Episode 3: Tehora He – Inviolable Goodness
In moments of polarization, the wisdom of Tehora He — the recognition of inviolable goodness in all people—can be a revolutionary tool. In this episode, R' Jericho talks about seventy faces, checking Biblical assumptions, Tehora he/It is pure, pre-prayer tests, Hitler’s daughter, two villains from one of my own spiritual wildernesses, Anne Frank, and a practice for bringing Miriam’s living Torah into our own lives.
SHOW NOTES
The concept of Seventy Faces of Torah appears in many ancient sources including Bamidbar Rabbah 13:16
The excerpt of the song Elokai Neshama Shenatata that you heard can be found in its entirety here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6W8GxuBYNM
The story of Miriam approaching Basya begins in Exodus 2:7
The Elohai Neshama prayer that affirms the purity of all of our souls is based on a text recorded in Berachot 60b
Reb Nachman on “ma’at tov” can be found in Likutei Moharan 282:1-5
Learn more about Dick Schwartz’s teachings on the purity of Self in his book No Bad Parts.
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A common feature of any spiritual wilderness is the jerks. The assholes. The villains. How do we relate to them? Our limbic system says freeze, fawn, fight, or flight. In my social media feed there’s a fair amount of fight, some freeze, some flight. And we’ve all seen a nauseating amount of fawn–the billionaires falling over themselves to prop up a fascist agenda.
Ancestral wisdom suggests a response that’s a little more complicated than these four options, a little more controversial. Heads up, it might upset you. But I think it’s powerful and strange and intense enough to be a potent tool in this spiritual wilderness.
In this episode, we’re going to talk about seventy faces, checking Biblical assumptions, Tehora he/It is pure, pre-prayer tests, Hitler’s daughter, two villains from one of my own spiritual wildernesses, Anne Frank, and a practice for bringing Miriam’s living Torah into our own lives.
Content warning, we will mention sexual violence, so please, choose to listen with care. There’s a good chunk in here that is definitely not kid-friendly.
I’m Jericho Vincent, your local feminist trans Kabbalistic rabbi and this is a Survival Guide for a spiritual wilderness.
Let’s continue on the path.
I’m going to tell a familiar story in a new way. Just a heads up, you might find it upsetting. It’s said that there are 70 faces or interpretations to any piece of Torah. These are sacred myths that can be read in endless ways. This idea that I’m going to share here does not negate the 69 other ways of exploring this same story.
Last episode we watched little Miriam sitting by the side of the river, using her Chakeh mah, her wait for what, to observe her brother as he floated in a basket on the water. She watches the basket drift towards a woman bathing in the water, surrounded by an entourage. The woman is Batya, daughter of the Pharaoh, princess of Egypt.
The sacred text tells us that Batya sees the basket in the reeds in the water, and she sends her slave girl to fetch the basket. She opens the top, and she sees a baby, crying. She says: This must be a Hebrew child.
Then Miriam steps forward from her place at the side of the river, after waiting, watching with chakeh mah, it’s her moment to act, and she asks: Can I get you an Ivri nurse, a Hebrew nurse for this baby? When the princess says yes, Miriam runs home to her mother, who is grieving her dead son, and says: come with me. Your baby is alive. The princess is hiring you to be his wet nurse, to breastfeed the child.
I heard this story so many times as a child. It’s always told looking backwards from what we all know ends up happening and so it assumes this air of inevitability. But let’s check our assumptions. When I really put myself into that scene, it’s very shocking.
I’m Miriam, I’m standing on the river bank watching my brother, I see Pharaoh's daughter grab him. Pharaoh's daughter—Pharoah is the one who sentenced this child to death. He’s killing all the baby boys. Pharoah is like the Hitler of that time, and Batya’s basically Hitler’s daughter. It wouldn’t be my first thought that Batya is going to scoop this baby up, save his life, and not only let him live, but adopt him as her own son. And yet Miriam steps forward, assuming exactly that. And not only does she assume that the princess wants to adopt the baby, she assumes she’ll want to follow best practices for cross-cultural adoption, and ensure the baby has some of his native culture, right? Miriam says: Can I get you an Ivri nurse, a Hebrew nurse for this baby? But of course, that’s what you’ll want.
