TRUMAH: The Nitty Gritty

A turn for the worse


The creation of the world was fascinating.  The flood was epic.  The stories of the forefathers, Yosef and the brothers, slavery in Egypt, the 10 plagues, the splitting of the sea -- this was all very exciting.  Even parshat Mishpatim, last week -- o.k. it was a bit technical with the damage and monetary law and what-not...the Rashi's a little longer than we would have wished... but at least there was action!  An ox on a rampage, a gouged eye, some theft, some intrigue at least!  This week, though, all of a sudden we're charging taxes, and before we know it we find ourselves in the middle of a metalworks, textiles and architecture textbook.  Coat this with gold, this many cubits by that many cubits, hammers this, weave this...  What happened here?!?  If the Jews in the desert had to build some sort of Temple for X or Y reasons, let them, but leave us out of the blueprints!


To make matters worse, Hashem preludes this long list of technical instructions with the loftiest of promises:

וְעָשׂוּ לִי מִקְדָּשׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּי בְּתוֹכָם   

"Make for Me a miKdash (Sanctuary) and I will dwell amongst you" (Shemot 25:8).

If only we could make it through all the nitty-gritty details of this parsha we would love to!  Who wouldn't want the Shechina, the indwelling of G!d's presence, here with us?  Peace and love between people, clarity, enlightenment, wisdom available to all, jealousy and hatred banished...it really does sound tempting, but what a pain in the neck to sift through all these details! 

~~~~~

Feminism Lost

We do speak about it, but we rarely actually think about it: the Beit haMikdash is destroyed.  It's been destroyed for almost 2,000 years.  When we walk down the steps towards the Kotel plaza and the view opens up as we round the corner, very few of us will even flinch at its lack.  We may even enjoy the beauty of the interplay between the blue and aquamarine tiling with the golden dome, and perhaps its contrast to the time-battered wall below, and "how interesting" how the different religions "share" this holy place.  This is just with regards to the physical structure.  In terms of what went on in there, it is barely a blip on our radar.  Even if you have a good Jewish education, and intellectually know what the Beit haMikdash service was like, how real is it for you?  How much can you actually relate to it?  Odds are... not much.  It is, at very best, a blurry, distant memory.

You see, I am a kohen, and there's a mitzvah from the Torah to give honor to kohanim (Vayikra 21:8, Rambam Hilchot Klei HaMikdash 4:2).  This means I get the first aliyah to the Torah, I lead Birtkat haMazon, I get served the first piece of cake at a birthday party, and everyday here in Israel, I go up to the Ark with the other kohanim and give a bracha to the congregation.  Intrigued by what kohanim used to do to deserve such honor, I looked into it a little bit.    

I'm going to tell you right now, in layman's terms, what they used to do in the Beit haMikdash.  It's something you probably already know, you just never thought about it like this: they would cook, fry, grill, bake, make sure people got fed, burn incense, light candles, clean the floors and all the while make sure that they remained impeccably dressed.  The following detail may have been lost in translation, but the Temple was not called "the Temple;" we call it the "Beit haMidash," "the House-of-Making-Holy."  It was first and foremost a house, our model of what a Jewish home should look like.  Every Jew turns to pray towards the spot where the Beit haMikdash stood -- it was the center of national Jewish life, and what was going on there?  Everyday household chores.

Again, we are so removed from this at this point, that we can't help but think that this is a bit "wierd."  We have grown accustomed to hearing answers to the question, "what does your mother do for a living?" with something to the effect of "she's just a stay-home-mom."  A "successful" woman is, generally speaking, defined by her success in the professional world, independent of any children she's raised and cared for, or the house she's maintained to be a well-oiled machine for two decades.  Hold this in the light of the destruction of the Temple.  What was once the source of radiance of G!d's Glory, raised on the pedestal of the Temple Mount as essentially meaningful, has been reduced since the Temple's destruction to "mundane," "trivial" and "technical."

