Feeling crabby?

According to Jewish tradition, each month is infused with meaning and energy that can be tapped into for healing, growth, and self-evaluation. According to Sefer Yezterah (The Book of Creation… which expounds on the first chapter of the Bible), every month corresponds to a different sense, a controlling limb of the body, a zodiac sign, one of the twelve tribes, and a letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

Ok, now pretend that I write horoscopes and that you are checking yours. This is fun, its like make-believe…except real because I am not making this up.

The month of Tumuz is the fourth month,
Sense: sight
Limb: right hand
Zodiac: crab
Tribe: Reuben
Letter: chet

The theme of this month is our sense of ‘sight’, which makes sense since it’s the summer time, a holiday for the eyes with everything blooming and basking in the summer-time sun. Janis Joplin says it herself in the song appropriately titled ‘Summertime’: she’s a looking good now. Also, the name of the tribe ‘Reuben’ comes from the Hebrew root word ‘to see’. And if you still don’t SEE the correlation, Reuben's tribal stone is the ruby, a deep, luscious red, the most vibrant and visually sensual of the stones.

Accordingly, the month of Tumuz we have the opportunity to focus on and rectify our sense of sight. To fix the sight does not mean changing the scenery or getting a better prescription (although if you need one visit http://www.1010optics.com/). Rather, to fix your ‘sight’ means changing your perception of things, taking another angle. Whether you step 90 degrees to the right, step back, take an aerial shot, or zoom in… we should try to take a situation in our life, perhaps a reoccurring annoyance or a tragedy that we can’t seem to get over, and attempt to see and understand it a little differently.

Sometimes it is hard to SEE the big picture, but that because we are but silly humans limited by the spectrum of colors our eyes can detect and the fact that we don’t have more than two eyes, like flies, or complete peripheral vision.

Interestingly, the crab (the zodiac sign for the month) is symbolic of our tendency to focus on the bad surface of a situation, because the crab has an outer shell. Our challenge is to see past the shell, or remove it, in order to reveal this inner truth, soul, or reality. The shell is only a guise, a mask, a trick.

Thank goodness we have the healing power within ourselves to overcome the shadow of the ‘shell’. Since ‘He prepared the remedy before he brought the disease’ (Megilah 13b), we can use the controlling limb of the month, the right hand (or your left if it’s more dominate) to wage the battle against poor sight. The right hand, notably the pointer finger, directs the eye sight. The right hand is also known as being the hand of kindness, of compassion, the hand of love. So we should try to see everything in a positive light, with understanding.

According to Rabbi Kook, the expression “always place G-d before you” really means TO SEE the godliness in everyone and everything that happens in front of your face, before your eyes. Rabbi Kook furthermore says, if you truly love the creator, you will love all that the creator created… which includes all people and trials that we experience. Also, according to eastern medicine, the emotion of anger affects your eyesight and your liver. Therefore when you are mad, you literally ‘see red’.

Yes it is hard to think positively all the time, but I challenge you to SEE it a little differently, change the way you look at your world, at the events in your life. There is a major difference between LOOKING and SEEING. You look at something and acknowledge it as being there, but ‘seeing’ something is how you internalize it.

A practical guideline for how to properly ‘see’: Since it is good practice to ‘walk in the ways of G-d’ (aka emulate Him), we can look into the Torah and find out how it is that G-d see’s things. The very first time the word “see’ is used in the Bible is in the fourth sentence when G-d is creating the world and it says G-d sees that it is good.

Next time you get annoyed, angry, flustered, depressed, etc, try to soften your eyes a little bit. Have compassion. Be a visionary, see the good, and then declare it…. IT’S ALL GOOD