Yesterday, I believe it was then that I had the revelation that the experiences of the forefathers, and of the tribes, are not and were not things that happened only to them. Their experiences are the archetypes and the tinder for our own experiences; everything that happens to us can surely be reflected in what happened to them.
We see this even a few generations removed, and in reverse, from Moshe to the blessing of Yosef and his two sons, Menashe and Ephraim. As Moshe blesses them, ". . . by the favor of He Who rested upon the thorn bush, may this blessing rest upon the head of Yosef, and upon the head of the one separated from his brothers." Devarim 33:16.
The latter part of the verse - nazir achaiv - is certainly very mysterious and open to surely thousands of interpretations. But the allusion to the burning bush - the sineh - as a presence resting upon it just as it would upon Yosef - this is an interesting and direct connection from Yosef, to Moshe (three or four generations later), back to the survivors of the tribe of Yosef, at least one generation later. Skipping in time, forward and backward, backward and forward - there is no insistence on linearity in Torah, and the more I think about it, perhaps a de-emphasis on it entirely.
Simply put, Moshe's blessing is that, after the repeated use of the word sweetness ("luscious fruits") - the Presence that rested upon the burning bush (my reading) should rest upon Yosef as well. Here we, in fact, have an expansion of yesterday - that the Presence that dwells upon the ark and inside of it merely not reside there - it may and perhaps must also dwell on a bush, and upon a person, and upon the "head" of an entire people. The Presence of H' must be found everywhere - it just sometimes takes a blessing to get there.
An incredible note from the Bahir: what is the root of the word bracha (blessing) - is it from baruch (blessed) or is it from berech (knee)? If from knee - the holy mystics potentially translate it as "the place where the knee bends" - if from baruch - potentially as "blessing." The secret they come to teach us is that it means both - a sort of physical, real-word surrender and recognition and a sort of spiritual influx of divine protection and energy as well. A single word so easily straddling both the so-called "physical" and the so-called "spiritual." In reality, there is no difference - that is why we say what we do every single day in the shema - and why a Presence that can rest in and on something as holy as the mishkan can also dwell upon plants and people as well. And throughout the entire universe, eternally.
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