In this moment, when Miriam steps forward with these assumptions, she’s demonstrating the third core tenet of her Torah, the third tool for surviving in a spiritual wilderness. We’re going to call it Tehora He/It is pure.
Tehora He/It is pure is the radical, highly countercultural affirmation that every single human being has a core of inviolable goodness that they can always return home to.
The name for this tool comes from a prayer that’s traditionally said every morning: Elohay neshama shenetata be tehora he. Goddess, the spirit you have given me, it is pure.
There’s no test you have to take to prove yourself before you say this prayer. It’s taken as a biological fact of life that every person’s spirit is pure. Pure means incorruptibly good. Every person’s spirit is good and that goodness can’t be sullied.
Well, how do we square this purity with how terrible some people seem to be?
We can distinguish the core of a person’s spirit from their behaviors and from the character that they build from their behaviors. Behaviors can be bad. And people can have terrible, ugly characters. But inside every single person, buried under however much gunk, is that core of goodness, that purity.
In the Jewish tradition the practice of making things right when we fuck up is called teshuvah, meaning return. Because repair and repentance is a coming home to that internal purity that’s always there waiting for us.
I don’t know what kind of reputation Batya, princess of Egypt, had, when Miriam saw her. But whatever it was, Miriam stepped out of the reeds and saw that core of goodness in a woman who should by rights have been her fearsome, loathsome enemy, and Miriam spoke directly to that goodness. “Of course, princess, you’ll want to adopt this child and you’ll choose a Hebrew nurse.”
Some people get really upset about this idea of Tehora he. They pull out the big guns. They ask: What about Hitler, are you going to say Hitler had a core of goodness?
To which I’d reply, yes, but there are two things that I want you to consider.
One: if you say Hitler didn’t have a core of inviolable goodness, a pure spirit within, that he was just a monster through and through, how can we hold him responsible for what he did? What can you expect of a monster but to act monstrously? To call someone a monster is to let them off the hook. When I affirm that Hitler or any other bad guy has this core of goodness I’m affirming that they are responsible for making the horrifying choices they did because every single step along the way they had a chance, no matter how small, to make a different choice.
The second thing I’ll say is, as a rabbi, when I get this challenge, what about Hitler, I often find with a little digging that the person challenging me is actually thinking about someone else who they have an even harder time believing has a core of goodness: Themselves.
So many of us have a core wounding around our goodness. So let me be crystal clear here: your spirit, it is pure. If you’ve messed up and haven’t made it right, you might have some bad actions you need to address, even bad character flaws. But no matter who you are, no matter what you’ve done, your spirit is and will always be pure.
The mystical master Reb Nachman called this core of inner goodness “ma’at tov” a little bit of good that is present in the core of every single human. And Reb Nachman teaches a complex and beautiful piece of Torah on the spiritual physics of taking the time to locate that tehora he, that core purity. He says that we actually transform the person we’re interacting with in a small but real way simply by insisting on the presence of that goodness within them.
Now this is a hard tool. We’re in a fucking spiritual wilderness, people, the tools that enable us to not only survive but thrive are sophisticated, they’re going to challenge us. But Miriam is here to cheer us on. We’re up to the task.
I want to tell you a story of my own struggle with this principle, Tehora he, an ugly story. I’m not going to make it pretty. I’m going to be really frank. And again, content warning for sexual violence, if you’ve got young kids around, you’ll probably want to put on some headphones.
I wrote a memoir about my experiences leaving ultra orthodoxy called Cut Me Loose. It doesn’t tell all of my stories, but it does describe how at 17, alone in NYC, abandoned by my family, I fell in love with a 24 yr old man I call Nicholas who I met at the local park. I was obsessed with Nicholas. Delighted when he took an interest in me, said he liked me. I was excited but nervous that he wanted to make out with me, but I didn’t want to have sex. Despite my no, one night Nicholas decided yes.
There’s another story that I don’t tell in my memoir, that an editor told me to cut because there was already too much violence in the book. But in a way it was even more consequential. I had one friend I trusted at that time when I knew Nicholas, one friend in the city. I’ll call him Jordan. I met Jordan at the same park that I met Nicholas, but unlike the other men there, Jordan was never creepy. He was always kind. When I got locked out of my apartment, he let me stay at his house. One night I fell off my bike and broke my arm, and he was the person I went to. As he very gently washed the gravel out of the wound, I fainted on his bathroom floor. I thought of him as a good guy.
