Or supplication? Lucid dreaming? Texts or poems or paintings? Dancing or lovemaking? Music or mitzvot? Maybe you fly upward with the blast of the shofar in the last minutes of Yom Kippur. What connects you to the heights? How do you get so high that looking down would make you dizzy?
If we are angels ascending to a high place, then we are also angels descending, returning back here to the ground. What do we bring back from our highest experiences? Are they forgotten? Or do we identify the blessing in them and integrate that blessing into our lives on this earth? Even what we experience at a Shabbat service like tonight, if it is a high of any sort – is it just an escape from the everyday or can we bring it forward with us to nourish the everyday? To add richness to our comings and goings; to make us more capacious and more capable.
How do these experiences stay with us when we look around at the earthbound and the commonplace, so that we might be inspired to say, as Jacob did upon awakening,
אָכֵן֙ יֵ֣שׁ יְהֹוָ֔ה בַּמָּק֖וֹם הַזֶּ֑ה וְאָנֹכִ֖י לֹ֥א יָדָֽעְתִּי
“Surely Adonai is in this place and I, I did not know it.”
And then we can let go of the vertical and let it pour into the horizontal. We can look around us and appreciate the holy landscape and all the angels that populate our lives.
These are the long nights of Kislev. May they be filled with vision. May we ascend staircases on wobbly ankles and come back laden with blessing. And may we awaken in the morning to the Divine all around us.
Sweet dreams.