I don’t have a lot to say tonight. I’m feeling some weight on me this week. Lots of deciding about High Holy Days – what will be in person and what will be on Zoom – and then redeciding and redeciding again as the virus resurges in all the various ways. I’ve been feeling that weight. And feeling the weight of the stories that congregants have brought me this week. Hard stories – family, money, struggle of all sorts. And hey, it’s not like my own life is free of challenges either – there have been and continue to be those.
This was all on my shoulders when I looked at this week’s Torah portion, called Eikev – the third portion of the Book of Deuteronomy. It is still Moshe making the big speech that he started two weeks ago. It is still grand pronouncements and threats for non-compliance and exhortations to faith and encouragment about the upcoming entry into the Promised Land.
So maybe it was because of all I was feeling and carrying this week that this verse popped out at me:
וְזָכַרְתָּ֣ אֶת־כׇּל־הַדֶּ֗רֶךְ אֲשֶׁ֨ר הוֹלִֽיכְךָ֜ יְהֹוָ֧ה אֱלֹהֶ֛יךָ זֶ֛ה אַרְבָּעִ֥ים שָׁנָ֖ה בַּמִּדְבָּ֑ר
לְמַ֨עַן עַנֹּֽתְךָ֜ לְנַסֹּֽתְךָ֗ לָדַ֜עַת אֶת־אֲשֶׁ֧ר בִּֽלְבָבְךָ
Remember the long way that Adonai your God has made you travel
in the wilderness these past forty years,
in order to test you by hardships to learn what was in your hearts.
This jumped out at me because so much of what we experience in this life feels like a test. Illness, loss, estrangement from family – I don’t need to give you the full list – but how many times have we wondered, “Am I being tested? And if so, what am I being tested for?”
Torah has a simple answer. The very same verse concludes by saying, “to see if you would keep God’s mitzvot or not.”
This is, on its face, a frustrating conclusion. Creating the circumstances of hardship as test of faith feels like the kind of Divine manipulativeness that sends us running from Torah so often.
Another perspective might be that God created circumstances of hardship by creating the world as it is, with the rules that it has, with the physics that it has, and God is wondering, “will you still believe despite?” In other words hard times are a part of human life on this planet. Will we only feel faith in good times? And if so, is that faith?
But I don’t like this verse as a faith question. And anyway, it was Rashi who read it as a faith question. Torah doesn’t say, “will you believe?” Torah says “will you keep God’s mitzvot or not?”
Because for some people, mitzvot are how you handle hard times. You do the things. And the practice of doing the things carries you along on the journey.
I took part in presiding today at a memorial for a friend who died of ALS. It was a Catholic mass – I didn’t officiate that part – followed by lunch and speeches. And one after another, people got up and told of the kindness of the man who died. They told of how loving he was. How loving he continued to be even when he no longer had language to express it with. How you could see it, feel it, in his eyes and his smile and his embrace.
And I saw how the love was radiating out of the grief in the room.
And this verse that I’ve been wrestling with this week came up again in that moment, and I thought, “Love!” That’s it. That is what we’re being tested for. Love! The long way that Adonai makes us travel to test what is in our hearts. It’s to test if love is in our hearts. Do we still have love to share? Are we still able to receive love?
Maybe Moshe should have left the end of the verse off. Because maybe obedience wasn’t what he or God was after. Maybe it wasn’t faith they were after. Maybe God’s prayer for us is that despite the hard journeys that are part of life in these bodies blah, in these hermetically sealed egos, that we continue to love. Maybe the compliance with mitzvot in this verse doesn’t refer to all the mitzvot. Maybe they refer to specific mitzvot. V’ahavta et Adonai Eloheykha. You shall love Adonai. V’ahavta l’reyekha kamokha. And you shall love each other.
Maybe God is rooting for us, like silent, invisible spectators at the Olympics, rooting for us to love.
In this morning’s mass, a relative of the deceased recited the famous words from First Corinthians, that many of us know from weddings we’ve attended (or had), words that I wish were part of our Torah as well. They go:
If I speak in the tongue of human or angel, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
And the passage continues to say that after a lifetime of experience, of putting away childhood and childish things, a life of never quite experiencing the Divine face to face, “these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
As we enter Shabbat together, let’s look back at the hard week, the journey of 6 days, the journey of 40 years, or 80, and ask ourselves: do I still love? And maybe, breathing, and gently asking the question, “do I still love,” we will feel it again.