Today is eight days of the Omer, which are one week and one day of the Omer. Chesed of Gevurah: The Four and Five of Wands.

We have come to the week of Gevurah, and boy do I know it. Gevurah has lots of shadings to its constellation of meanings. It’s the place on the tree that splits off to the Sitra Achra, or as Obi Wan Kenobi might say, the Dark Side. It’s the Sephira of Strictness and Severity, Harshness, Constriction, Might and the letter of the Law. Oh, and then there’s the other name of Gevurah—Pachad, which means Fear. And then there’s also Din, which means Judgement. Sounds rough, huh?

Well I start with the things I don’t like because I’ve always had my issues with Gevurah. It took me a long time to understand the positive side of this energy—and those positives include Restraint, Structure, Strength, Boundaries, Courage, Organization, Justice and Discernment.

Then there are some qualities that can go either way depending on the situation and how you take it: Discipline, Limitation, Power and Control.

And then there is one quality that transcends it all: Awe.

So right now, with social distancing in place and having maintained this for the last 41 days, I’m feeling severely constricted. The boundaries I’m living within feel very harsh to me today. Nevertheless, I am keeping the discipline. However, that doesn’t mean I’m not reacting in ways that aren’t particularly healthy.

Good that we start the week with Chesed of Gevurah, because this energy needs to be balanced by the love and mercy of Chesed. We can think of Gevurah as holding back the overwhelming blast of love that is Chesed as a necessary check. And this is true in the other direction—Chesed is a necessary check on the unmitigated severity of Gevurah.

Last week we saw this very same combination of cards on the second day. On the eighth day however, these cards are in reverse order, and that makes all the difference. It’s a subtle difference in the shadings of energy, but it’s an important distinction—and that ability to be discerning in this way is in fact one of the good qualities of Gevurah.

Today is about the love that underlies the structure of our lives. The love that powers our strength and our ability to set good boundaries, and to take control with courage out of a sense of service.

In my book, Tarot and the Gates of Light: A Kabbalistic Path to Liberation, I used the example of the humble traffic light to show how as a society we set limits and create laws in the service of love—of protecting everyone.

When I look at the Four and Five of Wands, I see the open space of Love that Chesed provides as being the motivating energy for Gevurah. So that the figure on the left hand side in the image in the Five of Wands, the man who seems to be holding his staff out as a way of getting the attention of all the others is the one who is trying to bring loving structure to a situation of disorganization. Indeed, the Five of Wands is a card that shows one of the negative expressions of Gevurah in the lack of structure. But because today is Chesed of Gevurah we can see the figure holding out his staff as acting out of Chesed.

This is an example of the corrective and guiding nature of Gevurah as spoken of in Psalm 23. In fact, today, this verse feels like the mantra I need today:

גַם כִּי-אֵלֵךְ בְּגֵיא צַלְמָוֶת לֹא-אִירָא רָע כִּי-אַתָּה עִמָדִי, שִׁבְטְךָ וּמִשְׁעַנְתֶּךָ הֵמָה יְנַחֲמֻנִי

“Even though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for You are with me, Your rod and Your staff comfort me.

Seeing the man on the left in the Five of Wands I know I must call on my inner Moses to rally all my complaining inner Israelites, straining against the discipline of the journey. Indeed, metaphorically speaking, we’re on the trek through the desert. Imagine that long line of ancient Israelites—men, women, children, and the “mixed multitude” of people who went with them. Plus, animals, tents, and belongings. Without the discipline of Gevurah holding everyone together, people would have wandered off in all directions.  

I need to remember this, because today I am experiencing the structuring quality of Gevurah as stricture.

One question I have to look at today is how I can reconnect with the love that is the principle that give order, the benevolence that underlies the boundaries I must observe. Certainly, this practice is one way to reconnect and heal my relationship to Gevurah in my life.

And I will look for specific disciplines I can add to my day as an expression of self-love, love for others and for the Divine—disciplines I know that I will chafe at sometimes, but that I can remember the underlying motivation for.