One's masterpiece

The opposite of קדוש "holy" is חול "mundane."  חול, in Hebrew also means "sand," small, disparate particles without connection to one another.  קדוש, on the other hand, always refers to absolute unity.  When a bride and groom stand under the chuppa, the man says to his bride, הרי את מקודשת לי "Behold you are ultimately unified with me."    

Again, the Temple is called the "Beit haMikdash."  We now can understand that this means: the House in which the mundane everyday details are made holy -- unified. 

Every med student knows that it is much easier to remember pieces of information if they are connected as systems.  Every history student knows that history must be learned as a narrative.  Lugging around details is cumbersome and frustrating.  Understandably, then, when we get to these parshiot recording the construction of the Mishkan, the moveable Temple in the desert, we get a bit antsy.  The reason is because we're just seeing unrelated pixels.  A curtain here.  A table there.  A candelabra there.  We don't understand or appreciate how these technical details are connected, but every component of the 613 parts of the Mishkan was critical to the whole like the 613 mitzvot and the 613 parts of the body and the 613 parts of the soul (R Yehoshua Heller, Ohel Yehoshua -- in this treatise on the Mishkan, Rav Heller maps how the Mishkan was a larger-than-life model of the inner world of the human soul).

Building a life has many many moving parts.  Any solution that is unitary in its approach -- a hammer with every problem a nail -- will never work.  The human mind and the world we live in are too complex for simple solutions.  To be able to bring G!d's Presence in requires unifying all the details that were previously חול mundane-disconnected towards that goal.  Exercise, work, love in marriage, study, eating well, prayer, giving to the community, friendship, teaching, mentoring, going to the dentist, getting enough sleep -- none of these are mundane when they are unified towards the goal of bringing in G!d's Presence -- none of them are just technical.  They are all necessary parts of your בית (home) and can therefore all be made קודש.

The challenge, of course, is defining one's overarching goal, ensuring that it is קודש, and planning how all the pieces move him towards it.  Then, there still remains the day-to-day challenge of reminding oneself that the nitty-gritty is part of the process towards that destination.  


The secret to Simcha-Joy in the face of these challenges is to realize that every detail is a piece of your Mishkan for Hashem.  Nothing is "too small."  It will take a lifetime to finish, but if one knows that he is building the space for the Almighty to come into his life, not just shlepping bricks for Pharoah, every piece can be placed with simcha -- the big difference between working as slaves in Egypt and working for G!d.          

MISHPATIM: Hearing Reality

Reality in Surround Sound


It is unfortunate, but unavoidable: the superficial encounter with words of Torah will not shake us -- it will barely move us -- hardly touch us.  It will surely look nothing like the account in last week's parsha (Yitro) of the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai:    

"...there was thunder and lightning and a cloud was heavy on the mountain, and the voice of the shofar was extremely loud, and the whole nation trembled...and all of Mount Sinai was [billowing with] smoke because Hashem had descended upon it with the fire..." (Shemot 19:16-18)

This is our paradigm for what a "Torah experience" can look like.  For most of us, it's a bit hard to relate to.  Words of Torah can seem flat and lifeless.  Where are we going wrong if the Torah's own image for what learning Torah ought to be does not resonate with our personal experience?

~~~~~

The Torah describes what it was like to hear Hashem speak...

...וְכָל-הָעָם רֹאִים אֶת-הַקּוֹלֹת

And the entire nation saw the voices... (20:15).

They did not "hear" the voices -- 2.5 million Jews experienced seeing the sound of G!d speaking His Torah to them.


If this is more than a matter of special effects, what is it?


The answer comes in this week's parsha.


Not Simple Obedience


Among the most famous and misunderstood phrases in the Torah is the Jewish response: 

כֹּל אֲשֶׁר-דִּבֶּר ה' נַעֲשֶׂה וְנִשְׁמָע

Everything that Hashem says We will Do and We will Hear (24:7).

The simple, bare-bones meaning of this is "we will obey... and ask questions later."  


