Thursday, January 27, 2011

Parshat Yitro


This week we read about the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai.  It is obviously a very important Parsha, and during the reading of the Parsha in synagogue we read as the Torah reader recites the Ten Commandments.  There is so much to say and so much written on this week’s Parsha.  I’d like to share with you one idea. 
Before giving the Jewish people the Torah, God tells Moses to command the people to prepare themselves to receive the Torah.  So, for the three days before they received the Torah, the Jewish people were preparing themselves.  I think that this is an important lesson with regard to our own spiritual lives.  Often we expect to have a religious experience or a spiritual feeling accessible to us at the moment we desire it.  A lesson from this week’s Parsha is that we need to prepare ourselves.
Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, one of the most important rabbis of the twentieth century, used to teach that there cannot be holiness without preparation.  Preparation is a necessary pre-condition to true holiness.  This is why God commanded the Jewish people to prepare themselves to receive the Torah.  Similarly, if we want to bring a little bit of holiness into our own lives, we can’t expect it just happen on its own.  To make our own lives holy, we need to be adequately prepared to have a meaningful religious experience. 
What exactly constitutes this type of preparation?  I don’t think that there is any absolute answer.  Everyone is different, and therefore what will be a meaningful preparation to one person may not work for the next person.  Personally, before celebrating a holiday or doing a mitzvah, I know that if I can find the time to learn something new about the experience I am about to have then the experience will be so much more meaningful to me than if I had just done the act without doing that preparation.  I encourage you to try and figure out for yourself what a meaningful preparation for your own spiritual life could be.  If you need help, talk about it with a friend, a loved one, or a rabbi.  I am confident you will not be disappointed by the work you put in.     

Monday, January 17, 2011

Parshat Beshalach

                A few Friday nights ago the father of a close friend of mine was hit by a car and killed on his way home from Friday night services.  Last night I got to speak to that friend for the first time since the tragedy.  I was grateful that he was in the mood to talk about his thoughts and emotions; earlier he‘d told me that his moods have been very unpredictable, sometimes leaving him in the mood to talk and sometimes not.  We talked about a number of different thoughts occupying his mind, regarding his experience of this tragedy and what the experience of the afterlife might be like for his father.  There is one thing that we talked about that I’d like to mention because it can relate to the way in which we view the experience of the Jewish people in this week’s Parsha.
                My friend shared with me that this experience has not made him lose faith in God, but it has increased his fear that maybe there is no meaning in this life, that what we do in this life doesn’t matter, and that there might not be an afterlife.  While he hasn’t lost his faith, he is occupied by these doubts constantly.
                I believe that his experience of simultaneously maintaining faith while harboring doubts is an important part of religious life.  I don’t think that religious life should be easy or obvious at all times; it is hard to see God in our everyday lives and maintaining a meaningful spiritual life for ourselves should take some effort.  To me, the idea of faith and doubt need to go hand in hand.  To not have doubts about matters of belief is not what faith is about.  Faith is about belief in matters that cannot be known absolutely.  I believe that a religious experience based on knowing that something is true without a doubt misses the point of the religious experience.   God has given us a choice when it comes to belief. By never revealing himself, he obviously leaves us with doubts.   There may be times where we experience God without a doubt, but the overall religious perspective is not about a life without doubt.
                In this week’s Parsha we read about one of the most obvious manifestations of God in this world, the miracles He performed when freeing the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt, and the culmination of this event when God split the Red Sea, thus saving the Jewish people from the Egyptians.  Right after the Jewish people safely arrive on the far bank of the Red Sea and the Egyptians are drowned, we read in chapter 14 verse 31, “Israel saw the great might which God had enacted on the Egyptians, and the people feared God.  They believed in God and in Moses, his servant.”  This verse seems to refute the point I had just made about God never revealing himself obviously, so as to give us no choice but to believe in his existence and involvement in our lives.  But I don’t believe that this is the overall lesson in this week’s Parsha. 
                The splitting of the Red Sea and the song that the Jewish people sang in response to the experience of being saved are the main focus of the this week’s Parsha, but there is more in this week’s Parsha which can add some insight into how this relates to the point I was making about faith and doubt. 
It is strange that immediately following the splitting of the Red Sea the Torah recounts to us a series of complaints that the Jewish people brought to Moses.   When you read the text of the song that they sang after the splitting of the sea it seems that they had just experienced an obvious manifestation of God’s existence and involvement in taking care of them.  How is it that the same people which could spontaneously sing about such an intense miraculous experience could begin doubting where their food and water would come from in the chapter immediately following that experience?  You would think that having experienced God wage war for them (as the Torah describes in the text of the song that they sang) in such an obvious and miraculous manner, they would lose any doubts about God’s ability to sustain them in the desert.
By describing the Jewish people’s complaints and fears that they would die of thirst or starvation in the desert immediately after their miraculous salvation from the Egyptians, the Torah teaches us something important.  No matter how obvious God is at the moment of our deepest religious experience it doesn’t preclude the possibility that we will have doubts at other points in our lives.  If the Jewish people, who experienced the miracles that God performed for them while freeing them from Egypt, can doubt whether they would have food and water in the desert, then it makes sense that all of us will experience doubts with regard to God from time to time, no matter how deep our faith is. 
These doubts are a necessary part of religious life.  I believe that, by making our religious lives more challenging, these doubts also make it that much more rewarding.  If faith were an easy black and white experience, it wouldn’t be such an intense and meaningful part of our lives.  It is our ability to maintain our faith in the face of challenges that makes that faith a source of so much passion in our lives.  It might be scary to embrace doubt as part of our inner spiritual lives, but doubt also has the potential to deepen our religious passions when viewed as a religious tool to be utilized, rather than a stumbling block to be avoided.