What are your questions for today?

Pharaoh and the plagues: Considering the Emperor card in the Raziel deck as Passover approaches during our modern plague.

When Rachel Pollack and Robert Place created the Raziel deck based on Judaic myth and folklore, the choice was made to illustrate the Emperor as Pharaoh of Egypt, with Moses standing before him.  

Moses told Pharaoh that he had to let the Israelites go or there would be plagues. But Pharaoh wasn’t about to free his unpaid workforce. He was warned again and again, but 5 times he hardened his heart and refused. And each time, the Egyptians suffered the consequences of his selfish desire to have unpaid workers build cities for his glory.

When I was in college, I remember studying the medieval mystery plays—in particular, the York and Wakefield cycle. They were called “cycles” for a number of reasons but among those reasons was the cyclical view of history they presented, often with the character who played Pharaoh (who ordered the slaughter of Israelite children) also playing Herod (who also ordered the slaughter of Hebrew children as the myth goes).

And indeed, I see this cycle playing out in front of our eyes right now. With a modern Moses who has been warning today’s Pharaoh for 3 months about our current plague. And this Pharaoh dismissing these warnings in favor of the stock market—his god. Of course, as he dismissed this plague, we all are suffering.

In Hebrew, Egypt is called Mitzrayim—the narrow or constricted place. And this is speaking mythically, this is both a physical and psychological narrowness.

As an enslaved people, the Israelites had lost their sense of themselves as a nation and could only see themselves as slaves. Their world had narrowed and they were unable to see beyond it, so when Moses first spoke to them of freedom they couldn’t hear him.

And of course, Pharaoh was of a narrow mind and was unable to see the evidence of the plagues before him. His people may have suffered but in his palace he wasn’t suffering. It wasn’t until he lost his son that he was affected.

The narrow mind of today’s Pharaoh needn’t be enumerated. A man who brags about the ratings of his press conferences as people are dying because of his malfeasance doesn’t even deserve to be named. However, just as the Divine could not be denied in the story in the Torah, as much as he may wish to spread “alternative facts” reality is catching up with him.

However, his actions have left us all in a different kind of narrow place. Those of us who care about our fellow citizens and the health of our society have voluntarily narrowed the space in which we are living right now. Some of us are in isolation/quarantine. Others of us are staying inside and limiting contact with others as much as possible.

For me, this leaves me with questions that can only be answered by the way I choose to respond to these circumstances. Especially as we approach the Passover holiday, which celebrates freedom from enslavement. Certainly, this year, my practice of Counting the Omer using tarot will find much to work with in the challenges I face living alone in this pandemic. And I will find many blessings to be grateful for, since I have a place to live, food to eat, and I am apparently healthy (since I know that symptoms can take two weeks to manifest).

But I find myself asking, how am I thinking narrowly about my situation? Is it possible to find freedom in a situation of constriction—and what would that look like? How can I connect with others safely so that any feelings of isolation are broken? How can I free myself from fear of getting sick (this is less an issue since I lived through the early years of the HIV crisis and learned how to work with my fear of contagion, but still)? How can I offer support to others while staying safe? What warnings does my inner Pharaoh refuse to pay attention to? What narrowness do I carry with me even after years of working to free myself?

Some of these questions may resonate for you. You will also have other questions for yourself that these musings bring up. If you’re willing to share them here, I would be grateful, since we are all each other’s teachers.

I’ll close with a quote from Viktor Frankl’s classic, Man’s Search for Meaning, that I often read to remind myself of the inner freedom that can never be taken away:

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

 May you be healthy. May you be happy. And as the Passover approaches, may you find new ways to be free in the year ahead.

Card image from the Raziel Tarot, conceived by Rachel Pollack and Robert M. Place, image © 2016 Robert M. Place

The Four of Swords: Staying Inside and Going Inside to Face Your Fears in the Days of COVID-19

I wanted to share some of the wisdom that the Four of Swords may have for you in these difficult days. In January I did a Tree of Life reading for the year ahead. And the Four of Swords showed up in the Yesod position.   

