Yom Kippur-Growth Involves Being Full Ready to Diconnect-A Quick 6 Line Lesson from Moshe

Growth Involves Being Fully Ready to Disconnect

Moshe personally involved himself in making sure that Yosef’s bones would come with Israel, as the nation left Egypt.

The Midrash (Dev. Rabba) curiously carries on about this, even saying that Israel would not have left Egypt had they not brought Yosef’s bones with them! Surely, had they tried their best, they would be exempt from this oath, as an “ones”, as something that is out of their control.

The Midrash speaks this way about Yosef’s bones because Yosef was Israel’s connection to Egypt. The removal of his bones wasn’t just a promise to take a holy man out of a repugnant place, the Midrash sees it as a metaphor for Israel needing to be entirely disconnected, entirely ready to leave Egypt and it’s temptations and incorrect lifestyle. Had they not been ready to remove their connection to Egypt, they would have remained connected to the concept of Egypt, though they had left the physical land. Moshe, as the archetype of netzach-values, is the ideas person to make sure this happens.

Step 6 of 12 Step Programs reads: “We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character”. We can use this as a model for growth, even if we are not addicted to a substance. It’s often easy to see the error of our ways, but extremely difficult to be ready to change.

As we say in the Yom Kippur liturgy “May it be Your will that we no longer sin.” We are not putting our responsibility on Someone else; this means, as it says earlier in the 12 Steps, that we need to turn our will over to him to help us. May we all find success in partnering with Gd and being ready to change.

—Ian