Monday, January 3, 2011

Parshat Va-eyra



Last Saturday night I received a call from someone looking for a Rabbi.  The woman I spoke to was calling on behalf of her daughter’s best friend’s step-father who was suffering from a terminal form of cancer.  He had been moved to home hospice care, and it did not look like had much longer to live.  He had been totally disconnected from anything Jewish, but now he wanted a Rabbi to pray with him and help him find peace.  They had tried to find a Rabbi through the hospice chaplain but were unable, so they looked on the internet and that’s how they found me. 
These kinds of visits are something I’m privileged to get the opportunity to do, but not really the easiest part of my Job.  Although making visits like this was part of my rabbinic training, it’s not something I have had much experience with.  Not really knowing what to expect, somewhat apprehensive and a bit nervous, I went to go visit him on Monday afternoon.  While all the details of my visit are not relevant,  I would like to share a reflection I made while in his home because it impacted something I noticed in the Parsha which I had never seen before. 
I’m not making a judgment on the family’s behavior.  I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for them.  I’m simply making an observation.  There was a great strain on the family from needing to take care of him, in their home, 24 hours a day.  On top of that, he was on medication that was making him angry, mean, and difficult to deal with.  Their patience was wearing thin.  The tension in that house was palpable.  There were moments where I could tell that my presence was a comfort not because of anything I did, but simply because I had not been dealing with the frustrations of providing care for him, and I was able to be more patient with him than he had experienced recently. 
All week I was thinking about how powerful patience can be.  Unfortunately, more often than not, when patience is really needed it’s more difficult to come by.  As they say, patience is a virtue.  But I think the virtue of patience is incredibly subtle and its importance is really felt when there is a lack of it.  Since this was what was on my mind when I was studying the Parsha this week when I noticed that Moses was an incredibly patient man.
If you think about the Parsha, why would Pharaoh let hundreds of thousands of people who work for free just pack up and leave?  Imagine the turmoil such an event would have on Egyptian economy.  Who would do all the work that the slaves had been doing, how would the government pay to fill those empty positions?  When you think about it like that, you can begin to understand why Moses did not want to take this Job as God’s messenger.  More than one time since the end of last week’s Parsha through the beginning of this week’s Parsha Moses tries to refuse God’s command to go to Pharaoh and free the slaves.  Such a task was bound to be an incredibly frustrating experience.  But Moses did it anyway. 
Let’s think about what it must have been like for Moses.  Before each plague he would go to Pharaoh, once getting to his meeting with Pharaoh, Moses would tell him that God was instructing him to let the Jewish people go.  Pharaoh would refuse, the plague would come, and then Moses would have to go back to pharaoh.  Sometimes with a hardened heart, Pharaoh would immediately refuse to give in, other times the plague scared him enough to say he would let them go if Moses would just stop the plague.  Pharaoh would then change his mind and Moses would have to go through the whole song and dance again.    This process kept repeating itself with every new plague.  Every time Moses would say pretty much the exact same thing to Pharaoh that he had said the last time.  It's very impressive to me that throughout this week’s Parsha there is no evidence of him getting frustrated with having to do the same thing over and over again and repeat himself over and over again.
Most people, myself included, lose patience very quickly when we have to keep repeating ourselves.  Maybe you’ve heard the term, “it’s like beating your head against the wall.”  It seems like Moses was beating his against the wall with Pharaoh, but throughout the entire story Moses remains cool, calm and collected.
