The Spiral Ladder: Parshat Emor

The Spiral Ladder

This past week has been a week of so much learning and so much shedding. I have a lot of insights, a lot of things I want to share, and a lot on my mind. My biggest problem in life is to just get out the fragments. I try to perfect, I try to say the whole picture, I try to get people to understand how it’s all connected—and it keeps me from ever sharing anything at all.

To have my writings come out in fragments is like a puzzle; while they may seem random, I can see how they are all so beautifully connected. I always feel like I need to go back and give explanation for where they come from, or from times before in my life, but really I think it all will come out in today’s lessons. In today’s insights. In today’s struggle. And what’s even more beautiful is that every time, these insights are actually deeply, deeply connected to Judaism. While I’m going to share much more than just my insights about the parsha , I really want to start having the parsha be part of my container for these insights.

What is so amazing about today’s lessons is that they actually encompass our entire past and everything we have learned leading up to this point. We don’t move away from our stories; we circle back to them. And we continue to circle back to them at slightly higher points than before. Life is nonlinear. But it’s also not a clear circle where we return back to where we started. We circle around the same lessons, the same themes, the same stories, every year—but the starting point is always higher and higher and higher. And through those lessons are the fragments of our life that all come together to complete a whole picture.

The Season of Shedding

So this week. This week has been feeling really profound for me. It’s come with struggle and hardship and a lot of really, really difficult feelings. I have been angry, irritable, emotional, hopeless, restless. I feel as if I am in the middle of a period of shedding. It has felt as if the same lessons are playing out over and over and over again in my life and I keep getting so upset with myself. And often times we feel we’ve REALLY FUCKING LEARNED IT! Just for it to hit us in the face a thousand more times. And that feeling—that painful feeling that feels pressured and urgent and PISSED off—comes and hits you across the other side, probably in hopes that THIS TIME , this time you won’t fucking forget it.

I feel like I have been in a time of my life where I’ve been slapped across the face with lessons I thought I knew and feelings of betrayal, back and forth so fast I don’t even know if my head is moving left to right or in a 360 before it’s like, “Yep, we’re back to where we are again.”

Repeating Lessons

While sitting by the sea writing, this image popped into my mind of a spiral—not a circle, but sort of a spiral ladder and I drew it (down below) It came to me when I was thinking about how throughout our lives we “circle” around the same lessons but we come out at a higher point each time we get caught in that loop. And it reminded me of how Judaism is all about how each year you go around having the same holidays, the same lessons, the same things. I remember thinking: Why do we need the same things over and over again? These holidays never change, their meaning never changes, their purpose never changes. And people live 100 years going and needing the same things every single year.

It’s the exact same lessons, but you aren’t experiencing them in exactly the same way. You’re experiencing them as, in a way, totally different lessons because you are approaching them at a higher point than before. With a totally different perspective and feeling.

Parshat Emor: the Blueprint and the Count

After writing all of these insights and grappling with this idea, I went to look up the Parshat for this week. It is: Parshat Emor. Across my screen it read: Parshat Emor contains the blueprint for the entire Jewish year. All the holidays. All the cycles. All laid out in sequence. It teaches that life isn’t a straight line. It’s a spiral.

The Torah emphasizes U’sefartem Lachem. This phrase literally means “And you shall count for yourselves.” It teaches us that while the whole community is counting the same 49 days, the work is strictly individual. Your “pigment”—how vibrant your purple (or blue or green or whatever your inner self feels) has become—cannot be measured against anyone else’s because you are on your own specific node of the spiral ladder. In Hebrew, the word for “counting” (Sefirah) and the word for “Brilliance” or “Sapphire” (Sapir) are connected. The act of “counting” and circling back to our lessons is actually a process of “polishing” the fragments of our soul. The friction of the struggle, the frustration of being “back here again,” is actually the exact pain needed to reach brilliance, until your soul shines with more depth and wisdom than it did the year before.

This Parsha also repeats the number seven —7 days, 7 weeks, 7 months. It emphasizes:

• The Circle (Cyclical Time): Nature moves in circles—the 7 days of the week, the seasons, the holidays. If we only had this, we would be stuck in a loop, ending up exactly where we started.

• The Line (Linear Time): History and the human soul move in a line—toward a goal, toward graduation, toward “the divine.” If we only had this, we would never revisit our past or learn from our stories; we’d just be moving in a straight line.

• The Result (The Spiral): When you overlay the Circle (repeating the lessons) onto the Line (moving toward a higher self), you get the Spiral. You are standing over the “same spot” as last year, but because of the linear growth, you are at a higher altitude.

And my jaw dropped.

The Progression of the Rainbow

Here has been my progression of this spiral ladder:

• Thought: You are the little dot, starting out at each node and going through this loop of life and lessons and coming out at a higher point, but then still always being caught in this sort of loop that is always ascending.