As much as this may be true, it's not sufficient.  It sucks the life-force out these holy words.  It makes us sound like a bunch of motorized, unthinking robots, when really the power of this statement is how deeply human it is...


No matter how much people can tell you about love, until you experience it, it is as if until then, you had never heard of it.  When, after years of maturing, you experience a deeper love, you realize that "no, this is the first time I've ever felt love" -- and this is the way life goes.  


A sensitive person understands that our knowledge is rooted and given contour by our experience.  The blind from birth can have no concept of the color green.


The pleasure of having a child.  There are no words that can describe it to a person who does not yet have one, certainly not to a person who does not want to have one.  If you ask a couple, "how much can I pay you to have a child?," they may name some exorbitant amount after crunching numbers for the child's education, insurance, baby formula etc. etc.  Once that couple has had a child, ask them how much they would have to receive to sell that same child...  There is no figure in the world they would agree to.


This is the concept of נַעֲשֶׂה וְנִשְׁמע We will Do and We will Hear.  


Before we said, "נַעֲשֶׂה וְנִשְׁמע," the Almighty spoke to us.  


When we speak, it can often be "hot air," and people may ask us to "put our money where our mouth is" because "actions speak louder than words."  Meaning, human speech does not necessitate action -- it doesn't even have to be true!  But Hashem's speech IS reality.  ברוך שאמר והיה עולם "Blessed is the One Who spoke and brought the world into Being..."  What He speaks is by definition Truth itself.  What the Jewish people witnessed at Mount Sinai was G!d's speech -- words with Divine weight behind them -- "And the entire nation saw the voices..."  Hashem literally allowed us to see His speech so we would understand just how real it is.      


The Alter miSlobadka, in the Ohr haTzafun, explains that this sensory experience was not just for the sake of special effects, but functioned as the key to unlock the epiphany within us of נַעֲשֶׂה וְנִשְׁמָע.  


The mitzvot are not just hollow directives -- "rituals" that are connected to some prize in the distant future.  They are not carnival games that you get rewarded with tickets, and exchange them at the end for over-sized stuffed animals.  Every mitzvah is a reality -- a world we have yet to experience.  Only through our commitment -- only through our sustained experience, weaving the mitzvah into our lives and our lives into the mitzvah (נַעֲשֶׂה), can we possibly come to "hear" (נִשְׁמָע).  


Look at any mitzvah that you keep -- let's say: not using your phone on Shabbat.  You have probably found that people who know you, who themselves do not keep that particular mitzvah, cannot relate to the immense pleasure of not having to think about the phone for an entire Shabbat.  They may say, "it must be stressful to not be able to use your phone...how do you do it?"  Little do they know that Shabbat is your salvation from the non-stop ringing/buzzing/beeping/chiming of your Blackberry.  


Similarly, if you light Shabbat candles every week -- a woman who does not light will not be able to grasp how lighting two candles on a Friday evening does anything for you.  "What can be possibly be so rewarding about lighting candles?"


Rav Yehudah haLevi in the Kuzari writes that the wealthiest kings on the planet do not know the royal pleasure of the simplest Jew.  Even on holiday in his summer chateau, with his mind racing to the things he "needs to do," "can do" and "feels like doing," he will never find the real inner quiet and enjoyment of the present that is Shabbat (III:5:10).    


Hashem gave us 613 worlds of pleasure to partake from.  He asks for our commitment because without it, we will never come to taste that pleasure that is at first, far removed from our imagination.  The Torah we hear that falls flat is very often because we have not yet developed the tastebuds to savor it.

"שכר מצוה מצוה"          

 "...the reward for a mitzvah is the mitzvah itself..." 

(Pirkei Avot 4:2 according to the Arizal as taught by Rav Moshe Shapira shlit"a)

YITRO: G!d & Our Parents

The Obvious Commandment


For better or for worse, 99% of conversations with therapists around the world revolve around parents.  It almost need not be said how enormous a role parents play in our lives, both as children while under their roof, and as adults long since "independent."  The fact that we must give them honor and respect as a small token of appreciation for their bringing us into the world, feeding us, changing our diapers, cleaning up our messes, and giving us love, manners and education...is obvious.  Yet, there it is, engraved on the 10 Commandments by Hashem Himself:

...כַּבֵּד אֶת-אָבִיךָ, וְאֶת-אִמֶּךָ    

"Honor your father and your mother..."