First, a little bit about the way I read the Tree of Life spread. I lay out the cards following the classic positions of the ten Sephirot on the diagram of the tree.

A diagram is flat—2 dimensional. But the thing to keep in mind about the Tree of Life is that it’s multi-dimensional and fractal. There are the four Kabbalistic worlds. And within each Sephira, this is a complete Tree of Life enfolded in a kind of implicate ordering of reality. In fact, in each Sephira in that implicate Tree there is another whole tree. This means each position has multiple layers of meaning. The first of these layers is revealed in the relationship of the Kabbalistic meaning of the card to the meaning of the Sephirotic position it lands on.

The Four of Swords, like the fours in all the suits, are cards the express one of the many meanings of Chesed, either positive or negative. So when a Chesed card shows up in a Yesod position, we’re considering how Chesed is expressed and mediated by Yesod. The Four of Swords in this position is an opportunity to explore the relationship of Chesed and Yesod.

Now Chesed is the unending flow of love from the Divine that sustains the world. It is a love so powerful it obliterates the personal ego. It is unconditional love that doesn’t discriminate—a veritable tsunami of Divine love that washes over and through everything in its path. This level of Chesed is not something that’s part of our everyday experience, though we do have everyday experiences of this Sephirotic energy. So looking at the Four of Swords, what does this kind of Chesed have to do with the image of a knight on a sepulcher?

Some people see the knight as a carving on a coffin, not as a living person. But this is not a card of death; it’s a card of initiation into starting the inward journey. This knight is very much alive, and at the start of a ritual. And if there’s anything the people of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn knew it was ritual—and in England this ritual was known as the Night Vigil.

It was the initiation into knighthood. The evening before the title of knight is bestowed on a squire, he prepared himself with a ritual bath of purification. He wore a white robe and entered the chapel with his sword and shield. In some places, the sword and shield are placed on a coffin. In some versions of the ritual, the knight-to-be would lay down in the open coffin, or rest atop it. He was not to fall asleep, but to spend the night in prayer and meditation.

The suit of Swords (and, in Hermetic Qabalah, the world of Yetzirah) corresponds to the intellectual and mental faculties—the ability to distinguish reality from illusion. The knight-to-be in the Four of Swords is not dead or sleeping. He is ever vigilant—Swords being the suit of the mind that makes distinctions. He is ready to face the awe and terror that an experience of Chesed can bring to the unstable ego. This is the test of the knight-to-be: not unlike the temptation of Christ in the desert or the temptation of Guatama Buddha by Mara, he must face his fears in order to undergo a spiritual transformation. Of course, when we look at this card, the first thought is that the fear is of death. And this is true, since the job of a knight, a warrior for Christ, is to face death: it’s just not the whole truth.

Remember that Chesed is both Boundless and “Boundary-less” and that to face this is to face the obliteration of the ego, a kind of death, which is a pretty terrifying prospect. The task of the knight-to-be is to face this fear and come away with an experience that is beyond duality—that he is both a separate being and an egoless expression of Divine Love.

The best expression of this idea that I know of comes from outside the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is in the words of Krishna to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. In this story, Arjuna hesitates before battle; he does not want to kill anyone (least of all his cousins with whom he is at war). But Krishna tells him that the Spirit that pervades the universe cannot kill or be killed:

“He who takes the Self to be the slayer, he who takes It to be the slain, neither of these knows. It does not slay, nor is It slain.
This is never born, nor does It die. It is not that not having been It again comes into being. This is unborn, eternal, changeless, ever-Itself. It is not killed when the body is killed.
He that knows This to be indestructible, changeless, without birth, and immutable, how is he, O son of Prithâ, to slay or cause another to slay?”

