Too few of us are willing to take the biggest risks of life.
Safe, small but usually win out in the end. The sure things in life are little
league baseball, work, even over time, cleaning, love, giving tzedaka, watching
things --like TV going to movies and plays, eating out etc..
These activities are good. Most warm self. Some are wonderful.
The one aspect they all have in common is that they are not concrete. They are
of the genre that can be called “avoiding life.” As one sage put it, “It is far easier to love
the starving Ethiopian than own family.” We run from the concrete into the arms
of the ephemeral for gratification.
They are distractions that remove us from the real fields of
human life. Here is a great truth: the place where all the most important
decisions are reached is around the kitchen table. Note that it is not sitting
around the expensive in frilly divan. Not at the fancy-schmancy restaurant. Or
on vacation in the Bahamas. They happen in the same place with the most angry
confrontations occur. The kitchen.
In rabbinical school one of my teachers, a famous scholar
and author, lamented, “Most people don’t go to Shull because they are afraid of
really meeting God. They are frightened that may be during prayer God will
actually appear and scare the dickens out of them. Worse, then they will have to do
whatever God commands. They will be hopelessly trapped.”
I laughed.
I see now that what I took for a joke was more true than I
was capable of understanding back then.
People are genuinely afraid of commitments which involve a deep
emotional component. That is why falling
in love is so easy -- and revered in
youth when there is little commitment but lots of palpitations -- and being in love is so trying. Being in
love makes real emotional demands while falling in love is hedonistic far less
dangerous.
So it is with three-day-a-year religion, dance classes,
yoga and horticulture.
The biggest risks in life are the ones most richly rewarded.
True, the feeling of wonder that accompanies the first shoots of life in the
garden and the great pride comes with graduation are lovely. Far greater than these,
though, is the knowledge that your children will carry on after you; that they
will continue to live Jewishly; they will be moral. Or a lasting love, one where we have worked and
invested our core self. There are a
few of these kinds of risks. We only have three or four of them. But they are
without peer in power and meaning.
Part of risk taking means drawing lines. Saying “yes” or “no”
to looting, lewdness, lying, allowing our children to inter-date or a living to
Jewish lifestyle are a few examples of that kind of risk taking. It is far easier to insist on good grade than
moral backbone or mowing the lawn on Shabbat instead of spending a thoughtful
day with family. There are very few
lines in a person's life that must be drawn in the world to chief the height of a
lifetime’s success.
What is yours?
“Why you spend money for what is not bread?
And your wages from what does not satisfy?
Listen diligently to Me, and eat what is good.” Isaiah 55:2
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