Right Effort carries within it a quality we could describe as holy chutzpah. Here’s where my life took me last week: I did a brief dive into Kabbalistic teaching and stumbled onto something that feels totally related to Right Effort. I love it when this happens, so I wanted to share it.
The Kabbalah teaches that G-d has ten divine attributes, which are more like creative energies. But these creative energies are also present in us. Some people have more of one kind than another. And some biblical characters are said to represent certain energies. Well, Moses represents the seventh energy, netzach. It’s difficult to define, but it feels a lot like Right Effort.
In Exodus, Moses embarks on so many difficult journeys. He frees the Israelites in Egypt and takes them across the Red Sea. He leads them in the wilderness. And he treks it up Mount Sinai on multiple occasions to receive instruction from God, and comes back down the mountain radiating from being in the presence of God’s glory. Netzach describes benevolent energy for God. For people, it’s more like the kind of effort that gets us up the mountain, that makes us willing to do brave things. We can’t really have benevolent energy without that willingness, right?
But netzach also means letting go. Moses enters into the cloud of God’s glory, which is quite frankly a little scary. He has to enter into something totally unknown with trust. For this reason, Rabbi Schlomo Carlebach calls it holy chutzpah.
Holy chutzpah asks for our good energy. It asks us to set aside the energy that will get us off track. Its goal is union with God. In Buddhist terms, the goal is enlightenment. (And hey, if you can’t see parallels of enlightenment in a story where a guy comes down from a mountain literally surrounded by light you are missing the over-the-head metaphor at work here.) But we don’t get enlightenment if we don’t walk up the mountain. And we don’t enter into enlightenment if we don’t enter into the cloud of the unknown.
Of course, the Torah itself offers us a powerful example of Right Effort because it offers so many examples of how to cultivate the good and prevent the unwholesome. But for anyone to do the Law, they need the kind of right effort that keeps them faithful. Which is where holy chutzpah comes in.
For those who follow the season of Lent, Ash Wednesday is tomorrow and we begin our own forty day journey “up the mountain” so to speak, toward Easter. It’s a good time to consider how holy chutzpah and right effort can support us in our Lenten disciplines. What can we cultivate? What might need to get weeded out? Either way, we’ll need some holy chutzpah energy to make it happen.
Where can you apply some holy chutzpah to your life this week?
This post belongs to my series on practicing the Eightfold Path. Read all my posts on Right Effort here.