Some time after my relationship with Nicholas had ended, I went to hang out with Jordan. We were watching a movie in his room when he surprised me by kissing me. I laughed, trying to normalize the situation, and shook him off. He laughed too, kept laughing as he continued his advances, as if this was all a game. Kept laughing as he blocked me when I tried to run for the door, kept laughing as he locked the door, threw me down, held me down as I begged him to stop, kept laughing as he raped me.
I lived with these wounds, along with others like them, for a long time. Then, when I was 33, I met my life partner, Ben Ash. We fell in love fast and hard. Early on, we got curious about how to use our combined wisdom to explore healing our wounds. When I told Ben about Nicholas and about Jordan, he was surprised by how much monumental space these men still took up in my brain. I was not surprised. I was used to it.
I hated these guys. They’d messed me up. But here’s a pesky phenomenon that occurs over and over again in emotional physics: when we have a polarized feeling, a really intense feeling, we often, if we dig around, discover that we also have the opposite feeling. When I spent a little time in my inner world I realized that some part of me still loved these men. Nicholas, who I’d fallen in love with at seventeen, Jordan, who I’d thought of as my friend. It was shocking.
My self-reflection exposed that subconsciously I’d been ping-ponging between hatred and adoration– two simplified perspectives. In hatred, I saw them as monsters. I denied that they had any goodness within them. In adoration, I saw them as infallible men, all good, no accountability, no judgement.
Ben invited me to do something very difficult, to practice Tehora he/It is pure. To try on the idea that each of these men had a core of goodness, and had made terrible choices. That I could affirm their goodness and hold them responsible for the harm they’d caused.
Oooh, that was hard. That was much much harder than monster or angel. That required me to really face who these men were as human beings, what wounds might have shaped them, and to look, straight on, at the fact that they had goodness within, but had made the choice to let their wounds and confusion take control, and they had hurt me. Oh, there was so much more grief in this way. Such a poisonous wave of grief. But I remember the feeling in my brain after that grief had moved through. The intense physical sense of poof! The ghosts of these men that had been crowding my brain for all these years shrunk into normal sized painful memories.
That’s a story about using Tehorah he/It is pure on memories. It’s a different thing entirely to use it in the present. Every single damn day that I open the news I am challenged to use Tehora he/it is pure in the here and now. And that is hard. It would be such a relief to think about the awful people in the headlines as monsters, to dismiss them in that way. It is much more painful to remind myself: tehora he, they have a core of goodness. That doesn’t mean that I don’t hate them sometimes. I think hate can be a very natural reaction to evil actions. But an excess of hate can eat you alive. Like a meditation, again and again I try to channel Miriam’s energy and remember that every being has this core of goodness.
This is a spiritual choice, but it’s also strategic. If we speak to the worst in someone, if we call them deplorables, we often bring out the worst in them, and we can pingpong in an ever-escalating dance. I imagine a scene in which Miriam burst out at Batya shrieking don’t you dare touch my brother, you filthy pig. I don’t think it would have ended well.
Miriam offers us five tools for surviving in a spiritual wilderness, this is the third one, and I think it’s the trickiest. It’s very advanced, very nuanced. And I think it has enormous power to help us survive and thrive.
In the modality of Internal Family Systems Therapy this tehora he/it is pure is called Self. The founder of IFS, Dick Schwartz, writes: "[Mindfully curious, calm, confident, and often even compassionate....That's the part I call Self. And after thousands of hours doing this work, I can say with certainty that the Self is in everybody. Furthermore, the Self cannot be damaged...[T]here is ample evidence that our negative expectations of others have a strong negative impact on their behavior or performance...[T]he view of humanity that has dominated the Western world trends towards the pessimistic...Once we shift paradigms to the knowledge that, at their essence, everyone is decent and kind, we can reorganize our economic systems, schools, and prisons.”
Or, in the words of the great Jewish teacher, Anne Frank: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death.”