In both the Hindu tradition and the Zen tradition in Japan, this was the philosophy of the warrior’s path. Only once you have purified your mind with this understanding are you fit to enter battle. And as you can guess, the misappropriation of the warrior’s path has been used to justify a lot of bloodshed by every religion. Remember, the image on the card is of a medieval knight—a warrior for Christ. Many such knights were Crusaders, which means some of my Jewish ancestors likely died at their hands.

Just because the historical reality of knighthood isn’t very pretty doesn’t mean the ideal of knighthood is any less spiritual. The ideal knight was a protector of the poor and weak. He was a protector of the faith by embodying its values. For when one is attuned to the Flow of Chesed within, it naturally flows out in ways that lead one to help everyone. When Chesed is experienced within, when you can face your fears of such a force and let go of them, you become a vessel for this force in the world. It flows through you and gives you strength.

In this time when we are being asked to stay inside, despite all the fear, for those of us fortunate enough to have the security of a home, this is an opportunity to not only stay inside, but to go inside. We are being the terrible gift of the enforced retreat. And rather than struggle against it, we have an opportunity to watch our mind react with all its fear, we can watch the ego with all its rage to be in control. And we can let these emotions pass through us and let them go. We may have these feelings, but they will not have us.

When this card showed up in the Yesod position in my reading, it presented an interesting challenge. You see, Yesod is not about going on retreat like a monk. It’s all about connection, bonding, generativity, and this includes sexual connection with spiritual intention.

In its healthiest expression it is about a spiritual bond, between a teacher and student or between lovers, that takes both of them to a higher plane.

There is an urgency to connecting in Yesod—all the power of the Sephirot above flow through it to Malchut below. On the body, Yesod maps to the genitals—the phallus or the birth canal.

When Yesod is expressed negatively, it is the Sephira of addiction—someone who can’t hold all this energy, and who doesn’t have a practice or a container in which to express it in a healthy way may find themselves expressing it, to use the Buddhist description, unskillfully. Those unskillful expressions can include substance abuse, sex addiction and other compulsive behaviors like gambling for example.  

When the Four of Swords showed up in the Yesod position for me in January I found myself reflecting on the year that had just passed. My six-year relationship had ended, and I found myself avoiding feelings of hurt and anger by seeking out sexual connection. I was trying to avoid looking at my own responsibility for the problems in the relationship by satisfying physical urges that had gone unmet in that last year.

So when I saw the Four of Swords in Yesod, I realized it was time to stop this avoidance. It was time to stop seeking the empty comfort of the physical in order to go on an inner retreat. It was time to face my responsibilities and how I used the relationship as a way of avoiding deeper inner reflection. So in January I made the decision to stop dating and to step away from hook-up culture for at least a 3-month period. And I made the decision to be a little less social—to take more time for my inner connection.

And now, here I am in enforced isolation due to the pandemic. Looking at the message of this Sephirotic combination I see a call for me to make greater connection with others based in Chesed. And today, an expression of Chesed is a phone call to my elders. Checking on neighbors. Giving to charities that provide for those who are suffering the economic consequences of this plague. And I see the opportunity to step up my inner practice with daily meditation and contemplation so that my fears of a healthy, deep connection of Chesed in Yesod within and with another will be revealed for the illusions that they are.

While I did this reading for myself, it feels that this Sephirotic combiation has meaning for everyone in some way right now. We’re all being called to stay inside and go inside. We’re being called to recognize bonds and connections in deeper ways. I hope you can see in the Four of Swords the inspiration to go through the dark nights ahead with Chesed and courage.

In just two weeks the practice of Counting the Omer will begin. My book is about using tarot cards for this Kabbalistic practice that lasts for 49 days. I’ve done this practice for years. If you’re looking for a daily practice that can help stay strong through the trials ahead, a practice that can take you deep within to face your fears and experience a stronger connection with the Divine, consider Counting the Omer.

While you can do it anytime—and many of my readers have already started—traditionally the practice will start this year on the evening of April 9th. Get a copy of my book, Tarot and the Gates of Light and read the introduction the week before and join me and millions of others around the globe on this inner journey.

