“No pain, no gain,” says the Baal Shem Tov. When someone has attained their enlightenment through yegi’ah, or long, hard labor, their insights deserve to be believed. Just as we’d believe the insights of a longtime practicing Buddhist over an enthusiast just back from their first Vipassana retreat. Because we know the longtime practitioner has gone and meditated over years of cold mornings when she would have preferred to stay in bed. When she says this is worthwhile, it carries weight.
Read moreYitro: Strangers in a Strange Land
My Spanish is good; I can declare in the declarative, and speculate in the subjunctive. I speak better than I understand; but still I fared better in Mexico than I did yesterday morning at Friendly Kitchen in Rohnert Park, when a patron glanced at the newspaper and remarked to me, “Those 49ers sure are” followed by 15 or so words that almost certainly had something to do with the Super Bowl; words that I undoubtedly know individually, but which, when fused together in a wave of football jargon, left me utterly bewildered. I didn’t understand his words but his desire for a bond of familiarity with me was clear. “Yeah,” I said, nodding, hoping that that was all that would be required of me. I was home, but still a stranger.
Read moreParashat Toldot: Brothers, Birthrights and Blessing
So here we were, like visiting nobility. A great party was thrown in honor of the return of the foreign relations from exile. Children, grandchildren, siblings, nephews, nieces, cousins – all here in abundance. And I loved it. I moved easily from family group to family group, learning names, memorizing relationships, asking for family stories. It was easy for me to experience this as hineh mah tov umah na’im, as good and pleasant. Because I didn’t know them. I knew no back-stories. I had no grudges and I was not charged with maintaining anyone else’s. In fact, it took days more to discover that there had been any.
Read moreKilling Your Darlings
Torah over and over presents versions of this, of the younger being justified in taking what should belong to the older. Why such anxiety? Were we, as newcomers to the Promised Land, as builders of a kingdom not on empty soil but on the turf of an older resident civilization, insecure about our position? Is Torah's message that the new supplanting the old is the order of things? In Greek mythology the younger gods defeat the older gods; children supplant their parents, suggesting that change happens in a generational way. The Torah version, invoking our innate sibling rivalry, is subtler and trickier. It involves the painful conflict of ideas that are more or less contemporaneous.
Kohelet: All is Impermanent; There is a Time for Everything
Or maybe it’s this. On Sukkot we live in a structure that is, by design, impermanent. Anitcha turned architecture. We eat and sleep and pray in it. And this structure, like our lives, is blown by winds much stronger than it. It is exposed to rain and cold. We have no choice but to live with its uncertainty, even as we reinforce the ropes and the knots and the fronds lying on top.
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