Parashat Chaye Sarah and Thanksgiving: On Being Blesed with "Everything"

Thanksgiving offers us an opportunity to find a sense of thankfulness inside ourselves. Avraham is a good model. In this week’s parsha we read:

Hashem berakh et Avraham bakol.

“God blessed Avraham with kol, everything.” (24:2). Everything? All? How can anybody have everything? And moreover, what exactly did God add to Avraham in this week’s parsha that he didn’t have before? He already had a great deal of material wealth last week and he already had two sons. If anything, Avraham sustains a loss in the beginning of this week’s parsha with the death of his wife Sarah. What does it mean to say that God blessed Avraham with kol?

God blessed Avraham with the feeling of kol -- a kind of fullness and a kind of stillness that made him feel completely satisfied, as if he did have “everything.”

Avraham attained this sense of kol at the end of his life, after experiencing the near loss of his son and the loss of his wife. There is some deep connection between loss and fullness here, between a sense of the fragility of life and an appreciation for its very richness.

This is a parsha surrounded by death; at its start Sarah dies and at its end Avraham and Yishmael die. In the middle is life and continuity, the marriage of Isaac and Rebekah. This is the way we live, our lives surrounded by the shadow of death, by the knowledge of the limited nature of our time here. The trick is to use this knowledge, as Avraham did, to somehow help us feel the blessing of kol, to help us appreciate the richness of the moments of this life we do have. If life went on forever, nothing would have any meaning. It is the potential loss which makes each moment so exquisite and full and thick.

It is for this reason that our children elicit in us such deep emotions; we are aware that their childhood will pass, and so, at odd moments when we are with them, we feel a fullness of heart that borders on nostalgia for the present, a sense of how very rich and complete our lives are, a sense that at this particular moment, we do have kol, everything one could possibly ever want. It is the knowledge that this moment will pass that makes it so intense and full.

Such moments of feeling kol are not easy to come by, though. Avraham was blessed with them from above, and indeed, they are by their nature of a divine source. We are all headed eventually to the place where Sarah, Avraham and Yishmael go in this parsha. We are fleeting; we are a kind of nothingness. Feeling that sense of kol is a way of tapping into the divine, the eternal. It is God who is All. Nachmanides quotes a kabbalistic source that compares this kol to a tree created by God which nourishes and provides everything in the world to all. When we feel a sense of kol, we are touching -- we are a part of -- this tree.

In the grace after meals, we first call God, hazan et hakol, “the nourisher of all (kol)” and then we ask Him to bless us as He blessed our three patriarchs, all of whom were blessed with kol: bakol, mikol, kol. We, too, ask for such a blessing – not the blessing of actually having everything, but the blessing of feeling that we do, of feeling the richness and fullness and deep blessedness of our short lives. To ask God for such a blessing while we are thanking Him for the blessing of food is, in a sense, enacting our own request, teaching ourselves, through small acts like the grace after meals, to feel how very rich and full our lives already are, to be aware of the fact that God already has blessed us with kol.

Parashat Vayera: On Divine Revelation

This week’s parsha begins with a divine appearance to Avraham: Vayera elav Hashem. “The Lord appeared to him.” We normally think – that kind of revelation happened only in biblical times; it is closed to us.

But the Torah is eternal; maybe there is something to learn here about our own experience of the divine.

Immediately after the proclamation that “The Lord appeared” to Avraham, the Torah tells us that Avraham lifted his eyes and saw 3 “men” in the distance. The relationship between these two events – the divine appearance and the visitation of the three men/angels -- has been debated for generations. Were they two separate events or one? Was Avraham’s vision of the three people – guests to invite into his home – actually the content of his vision of God or merely coinciding occurrences?

The two stories are woven together in a strange and complicated way. Even at the end of the narrative, as Avraham walks his visitors out on their way, God is at the same time informing him of his plans for Sodom. The narrative switches back and forth between the three visitors and God in a seamless way, giving one the mixed up feeling of a dream, with one character blending into another. The implication is that for Avraham, the two entities, whether or not they were identical, were certainly interrelated in some profound way.

Avraham saw God by seeing (and helping) other people. His vision of God did not take place in solitude, but as part of his interactions with others. At the same moment that he made himself open to receiving visitors into his home, he also opened himself to receiving God’s presence. The experience of helping others and also of being able to receive from others – as he received the strangers’ good message here—made him feel the divine presence on this earth.