My wish is that it brings you deep peace, a heart of compassion, spiritual strength, and the blessing of experiencing the Divine light that always surrounds and supports us. So that no matter how many days we have ahead of us, we know how to make every day count.

On Social Distancing, the Social Contract and Netzach of Gevurah: A Kabbalistic Tarot Exploration of How We Respond in a Crisis—the Seven and Five of Wands

In my book, Tarot and the Gates of Light: A Kabbalistic Path to Liberation, readers are asked to work with different 2-card combinations over the course of a 49-day traditional Kabbalistic ritual called Counting the Omer. Each combination of cards provides spiritual exercise leading to greater insight, helps people see the thought patterns that keep them from feeling fully connected to the Divine. I want to look at one of those pairs and how it connects directly to what we’re facing right now: the Seven and Five of Wands, which appears on Day 11 of the count.  

When I wrote the book, oddly enough, I saw the man in the 7 of Wands as defending himself, not unlike the hero in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People—this heroic doctor discovered that the mineral baths his town depended on for tourist income had become contaminated and was the source of disease. He was, in other words, a whistleblower for public and societal health. And because his information threatened people’s incomes, he was ostracized, his home vandalized, his family attacked. In this pair of cards that’s how I saw the man in the 7 of Wands: Now consider the man on the far left of the other card, the 5 of Wands, as this very same man, but here he is trying to get the attention of the others and bring them together even though they ignore him and continue in their pursuits and competitions that degrade the social structure.  

If you’re wondering how I got here, I interpret the cards from the filter of their corresponding Sephira on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. One of the many positive interpretations of Netzach includes Perseverance in the face of obstacles. Remember though, each Sephira has a negative side as well, and the image in the corresponding card may express that negative energy. The 5 of Wands is a Gevurah card, and one of the positive ways of looking at Gevurah is as structure, and organization. So that in looking at the 5 of Wands I see one of Gevurah’s negative expressions—social structure in disarray, where everyone wants to be the leader and acts only in self-centered concern.  In this view the social structure, the social contract is breaking down.  

And since I’ve noted that each Sephira has a positive and negative expression, alternately we can see the man in the 7 of Wands as not defending an unpopular opinion, but as someone who is simply out for himself—the destructive side of Ego, which is also one of the meanings of Netzach. And he’s not the only one. When we look at the 5 of Wands, we can see a group of people all out for themselves, in a social structure that is crumbling.

All you need to do to see this dark Sephirotic energy expressed in human action is to watch videos of the fist fights taking place in supermarkets all over the country as people rush to buy more toilet paper than they need or could possibly use.  

Gevurah can represent the Social Contract—the altruism of people coming together to help each other in organized groups where everyone is respected. And in its negative expression, Gevurah can reveal a social structure atomizing into individual selfishness.

Let’s face it, in crisis situations we all have our flight, fight, freeze or faint mechanism that takes over even when it’s not appropriate or even necessary. While I’ve never fought anyone over a roll of toilet paper, I felt the rage rise up in me when someone took the last package of something I wanted at Trader Joe’s. It’s one of the emotions to observe as it arises, without acting it out or reacting. When I’m in a crowded supermarket where everyone is on the edge of panic, the real infection to be afraid of is that panic, which clouds our better judgment and our humanity. And in crowds, spreads like contagion.

In the days ahead, we are all going to face trials. Consider the selfishness of someone like former Miss Nevada, Katie Williams, whose response to the CDC asking people to stop going out tweeted: “I just went to a crowded Red Robin and I’m 30. It was delicious, and I took my sweet time eating my meal. Because this is America. And I’ll do what I want.”

This is a pathological individualism that doesn’t recognize our interdependence. “This is America, and I’ll do what I want.” Social distancing and the social contract be damned. Even if it leads to the deaths of thousands or millions.

She represents the negative side of Netzach in Gevurah—a pig-headed stubbornness in service of selfishness.