• Thought: We start out as this little dot and each year represents a different color that we go though in order to end up at a point that is our “higher selves”

• Thought: No no thats not right, our lives are meant to start as our true selves, drift away and step back into ourselves more and more every year . We begin at our ‘True North’—my personal Purple—and as the years pass, we travel around the wheel of the rainbow. To the untrained eye, it looks like we are wandering away from ourselves as we pass through the reds, yellows, and greens of worldly experience.

In reality, we aren’t lost; we are looping upward. We have to traverse the entire spectrum to gain the wisdom each color offers, bringing us closer and closer back to our original caller. But, we return to a much deeper Purple, we haven’t just come home, we’ve also ascended. We arrive as a deeper, more resonant shade of ourselves, having integrated the whole journey. The final, highest loop transcends even that identity, opening up into a much deeper relationship with others and the Divine.

The Rainbow Ladder: then I thought gemini could probably make this image in the exact way I have in my mind in a lot less time than I can, so i proceeded to spend my entire bus bus ride to Jerusalem making this image. I specifically wanted this “spiral ladder” to be a rainbow of different lessons. Each step represents different struggles, emotions, holidays, or mitzvahs. Every year has the same colors at the same times, but at the bottom, it starts as a faint rainbow, not very pigmented. Every year we go around, it becomes more and more pigmented. The lessons become clearer and clearer as we ascend. At the beginning of life, you’re just learning the ropes and over time you gradually make these twists and turns in order to step back higher into yourself.

And again, the purple represents the highest form of yourself (myself specifically, because I’m a purple girl and that’s my most inner self). While you may have reached a point of returning to yourself fully, and it’s the “ceiling” of one reality, it is also just the “floor” of a much brighter, more vibrant world waiting above. Once you step more into yourself, you actually start forming this insanely deep relationship to everyone else’s “true self” and also to the “divine.”

Repeating vs. Changing

What I love so much about Hebrew is that nothing in this language is a coincidence; it all has a much deeper meaning. The word for “year” is Shanah (שנה). It comes from two roots that seem like opposites: Lishnot —to repeat—and Lehishanot —to change. The Jewish year encompasses the fact that we are both repeating and we are changing.

This is the difference between a circle and a spiral. A circle is stagnant—you go around and end up exactly where you started. But a spiral means that even though you are standing over the same spot—another Passover, another breakdown, another moment of realizing you played it safe—you are standing at a higher altitude.

Sometimes we can get really upset with ourselves because we feel like, “I’m back here again, how the hell am I back here again and haven’t learned!?” But we are not back; we are actually that much closer to fully learning the lesson we need and letting go of the grip it has on us.

The Beauty of Awareness

Whether you’re Jewish or not, religious or not, this applies to every single person: EVERYTHING in life is at the exact right time and the exact right moment for you. It is not possible to live with regret no matter how painful the experience is, because that pain IS the lesson. You couldn’t have gotten that thing before you were ready. You can’t be upset with yourself for returning to the same lessons, because you weren’t ready for them then—you made the choices you did because that’s where you were at. You had to make that choice in order to learn the lesson and it simply could not have been any other way. And if you’d gotten what you wanted then, you wouldn’t have appreciated it the way you can now.

Your energy aligns with the exact lessons you need, at the exact time you need them.

We can and should be upset, hurt, frustrated, angry—all of it—because it is difficult to realize you’re “back” where you started. But you’re not where you started. We have to see the beauty in the frustration, because it means we are AWARE enough of our lessons to even be frustrated in the first place. The anger, the frustration, the pain—it’s all amazing because it shows you that you are now aware of what you truly want and need.

So the next time a spiral shows up in your life—the same fight, the same pattern, the same feeling of “here we go again”—don’t measure how far forward you’ve gone. Ask yourself how much you’ve ascended.

Notice what you see now that you couldn’t see before. Notice how angry you are because of how close you are to finally learning it and having it lose its grip on you. That’s the growth. That’s the shedding, that’s the path to enlightenment.

The climb never ends. And that’s the beauty of it. I will continue this idea in my next post. I had so much to share, but in the spirit of climbing that ladder, I have learned something profound: that our stories, our journeys, our accomplishments are built one fragment at a time… so stay tuned. :)

Questions for You:

• What spirals do you see yourself trapped in?

• What places have you said “no” to, only to later return to them with so much more insight, excitement, and gratitude?

• When a spiral shows up, don’t think about how far forward you’ve gone, but how much you have ascended on that spiral ladder.

• When is the last time you looked back at your life and appreciated how much better you handled things?

• Can you let yourself shed, and even find beauty in your frustration, realizing that your anger is actually proof of your new awareness—that you’re now standing high enough on the spiral to feel the friction of the lesson finally losing its grip?