The Torah does not state the obvious.  If you're wondering where we find prescriptions for common courtesy in the Torah, you're looking in the wrong place.  "Derech Eretz Kadma laTorah" common courtesy is prerequisite to the Torah (Vayikra Rabba 9:3).  Derech Eretz was on the SAT's to get into the university of Torah.  The Torah assumes that we understand that we owe a debt of gratitude to our parents and that this involves a fundamental level of honor and respect on our part.  Why then would G!d find it so critical to eternally engrave it in stone as #5 on the 10 Commandments?!?    




Beyond the Obvious


This question crops up again and again.  We could ask a similar question in terms of the prohibition of murder or the obligation of giving charity.  They're obvious, no?  


The introductory answer to all of these questions is that in these cases, the Torah is coming to give our basic intuition 1) shape, and 2) proportions.  


Shape: While we may (and should) intuit that murder is wrong, as soon as you get a case with one or two degrees of complexity you will either not know what to do, or even worse, mistakenly think you do.  For example, murder is bad, right?  (Right.)  Let's say it's for self defense -- can a person kill another then?  (Definitely.)  What if a terrorist tells A to kill B, or he will kill A -- can A kill B?  Why or why not?  You can imagine more complex cases as well.  This is without getting to abortion, euthanasia and the definition of life.  Very quickly, life gets complicated, and our intuitions and "sense of right and wrong" will simply not suffice.  This is the domain of Halacha, the legal output the Torah that very precisely defines the weights, boundaries and conditions of every law.  


Even though we all intuit the importance of honoring our fathers and mothers, the Torah comes to teach us how to do it in the best possible way.


Proportions: Aside from the aforementioned difficulty of the human mind defining a system ethics without being arbitrary, there is another important limitation that we must admit to possessing.  We can only appreciate the importance of a yet un-experienced value through some "exchange rate" with another value which we do have experience with.  


For example, let's say someone tells you that a Bruce Springstein concert is "amazing," and you've never been to one.  You will ask him, "how so?"  He may respond, "well, I took off of work for a week, and slept in a tent on top of the pavement, living off of trail mix and water."  You, who realize the value of money, a job, sleep, and decent food will probably say, "wow, it must be a really amazing experience."  


This form of valuation has its limits since there are things of essential value that are non-transferable.  People can speak your ear off from now until tomorrow, but you will never even begin to understand the value of being a father until you have a child.  This is also where the Torah helps us.  It shows us the Divine proportions of those values which are infinite and therefore beyond our realm of experience.




The Divine Proportions of Honoring our Parents  


Let's take a closer look at the 10 Commandments:

    

(This is not an accurate picture -- the tablets were actually square, but for our purposes, it will work.  Pardon as well the Olde English translation.)

A quick overview of the 10 commandments will reveal that they are divided into two: five on the right and five on the left.  On closer inspection, you will see that this division makes a lot of sense: the ones on the right (I am Hashem etc., Don't have idols etc., Don't use My Name in vain etc...) all have to do with our relationship with G!d; the ones on the left (Don't murder, Don't commit adultery, Don't steal...), all have to do with our relationship with other people.

There's just one exception to this neat division...כַּבֵּד אֶת-אָבִיךָ, וְאֶת-אִמֶּךָ Honor your father and mother... It's on the wrong side!  My father and mother are people like anyone else!  Maybe G!d really only could think of 4 commandments between man and G!d, but for symmetry's sake threw the one about parents on the right side?

No.  We're the one's on the wrong side.  We do not have anything in our personal experience to be able to imagine what Hashem wanted to communicate to us in the Fifth Commandment.  For us to begin to appreciate it, we have to start from the top and see how it builds one on top of the next:

1) "I am Hashem..."  The root of everything is to Know that G!d is an "I" Who is personally interested in our freedom.