My therapist once pointed to a particular person in my life and said – She was an angel sent to help you understand something new about yourself and the world. People sometimes are angels. Can we sit in our open tents ready to greet them and to hear their divine messages? Can we see that our interactions with others -- our ability to give to the other, to hear the other, to receive from the other -- these are all ways of seeing and experiencing God?

It’s like the joke about the flood. A man sat in his house during a flood and waited patiently for God to deliver him. A boat came by and the people in it called – Come on up. But the man refused, insisting that God would save him. The water rose and he went up to the second floor of the house. Again a boat came and again he refused. Third floor and the same thing happened, until finally he drowned. He went to heaven and said to God angrily, Why didn’t you save me? God said: What do you think all those boats were?

Maybe we shouldn’t be so sure it’s impossible to see God anymore.

Parashat Lekh-Lekha: Our Own Journey

People often wonder: Why did God choose Avraham? Unlike Noah, we don’t hear that he is a great tzaddik, “a righteous person,” before God speaks to him. So why did God choose him?

God didn’t choose Avraham. Avraham chose God, is the Sefat Emet’s answer. Notice that God does not call Avraham by name in that first call: lekh lekha. “Go forth,” He says simply. (Later, when their relationship develops – in the story of the binding of Isaac – God will call him by name, but here the call is more universal.) This lekh lekha call of God’s is present at all times and to all people, says the Sefat Emet. It is just a question of whether you choose to hear it and respond. Avraham was the first one who did.

This call is still relevant, in fact, essential. The Torah has been around for thousands of years now. We have a strong tradition we pass down from parent to child. And yet there is something that cannot be passed down. Each person, as an individual, needs to choose to heed the call. We should feel that we are each, like Avraham, discoverers of God.

Avraham was asked to leave his homeland, his birthplace and his parental home. We who are brought up in the tradition have no need to do this in order to find God. Or do we? Every person must make an Avraham-like journey. Tradition can be passed on, but faith in God, a religious feeling, cannot. It must be discovered anew inside each person.

And it can only be discovered by leaving something behind, says the Sefat Emet, by leaving behind the entrapments of our normal, everyday life. There is something about routine that makes one unthinking and unseeing. We need to somehow shed the impediments of the norm in order to allow ourselves to become a bri’ah hadashah, “a new being.”

This was Avraham’s strength, his ability to take a journey, to grow and change. He is not like Noah, a ready-made tzaddik, but he becomes greater than Noah over time, because of his ability to transform. By the the end of this week’s parsha, he is truly “a new being;” he has transformed his body – through the brit milah – and his name – from Avram to Avraham.

Avraham’s journey is a long one. He does not simply arrive in the land and it is over. The parsha details his many stops along the way. And the midrash names 10 different trials he had to overcome over the course of his lifetime. This command of lekh lekha, of walking or going forth, was an ever-present command of continued transformation, of never staying in the same spiritual spot.

Are we such travelers? Do we have the strength to shed the bonds that hold us in place, that keep us in the past? Do we hear and heed the call to go forth, to keep changing, ever becoming new beings, ever learning to see the world and God afresh, like our first ancestor? As the Sefat Emet says, the call is there. It’s just a matter of learning to hear it.

Parashat Noah: Finding Favor in the Eyes of God and Man

The Moroccan havdalah includes the recitation of a biblical verse about Noah, the main character of this week’s parsha. VeNoah matza chen be’eynei Hashem. “Noah found favor in the eyes of God” (Gen 6:8, the last verse of last week’s parsha). The verse is chanted by the havdalah leader, and the listeners respond: Ken nimtza chen vesekhel tov be’eynei Elokim ve’Adam. “So, too, may we find favor and understanding in the eyes of God and man.” It’s interesting, that added word at the end, Ve’Adam. We want to be like Noah, but we don’t want to find favor only in the eyes of God, but also in the eyes of our fellow humans. Herein lies the crux of the Noah story.

Noah was a loner, for good and for bad. God chose him because Noah was able, as Bet Shraga teacher Morah Yisraela taught her second graders this week, to be a righteous person even when those around him were not, not a simple matter. The flood is a good image for Noah’s generation. He lived in a flood of evil, but somehow managed not to be swept away by the current, to stay morally afloat in a sea of wrongdoing, to keep himself perfect and pure, tamim, like an island onto himself, like the little ark-island he eventually inhabited.

