Possessed

“Had possession of the land remained central to the covenant during the exile, Israelite religion would have collapsed. By concluding the Torah with Deuteronomy and not Joshua, the fulfillment of the Torah is defined as obedience to the requirements of covenantal law rather than the acquisition of a finite possession.”

The Jewish Study Bible: Second Edition

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Dear Kate,

Why are we so possessive?

It seems to me the world is turning and history being made all and only because we want to acquire and occupy, own and seize and retain--not just material goods, but really everything, anything that is possessable, with or without a price tag, tangible or not, visible or never, noble or base, from the past or yet to be, we just want to lay claim on and call it our own.  Wealth and comfort, yes.  Health and beauty, of course.  Justice and bliss, no doubt.  We have a world of busyness to deal with.

How's your day?  Busy?

Busy to do what?

To behold the mystery of life?  To wait on an ineffable word?  To trust somehow your life is being cared and spoken for even as you laid your dead-tired body on your bed most vulnerable and helpless and the roof could have collapsed on you a dagger driven through your heart carbon monoxide permeates your every atom the devil sneaked under your big fat blanket to claim your soul?

That's right: as we lay claim on everything we lay ourselves wide open to being claimed by anything.  A remark.  A missing digit.  A broken handle.  A sheet of ice.  A wrong turn.  A coronavirus.  A pill.  A lie.  A misunderstanding.  An obsession, petty or magnificent. Anything can take away everything from us.  There are so many A's in this paragraph that even if its reader is to know no English she would still be intrigued by the conspicuous recurrence of the triangular shape.  But the on-a-treadmill, round-the-clock, everlasting chain of Busynesses in our life?  We possess no peace to discern its rhyme or reason.

Yours, Alex

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Dear Alex,

I had a hard time making veggie soup from scratch tonight.

They stood ready for action, my ingredients, chopped and opted for a winning wintry concoction, my masterpiece of celery, beets, carrots and apples basking in life-brimming broth. In my world-stage kitchen, I morphed into master and rat chef, Remy, and spun in live drama my version of "Ratatouille."

But beyond conviction, I needed a 5-star rating for my soup and granted my teen daughter the privilege of taste testing. She spat it out soon before blurting an offense - too sweet! So I added salt to counter the sugar, then poured garlic and cayenne pepper to counter the salt, thereby counting and countering my mounting of seasoning until I paused on my own account to re-assess the flavor of a soup turned too wild to be swallowed, too tame to fail.

Then I went in resolute faith to my kid for another march of taste testing. With time-tested suspicion, she sniffed the soup while I convinced her to just listen and drink it. The soup was incredible, southward and so awkward in distaste that the tragicomedy nearly choked her: “This is gross!”

Extreme ownership is a radical mindset in leadership extending from battlefield to business and home, a conceptual paradigm masterminded by two highly decorated Navy SEAL commanders. You are responsible for not just your tasks within your control but also for everything and everyone you impact. You own the world within your reach.

My soup sounds silly but the seriousness of ownership perfuses into the most critical nuances of our attitude and magnitude in influence. I am the extreme owner of my soup. Its flavor is my favor, its failing mine too. Chop it up any way and I stand to take the slay.

The Torah is the Pentateuch or the first five books of laws in the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The English Standard Version Study Bible describes Deuteronomy as “largely a sermon, or a set of sermons” preached by Moses for Israel before his death at the brink of entry into the Promise Land. He was the extreme owner of the promise without ever possessing the tangible promise through conquest of land.

The book of Joshua excluded from the Torah fulfills the promise of ownership in outcome or acquisition. It enacts the extreme ownership, redemption and faithfulness of God for his people falling short of the faintest ownership of anything but faithlessness. “By concluding the Torah with Deuteronomy and not Joshua”, the ownership of the laws is gifted to us by grace, an invitation to our obedience as we choose to become owners and backpackers in the wilderness.

From moment to movement, we are drunkard or steward in our heaven-on-earth promise land. What is at stake in this life, ours and yours, counts towards extreme ownership of obedience.

I feel bad telling you and perhaps you may have predicted: I trashed my soup. I could have re-purposed it in multiple reforms but my declaration of empty words in empty calories was my sole form of any ownership or possession. And now I own this error, this cross, grief and greed in me, soft blue squalor. God smells like alcohol.

Yours, Kate