2) "You shall have no other gods before Me..."  It's not sufficient to believe in G!d, if we have other things in our life to which we turn to as independent sources of power.  The fact that one has an idol is paradoxical to the true belief in G!d.

3) "Do not take Hashem your G!d's Name in vain..."  It is not sufficient to believe in G!d, even without having any other idols in one's life.  Belief in G!d must filter down to the realization that His Name, the way we speak about Him, and the way we don't speak about Him -- they matter!  Even our consciousness of G!d is Holy.

4) "Remember the Shabbat to keep it holy..."  Even if one does all of the above, it is not enough if one does not realize that G!d created the physical world and all of the laws that govern it.  We must realize it and live it.  Not just our though and speech, but our actions have objective meaning.  Whether or not we light a match on any given Saturday matters!  

Lastly, 

5) כַּבֵּד אֶת-אָבִיךָ, וְאֶת-אִמֶּךָ "Honor your father and mother..."

Even if our consciousness of G!d is such that we recognize that He created the physical world, and this awareness even impacts our actions on the seventh day of the week...it is not enough...

G!d did not only create this world in broad strokes with general rules and left it on autopilot...He created you.

This means that your parents didn't "randomly" cross paths.  On their 1st date -- Hashem was there.  When they got engaged, G!d was there.  Under the chuppa, G!d was there.  Your conception -- with all of the billions of possibilities of combination racing to become you -- G!d was there conducting the symphony!  

You are not a random blob of molecules that happened to come together at the right place and at the right time.  The Almighty saw to it that you would be born to your parents.  Yes, your parents specifically.  As surely as you look the way you look because He made you that way, so too He custom tailored the home that you would be raised in.  Otherwise, why should your parents be any different than anyone else?  You may owe them more honor and respect from common courtesy and gratitude, but not more.  Hashem is telling us that as much as every person bickers with his parents and gives them a hard time, he must accept that the Almighty Himself sent them to be his parents, and him to be their son.  

The Talmud in Kiddushin expresses this explicitly:

"There are three partners involved in making a person: Hakadosh Baruch Hu (G!d), [the person's] father, and his mother.  When a person gives honor to his father and mother, HKBH says, 'I will consider it as if I lived amongst them and they gave Me honor...' And when a person causes pain to his parents, HKBH says, 'I did well by not living amongst them, for if I did, they would cause Me pain as well.' " (31b).

This is for us as much as lesson in being children as it should be in being parents aware of the cosmically critical role we play for our children, destined to be the ones who teach them how to have a healthy relationship with Hashem.


(This piece is based on the writings of the Maharal in Tiferet Yisrael Ch. 35 and 41.  It is a tremendously deep and powerful concept that requires study and contemplation to begin to appreciate properly and apply in one's life.  Hopefully, it served to whet your palette to look into it further.)  

BESHALACH: Writing our Song

Write for Yourselves this Song


At the very end of the Torah, the last mitzvah we're taught is that every Jew must write his own Torah scroll:

וְעַתָּה, כִּתְבוּ לָכֶם אֶת-הַשִּׁירָה הַזֹּאת, וְלַמְּדָהּ אֶת-בְּנֵי-יִשְׂרָאֵל, שִׂימָהּ בְּפִיהֶם

And now, write for yourselves this song and teach it to the Children of Israel -- place [the song] in their mouths (Devarim 31:19).

There, at the end of Torah, the Torah itself is called a "shir," a "song."


To the uninitiated, this may could be seen as a bit odd.  The Torah may be true, and carefully written, and with interesting narratives sprinkled throughout, but at the end of the day, it is a book of law*.  Neither the U.S. Constitution nor the Bill of Rights -- not even the Magna Carta -- has anyone had the thought to score and make into a musical (to my knowledge).  And lawyers, although renown for their "song and dance," are rarely known to actually break out into song and dance.  In fact, it is probably safe to say, that law is the exact opposite of music, and if so, who is the Torah trying to fool over here?