But good is not meant to be done alone. Noah’s good is shut inside a sealed ark, inside himself, and so, in some way it eventually becomes suffocated and twisted. When he comes out of the ark, he seeks only his own intimacy; he becomes drunk and “uncovers himself within his tent.” The verb is vayitgal, a reflexive verb; he is closed in upon himself, doing the uncovering of himself to himself.

Such good cannot last. Our own internal good is partly a reflection of the goodness of those around us. Noah found favor in God’s eyes, but he did not find favor in the eyes of those around him. Finding favor is work. It is partly a matter of finding the good in other people, seeing those buried good points in others (nekudot tovot, in Rav Nachman’s terms) which in turn helps them see the good within us, and so a cycle of good is created.

Avraham is the model of this cycle of goodness. The midrash speaks of the many people he influenced and converted. If the symbol of Noah is a sealed ark, closed against a sea of evil, the symbol of Avraham is an open tent, drawing others in around him to the pursuit of good.

Later, when we hear of Avraham’s nephew Lot in Sodom, we will think again of Noah. Lot, too, had a certain righteousness about him, but one that was purely limited to himself. The evil around him was so great that the only way for him to keep it out was literally to shut the door on the hordes of evil-doers at his doorstep, waiting to come flood his home like the waters outside Noah’s ark.

There is something to be said for a closed door approach to evil. Noah stands as a model of great moral fiber and fortitude in his ability to withstand evil. And there are moments – Nazi Germany comes to mind -- when such strength of character is required. May we not be tested with such moments. The general work of the world, though, seems to lie mostly in the Avraham open door approach, the attempt to find good in the eyes and souls of those around us, the attempt to share our goodness with that of others and thereby increase good in the world. Ken nimtza khen be’eynei Elokim ve’Adam. So, too, may we find favor in the eyes of God and man.

Simchat Torah: On Imperfection

“Imperfection and incompleteness are the certain lot of all creative workers,” wrote H.G. Wells. This is how we feel when we read the last words of the Torah – on the upcoming holiday of Simchat Torah – which describe Moshe’s death scene, standing atop a mountain looking out into the Promised Land which he will never enter. This man has accomplished so much; he took the people out of Egypt, led them through the Red Sea and through 40 years of desert journeys, and gave and taught them the Torah. And yet we leave Moshe with a sense of incompleteness; he has not achieved perfection; he will never arrive at that utopian destination.

This is the human state. But not the divine state. Immediately upon reading the end of the book of Deuteronomy, we begin the Torah again; we read of God’s perfect, orderly creation of this world in 7 days. There is perfection in the world; there is completeness; it is just not ours.

What are we to do then? Give up? If we can’t be perfect, is there no point? We return to the cycle of Genesis and hear once again how quickly the first humans made a mess of God’s perfect world. We can identify. Here we are at the end of a season of high religious activity. We promised ourselves we’d do better. Maybe we’ve changed a little, but have we arrived? Have we achieved our goals? In the Kol Nidre prayer of Yom Kippur eve, what we say is not “Nullify the vows of last year,” but rather, “Nullify the vows of the coming year.” We know already that we will not achieve them. We are hopelessly incapable of doing it completely right.

The figure of Moshe begs the question of imperfection, but it also provides some suggestions of how and why to nonetheless proceed. First, Moshe is the final and best example in the Torah of a successful divine-human partnership. Maybe alone we are imperfect, but look at what can be achieved together with God! The Torah is brought to earth. Moshe momentarily overcame his human imperfections by being a person who could stand atop a mountain –between heaven and earth – and catch glimpses of the Promised Land, glimpses of the divine. Where is our mountaintop? Shabbat and the Torah, each a piece or a taste of divine utopia, a taste that allows us, too, to move beyond our human imperfections.

Second, Moshe did not pursue this relationship alone but as a leader. His concern was not just his own relationship with the divine, but the continuity of this relationship, its transmission to others and to future generations. The Torah ends with the words asher asah Moshe le’eynei benei Yisrael, “which Moshe did before the eyes of the people of Israel.” His actions were “before their eyes,” or “for their eyes,” for their sakes, for their understanding.

