How the Narrow Place Leads Us to Expansion: A Meditation on the Ten Tribes of Israel

The apocrypha tells us that ten tribes of Israel were lost. 
Or rather, stolen.
Carted and carried along the narrow places of the Euphrates River.

And we were
Held captive by foreign masters.
And the hope of:

וְהַרְבָּה אַרְבֶּה אֶת-זַרְעֲךָ כְּכוֹכְבֵי הַשָּׁמַיִם

Of being made numerous like the stars of heaven.

But instead of stars, we were seeds.
Transplants of Yosef.
Sold into slavery and then rising from the ground to feed the hungry and welcome back our kin.

Narrowness has been our passage.
And we have been made small and broken by the way.
But our scattering has seeded our return. 

For as we have turned to the world.
We, too, have returned to ourselves.
Building a New Eden
Rooted in the wholeness of our shared humanity and the radical tending to every human being living on the Earth. 

 

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