So far, we’ve considered two sides of Netzach in Gevurah in this paring of the 7 and 5 of Wands: Standing up against society for what’s right in an attempt to save that society out of the recognition of interdependence. Or standing up for a selfish individualism that sees no social obligation. The practice of Counting the Omer then asks us to see ourselves in all these situations, questioning our moral character at its deepest from every angle. Who would I be in this situation? How would I respond? Is there something of the other side that lives within me? In my past, who have I been in situations like these? What can I learn about myself, for better or worse?

There is one more way I would like to look at this pairing. And if you thought this last example was dark, I’m sorry. As I wrote, part of the way I interpret the situations I see in the cards is by inhabiting every angle and every character in the card, visible or not. My storytelling teacher and dear friend, Laura Simms, taught when you learn to tell a story, you can’t identify with one character or have a favorite. Otherwise you’re not letting the audience have its own experience or decide for themselves. And so in the 7 of Wands, rather than looking at the man on the hill who is beset by six unseen attackers as either a brave soul standing up against the crowd for what’s right, and rather than seeing him as someone who’s selfishness makes him unable to see his connection and interdependence with others, we can ask ourselves about the people (presumable they’re people, we don’t see them) who he appears to be defending himself against. Who are they, why are they attacking him—and are we in that group?

I remember how, in the early 80s and through the 90s (and truth be told even today) there were people who responded to the AIDS crisis by saying, this is God’s punishment against homosexuals for their sin. Combine this with another history further in the past but that I always live in cognizance of—in times of social upheaval and crisis, people look for a scapegoat. During the bubonic plague years between 1348 and 1351, a wave of anti-Jewish violence followed the plague in its wake. Jews were accused of starting the plague by poisoning the wells. By the close of the plague years in 1351, there had been 350 incidents of anti-Jewish pogroms and 60 major and 150 minor Jewish communities had been exterminated across Europe. In the last century, on the other side of the world, in the wake of the fires that followed the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, native Japanese turned on their Korean neighbors—some newspapers reported the accusation (not based in any fact) that Koreans were poisoning wells. Sound familiar? We humans have a limited imagination. It’s estimated that 10,000 Koreans were killed in anti-Korean violence and riots in Tokyo.

So it’s also easy for me to see the man in the 7 of Wands as the victim of persecution. And in the 5 of Wands, how in a weakened social structure it’s easy for a leader to turn people in a society, each against the other. Consider the figure on the far left of the 5 of Wands this time, rather than holding his wand up, trying to get the others attention and bring back order—from this angle I see him as egging on a fight. Today, the pastor of an evangelical church took 45, Orange Caligula, or whatever you want to call the sad excuse for a human in the White House, this pastor took him to task for calling COVID-19 the Chinese virus, saying that it fuels racism and discrimination, hate and violence. Of course, for Scump, that’s a feature, not a bug.

One of the things I tell people in the introduction to my book is that when you work with a pair of cards, since our journeys are all different, you may see other situations and find other meaningful lessons for your own life. And for this pairing in the book, what I wrote today I wouldn’t have thought of in the last few years on Day 11 when this pairing appears. Because not only are each of us different, each year we’re different, and circumstances are different. It’s what makes using the cards to Count the Omer such a rich practice for me.

And because the practice asks us to consider every experience that comes up from every side, I must look at not only my fears of persecution, but I also must look at my inner persecutor. Yes, I have to consider my inner Orange Caligula, see if anywhere in my life or in my thoughts I identify with or have hidden desires to be a persecutor, and when in my life I have been a persecutor.

I never said this was an easy practice.

This year, when I get to Day 11 of Counting the Omer, with the 7 and 5 of Wands I’m going to have a whole new set of questions to ask myself about my own courage and my own selfishness. This year, the Counting of the Omer begins on the evening of April 9th, the second night of Passover begins the first day of the Omer. And I’ll be counting online with either videos or my own daily thoughts and meditations, my inner questioning and insight. I hope you’ll join me.