*This is the underlying premise of the first Rashi on the Torah, asking why should the Torah open with narrative?  It should open with the 1st mitzvah given to the Jewish people as it's essence is a book of law!




Between the heart and the mouth


Two and half million Jews were trapped between the sea and the Egyptian Royal Guard.  


Only 20% of Jews in Egypt had worked up the courage to paint their doorposts red and walk out into the wilderness on that fateful morning seven days prior, following a pillar of cloud during the day, a pillar of fire at night, and the promise of redemption given to them by Moshe.  They had put all chips in the middle.  They were up to their nose in the sea of commitment with no way back when the fierce waters split and rose like stained-glass windows at their sides.  As they crossed to safety, the Egyptian troops on the other shore were lured into the seabed amidst a thick fog, thousands of tons of water silently threatening to tumble.  


The entire Jewish nation saw G!d that day.  For those moments, as the Almighty waged war against Egypt like toy soldiers, all the plot threads came together: Why did the plagues have to take so long?  Why did we have to loan our neighbors' jewelry?  Why did G!d lead us to a dead end?  Why did we have to suffer all those years?  Disparate painful memories clicked together like a gigantic puzzle.  Jews saw the slave drivers who had whipped them day after day, and the soldiers who had slaughtered their children, flung by the waves to come crashing onto the shores at their feet.  Fears were transformed into faith.  Despair turned into ecstasy.  The blinders were removed and the Big Picture was revealed.  There was a Plan all along.


70 year-old Moshe, the leader of our nation, responded to this revelation with song.

אָז יָשִׁיר-מֹשֶׁה וּבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל אֶת-הַשִּׁירָה הַזֹּאת, לַה', וַיֹּאמְרוּ, לֵאמֹר

Your trusty Artscroll translation of this will read something like:

Then, Moses and the Children of Israel sang this song to Hashem and they said saying (Shmot 15:1).

If this is all you have to go on over here, we're sorry to be the bearers of bad news, but you've been robbed.  You're missing the heart of the verse, the heart of the parsha, and arguably the heart of the Torah itself!  The passuk does not just flatly tell us that Moshe sang.  A rigorous, precise translation should render it: "Then, Moshe will sing [and the Children of Israel]..."  


What does this seemingly insignificant, finicky grammar correction mean?  A whole lot.  


The camera pans over the whole scene -- millions of Jews watching, eyes alight and jaws dropped as the Almighty Himself waged war on the sea.  

"Israel saw the Great Power that Hashem did with Egypt, and the nation was in awe of Hashem..." (14:31).

 Then, in the very next verse, the camera dollies in at high-speed on Moshe.

אָז, "Then," 

There is a freeze-frame to capture the moment...

יָשִׁיר "he was about to sing [and sang]"

...the moment right before Moshe opened his mouth to sing.  Rashi describes the camera of Torah's eye zooming all the way into Moshe's heart, bringing the subconscious emotions of the Jewish leader under the electron microscope of the Torah:

"Then, as he saw the miracle, it arose in his heart to sing..." (Rashi).

For some reason, this is the microsecond the Torah wanted to vignette for us -- the rising of song in Moshe's heart...we have to ask ourselves: why?


Lucky for us, half a millennium ago, the Maharal of Prague also asked himself this question.  His answer is a both a gem unto itself, and a key to unlocking all of Judaism:

"...It should have just written, "Then, Moshe sang" -- why did [the Torah] have to extend itself and tell us "it arose in his heart to sing...and then he did so?"

The following can be suggested as an answer: the cause of song is in the heart because when simcha-joy reaches the hearts of tsaddikim righteous people, song [automatically] arises in their hearts, and there is no doubt that [the Jews] sang with all their hearts...not that they had to force themselves to sing...because were this the case, it would [be impossible for it to be] a song from [true] joy.  Rather, the song that is with joy begins with a great happiness in the heart, and [overflows into song]."