Tehora He, it is pure, invites us to root in the goodness always present in the world, even in the most barren wilderness. Most of us are not going to talk to the people making headlines for doing awful things but, in this spiritual wilderness, a lot of us are going to talk to family members or neighbors or co-workers who are supporting awful things. What becomes possible if we appeal to that goodness within? Again, not backing away from our clear-eyed knowledge of what is evil but returning, again and again, like a meditation, to the core of goodness that is present in each being. It’s a painful choice and it’s not always going to result in transformation as it does when Miriam so expertly wields it but assuming everyone’s capacity for goodness, that Tehora He, that purity inside, is a powerful tool. It can de-escalate us from a nightmare frenzy and bring us back to the much thornier but realer challenge at hand, back to a path through this wilderness.
Let’s take a moment to practice using this tool of Tehora he/it is pure. I invite you to get comfortable in your seat, feel your weight in your chair, feel the chair holding your weight. Lower your gaze or close your eyes.
Bring to mind someone who has hurt you–a hurt of a size that feels okay to work with right now. Remember what they did, how it felt to be hurt in that way.
Feel your anger, feel your disgust or your sadness—whatever reaction you’ve been having to this person. Affirm your reactions, that it makes sense to feel the way you feel, that your emotions are important and you’re going to take them seriously.
Turn back to the person who hurt you. See them at their ugliest, in the moment of causing most harm. Imagine that at their core, maybe somewhere in their upper chest, there is a spark of pure sweet goodness, tehora he, a core that is good. Some people find it helpful to imagine this person as a baby, and imagine that spark of pure sweet goodness coming out of their chess, and then fast forward to a more contemporary moment, present day, the moment they hurt you, and see if you can locate that spark within, however deeply buried.
The meditation challenge for you, is not to erase the image of the harm they caused, not to excuse them, but to be able to hold the truth of the damage they caused in your mind with the truth of their core of goodness.
When you’ve got both fixed in your mind, breathe into the scene. Turn your attention to your own body. What shifts for you, when you hold this complexity? What feelings want to be felt?
Pause my voice for as long as you’d like to be present with yourself.
Imagine a river of purple blue loving energy, Miriam energy, flowing towards you and this person, at a rate that feels okay to you. When it reaches you, it winds around your body, a cocoon of care, a cocoon of safety, tender and concerned about your wounds. When it reaches the person you’ve been thinking about, it feeds their core of goodness, it grows within them, and the person, in your mind's eye, starts to make better, kinder, more responsible choices. What do they do, nourished by Miriam energy? What actions do they take? How does it feel within your own body to see this person who caused you harm making better choices?
Stay with this as long as you’d like. When you’re ready, thank yourself, thank your heart, for allowing you to be present with these difficult emotions. Then use your hands to gather up the purple indigo Miriam energy from all around, and compress it into a small seed and place it with your right hand, hand of compassion, palm down, on your belly. Place your left hand, your hand of strength, on top of your right. Imagine that intense seed of Miriam energy within your belly growing stronger, growing a trunk of strength that moves up your spine, a strength that is supple and calm. A strength that belongs to you.
I want to pray for us in this painful moment, I pray:
Morah Miriam
Ancestor Miriam
I am grateful that your wisdom survived all these generations to support us in this difficult time
Please, give us the courage and the strength
To remember the tehora he, the core of goodness, within every being
Please, give us the power to speak to that goodness in the people around us, and in ourselves
And in that choice, to speak to the tehora he, may our words cause goodness to grow and flow in the most narrow of spaces
That we might see our worlds shift towards justice, towards compassion, towards liberation for all.
So, our Survival Guide is growing. We know Spiritual Chutzpah, we know Chakeh mah, we know wait for what, we know tehora he, it is pure. These are tools from Miriam’s experience in the spiritual wilderness of slavery. Next time, we explore the fourth tool that emerges the moment Miriam touches down in a new spiritual wilderness, after being freed from slavery, where Miriam really steps into powerful leadership. Join us as we learn what tool Miriam uses to guide the people in a difficult time. It might surprise you.
I'm rabbi Jericho Vincent, and I'm so excited to take this trip with you, guided by the ancestor Morah Miriam. This is a Survival Guide for a spiritual wilderness. I'll see you on the path.
Thanks to Ella Joy Meir for the beautiful original music, to Kanfei Edges Group, to my creative partner Ben Blum, to Morah Miriam for her guidance, and to Ruach HaOlam, the oneness within, between and beyond us all.
Survival Guide for a Spiritual Wilderness is a part of the Judaism Unbound family of podcasts made possible with support from Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah.