And so we face our looming sense of incompleteness and imperfection this time of year with two tools – a sense of human-divine partnership and a commitment to transmit the Torah to future generations. Alone we are imperfect and incomplete, but together – together with God and with each other, thoughout the generations – we are somehow complete. We become, like the joining of the end of the Torah to the beginning of the Torah, not a line that ends, but a circle that has no end and no beginning, a part of eternity.

Sukkot: On the Joy of Flying

In the desert, the sukkot were meant to provide the Israelites with protection from the elements, the sun and the wind. But today, when we celebrate the holiday of Sukkot and move out of our well-built, well-insulated homes to a shabby hut outdoors, it’s not so much protection that we feel, as openness, a breaking down of barriers. The skhakh roof above, mandated to have holes in it for seeing the stars, symbolizes this openness.

We need this feeling of openness. We are generally very constrained in our lives, bound in by our bodies’ limitations and by the obligations of work, community and home, and especially, by time. We have to be at a certain place at a certain time and there is no way to get there any faster than traffic or our feet will allow us. It often seems – and is true – that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to get done everything we need to get done.

And so this holiday comes to break open the paradigm, to remind us not to let all those constraints come in the way of seeing the stars, of taking the time to think what this life is all about, what we are other than physical bodies taking up time and space in this world.

Such a glimpse of the stars, such a sense of divinity/spirituality, such a glimpse gives us intense joy. It is the like the joy of biking, the sense of a sudden release from the normal constraints of one’s physical body, of being lifted off of one’s feet, defying gravity and the plodding nature of our normal pace, and simply flying. Have you ever had a dream about flying in the air? The feeling is of a joyful release from constraint, a sense of doing the physically impossible, of freedom, of the incredible power of the spirit over the body.

Flying is indeed physically impossible. But sitting in a sukkah is not. It gives us a chance to sit within the confines of walls, to dwell within our physical constraints, and yet still see the stars, still feel the power of something above.

Yom Kippur: Who is Compassionate?

Hashem, Hashem, Kel Rahum Vehanun. “O God, O God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abundant in kindness and truth, preserver of kindness for thousands of generations, forgiver of iniquity, willful sin and error, and One who cleanses.”

We say – or sing – these words countless times during the Yom Kippur service. They are a list of the 13 attributes which God revealed to Moshe as part of the forgiveness and healing process after the sin of the Golden Calf.

What are we doing when we recite these attributes? On the one hand, we are describing God, reminding God on this day of judgment that it is His basic nature to be compassionate and forgiving, that, as He sits on His throne of Judgment, He should judge us kindly.

I wonder, though, if we aren’t also describing ourselves, or rather, setting up for ourselves a model of the virtues we should strive to attain. God is not the only one involved in judgment. We as humans are constantly evaluating and judging ourselves and others. Perhaps on this day of judgment, when we ask God to take a kind approach, we are also asking this of ourselves, in imitation of Him.

This is where Jonah went wrong. God asked him to be an instrument of divine compassion in the world, to reflect the tenderness God feels toward His creatures, but Jonah wanted only to be an instrument of divine judgment. It is particularly on the Day of Judgment that we are asked, like Jonah, to learn to feel --- as God does -- tenderly and compassionately toward our fellows.

The task is not an easy one. We are all like the priest Eli – from the haftarah of the first day of Rosh HaShanah—who looked at Hannah standing in the sanctuary moving her lips but not making a sound, and presumed the worst, that she was drunk, when she was in fact fervently crying out to God in pain. We – like Eli – stand on the outside judging others, when maybe what looks bad is really not, when maybe – usually – we don’t know the whole story, don’t know the inner woes of our fellows’ hearts.

The key is to be, like God, rahum, compassionate or sympathetic. Our fellows’ offenses are often a sign of some inner disturbance or insecurity. Instead of taking offense and becoming angry and judgmental, we can ask ourselves why the offense was made, what troubled thought must have preceded it, and thus, like God, learn to move from “the throne of judgment” to “the throne of sympathy.”

Good judgment begins at home, in how we treat ourselves. Rav Nachman says that we need to learn to look in others as well as in ourselves for the nekudah tovah, the “good point,” the single good thing inside us. Yes, maybe we are full of faults and shortcomings, errors and misdeeds. But to focus on those is to give free reign to the waiting evil of sadness and depression. Instead, we should -- like God – look to the good, not to the Accuser, and find within us those points of good.

O God, O God, compassionate and gracious. O human, O human, be compassionate and gracious as well.