Simcha-joy is free flow from one's inner desires outwards into their physical expression.  From the toddler who gleefully learns to walk, to the basketball player who shoots the three-point swoosh to win the game, to the professional who finished executing the project she had planned for months -- their joy comes from watching their desires expressed.  Like spontaneous song or dance, it is the freedom and smoothness of expression that epitomize joy.  The hindrances along the way can produce frustration, sadness and ultimately despair.    




Awkward beginnings that end in song


The Song at the Sea was the first national prophetic experience we had as a people.  It came at the completion of the first of seven weeks on our way to receive the Torah at Mount Sinai, and can therefore be seen as a prelude and "priming of the pump" to the giving of Torah.  As such, we have to stop and meditate on the power of what we've uncovered above.


It is a common qualm to look at the keeping of mitzvot as a recipe for a robotic lifestyle.  How can you remember all those laws?  Doesn't it bother you?  Don't you feel constrained?  Don't you wish you could just do whatever you want?  Indeed, the parent or friend looking on at the beginner in Judaism will without-a-doubt observe as he mechanically tries to re-mold his life around 613 new rules.  He clumsily struggles through the prayers, self-consciously eats his unsliced tomato and cucumber at the non-kosher restaurant with the family, and not-so-suavely avoids getting kissed by the Russian ladies in shul who have smooched him since he was a kid.  


Let's call a spade a spade: Baalei Tshuva (Jews who become more religious later in life) are awkward.  


At least at first!  But of course, new rules, by definition, make for awkwardness.  Every athlete is awkward when he picks up his first basketball, or baseball bat, or tennis racket.  The body has a way it does things, and it takes time and practice to accustom it to do things differently.  Every parent knows that if he wants his son or daughter to someday be a concert violinist, he better purchase some good earplugs in the interim because it will be painful -- at least at first!  


Integrating mitzvot into one's life is no different.  As the Maharal was careful to point out, it is specifically "in the hearts of tsaddikim righteous people," who have pushed through the hard work -- it is in them that song spontaneously emerges.  


סוף מעשה במחשבה תחילה "What is last in action, was the first in thought."  We sing this Friday night in Lecha Dodi.  We began by mentioning that the last mitzvah -- the last action the Torah asks us to fulfill is to go back and re-write the whole Torah for ourselves.  And specifically there, at the end, the Torah is referred to as a song.  Only once we've been through all the individual parts of Torah sequentially -- seen all the mitzvot -- one-by-one -- can we go back, with the Big Picture in mind, and put them all together as a "song."  This was the thought the Almighty wanted to put in our hearts before we received the Torah.  Two and a half million Jews sang in unison at the sea, not because they were externally forced to do so, but because their hearts genuinely overflowed with the joy of the moment.  Of course, that first-time joy does not last forever.  It was a spark -- a sneak preview of what life is supposed to look like.  It is as if the Almighty would release the shackles holding back that young violinist's hands on his first day, and allow him to play a virtuoso sonata for him to see what is at the end of the tunnel of years of playing scales.


This is the pattern we see throughout Torah and mitzvot and the entire Jewish calendar.  Although we stand in reverence in front of the open ark on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, on Sukkot we take the Torah out and circle the bima 7 times, and on Simchat Torah (lit. "the [holiday of] Joy of Torah"), our feet leave the ground as we dance with the Torahs -- the same Torahs that were one to fall, everyone present would have to fast -- we dance with them.  This is the image we want to keep alive -- the spontaneous song and dance that the Almighty wants from us.               

BO: History and the Now

What happened to the Now?


Every year, tens of thousands of Americans take a break from their normal lives to don the military uniforms of the Union and Confederate armies, and descend onto the fields of Gettysberg to reenact the battle there fought during the American Civil War that took place 150 years ago.  In the year 1998, the 135th Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysberg was attended by an estimated nearly 40,000 musket- and cannon-wielding enthusiasts on the battlefield, and about 50,000 spectators.