The importance of patience is subtle, there isn’t a clear lesson to be learnt from Moses’ patience because it doesn’t change the story at all, and everything just progresses without most of us ever paying attention to this detail.
The value of patience is really most obvious when we observe the lack of it.  Let’s take an example from this week’s Parsha.  When Moses came to tell the Jewish people that he had come as God’s messenger to deliver them to freedom they didn’t pay attention to him.  The Torah says it was because of their קוצר רוח, short spirit.  Many bible commentators explain this phrase as impatience.  The Jewish people were so frustrated with their situation that their impatience to be freed wouldn’t allow them to believe in the messenger of their deliverance. 
Another example which really drives the point home is an episode from later in Moses’ life. We will read about it later in the torah.  The Jewish people were complaining to Moses because they had no water.  After a long time in the desert, with the people’s seemingly never-ending list of complaints, Moses was no longer able to remain patient.  God had commanded him to talk to a specific rock in front of all the people and it would bring forth water.  In frustration instead of talking to it, Moses hit the rock with his stick.  This event, where Moses finally loses his patience, is seen to be his greatest flaw as a leader. 
For anyone who has children of their own or who has ever worked with children you might be able to relate to this.  It amazes me how it seems to that since he was born, my son, Yonah has had an amazing ability to be particularly difficult when I have less patience.  I joke that it’s like he’s got a patience radar, but there’s some truth this.  Babies can sense and respond negatively to our frustration.  That’s just one example.  I’m sure if each of us reflects on our lives we can come up with countless examples of where our relationships with other people, particularly those who are closest to us: Our family, friends, and co-workers, have been negatively affected when we lose our patience. 
There are always things that strain our patience. The reality is that patience isn’t always easy to come by.  We all know people who can be particularly difficult or sometimes we are just tired, hungry, cranky, etc.  So the question I have is if the Torah is teaching us about Moses being patient, does it give us advice on how to be more patient in our own lives? 
I think the most helpful piece of advice that the torah provides for us with regard this is that we need to consciously make an effort to be more patient.  Before sending Moses to speak to Pharaoh, God warns Moses that he will harden Pharaoh’s heart, meaning Moses should expect pharaoh to be stubborn.  Knowing that, Moses was able to show a great deal of patience throughout the story.  Similarly, if we expect a need to be more patient, we can consciously try to be more patient.  We don’t need a warning from God to know that people will be difficult.  I challenge everyone here to consciously make an attempt to be more patient especially in situations where we know it might be difficult and see if it makes a difference.
I’ll close with a confession:  When Naomi andI first moved to Nashville, we couldn’t help being surprised with how long our conversations with Nashvillians were; it was bit of culture shock for us.  Not that these conversations were actually excessive at all, or that we didn’t enjoy talking to people, but it was just a different than what we were used to.  You have to understand, coming from NY where even if you see a close friend who you haven’t seen for years to say more than, “hi, how are you, it’s so great to see you,” could be considered a long conversation.  We didn’t expect that people might actually want to talk to us for a few minutes.  We were afraid that people would sense our impatience and think we were being rude.  So one day we realized that the only reason we are getting impatient is because we are expecting these interactions to be like the incredibly impersonal ones we were used to in NY.  After a day or two when we realized that we needed to change our expectations we immediately felt that impatience disappear and our fear of being rude along with it.