When the War in Iraq broke out in 2003, university students from around the country swelled with excitement that their time had come for "real activism" with a "real cause," to take a stand as their parents had done in the 1960's.


We all hearken back to that heyday (whatever it may be) -- that "Golden Age" ... if only we lived back then, then we would be someone -- then we would be a hero.  


The present abandoned, empty of that electricity in the air that "maybe something big will happen."  The final and unfortunate consequence of this mentality, or any outlook resembling it, is that the Now is drained or meaning, and our lives in the big picture drained of their significance.
  


The Son that Doesn't Know How to Ask


Everyone knows about the "Four Sons" from the Pesach Hagaddah.  What people don't know is that every son in the Hagaddah and the appropriate parental response, is drawn from four explicit verses in the Torah.  Each son has some sort of opening line or question, and the verse following it is the parent's custom-fitted response...except, the Son that doesn't know how to ask.  Naturally, he has no verse recording his question...since he doesn't know how to ask.  


The Torah goes straight into the single concept we must convey to him to open him up -- to get him to care about what it means to be a Jew:

וְהִגַּדְתָּ לְבִנְךָ, בַּיּוֹם הַהוּא לֵאמֹר:  בַּעֲבוּר זֶה, עָשָׂה יְהוָה לִי, בְּצֵאתִי, מִמִּצְרָיִם

"Tell your son on that day [Pesach night]: "Because of this [pointing to the Seder table full of matzot, bitter herbs, charoset, etc.] G!d acted for me in my departing from Egypt." (Shmot 13:8).

The latter part of this verse resonates with the more well-known idea that "In every generation, every person is obligated to see himself as if he left Egypt" (Hagaddah, Pesachim 116b).  A parent or Jewish educator must be able to convey to his child or student that he genuinely feels that he has been freed from his personal slavery through Torah and mitzvot and his relationship to the Almighty.  He must be able to say these words "G!d acted for me" straight-faced and believe it for the student to believe him and begin to open up.  A Jew has an obligation to be aware of how far he has come in his own life -- breaking free from bad habits, anger problems, superficiality, and the immaturity of his youth.  This is the more well-known part of the verse.


The first half of the verse has a nuance that one could overlook his entire life, but one so powerful that in can supercharge his whole vision of the Now -- of the present in front of him at any given time.  Rav Shlomo Wolbe points out that we are trained to see time as event A leads to event B leads to event C leads to the Present.  This is a G!d-less vision of history.  It represents a history without direction, without endpoint.  Just as we educate ourselves week by week to see the six days leading into Shabbat -- the endpoint and purpose of the week's efforts, so too must we look at our lives and human history.  This concept, which is the key to unlocking a Jewish neshama hidden inside the vault of jaded apathy, flips our concept of history on its head.  Inside-out actually...


It's not that we keep mitzvot because we're reenacting or memorializing our past.  We don't have the Pesach seder because we left Egypt; we left Egypt because of our Pesach seder.  בַּעֲבוּר זֶה because of this -- because of the mitzvot we are doing right now (e.g. matzot, telling over the leaving of Egypt) -- this prayer with kavana (concentration), this effort we are making to help a friend through a problem, this kind word of loving encouragement we tell our spouse, this candlelighting, this Torah concept I am working to get clear...because of THIS, Hashem -- the Creator of Heaven and Earth, King of the Universe took 2 and a half million Jews out of Egypt with never-before-seen wonders and miracles.  


What we do today makes everything leading up to it worthwhile.  If you are a Jew reading this, you must realize that you are a survivor the son of survivors the son of survivors.  Chosen indeed.  By definition.  3,500 years of Jewish history is invested in you and everything that you can do to make life better for those around you, to connect to G!d or help others connect -- all of it is cosmically significant.  Just as the Almighty Himself protected us in the desert on all sides with Clouds of Glory, and just as He, in all His greatness, Himself protects every Jewish home with a mezuza, so too, the Almighty is watching this moment cheering for us to succeed -- everything in the past is riding on what we make of the present.