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 We chose pain.

If there is a single moral to the tale of Creation it is that Adam HaRishon (primordial man) elected to take the path of pain instead of spending his days on utter comfort.  The Garden was perfect.  There were no needs or wants.  They did not have to work and the possibility of failure did not exist.  There could be no failure.  Likewise there was nothing to succeed at.  All Adam HaRishon had to do was breathe.  
In the taking the forbidden fruit shame launched itself in the consciousness of the two beings.  First naked and unashamed (2:25) Adam and Havvah felt their vulnerability grow into an unrelenting self-conscious throb.  Now, instead of roaming about the Garden Adam and Havvah now crouched in the bushes.  Just moments before the universe stretched before them.  Now, the world had closed in on them.  The skies felt like they were crushing down upon them.  
Self-loathing and fear gripped Adam and Havvah.  Dark suspicions colored the previously pristine Garden.  They accused one another, contemptuously.  He said, “The woman that You gave me—she gave the fruit…” The woman said, “The serpent…”  Perfection was blemished.  Shunned from Eden, Adam and Havvah now had to deal with unimagined pains that would assault their physical being and relentlessly pursue their consciousness.  They crouched lower into the foliage, terrified of the inner darkness.  
Why did they choose the path of pain?
On Hanukka we celebrate in many ways.  Among the more opaque observances is the tradition of spinning the dreidle. B'nei Yissachar said that the difference between Hanukka and Purim is best demonstrated by the dreidle and the gragger.  The dreidle is spun by taking hold of the top and twisting one’s wrist.  The gragger is sounded by taking hold of the bottom and yanking it around.  One is gripped from below; the other above.  That reminds us of the difference between the two holidays.  While Purim celebrates Esther’s ability to find her self and God and save the Jews (below); Hanukka recalls God’s intervention in coming to the aid of the Hasmonean warriors (above) with the miracle of the oil.  
Redemption has different origins in the two holidays.   There are times when we depend upon God and other times when we must depend upon ourselves.  Yet, the connection between Purim and Hanukka is that redemption only comes about through struggle, pain.  Both tales are pock-marked with rivalry, desperation and fear.
It would be nice if life was different…and it was for a brief flicker of time in our past.  We return to our first question: why did they do it?  Why did the sole inhabitants of Eden forfeit perfection?   Why could they not turn their backs from the Tree of Knowledge and forever walk in the Divine Radiance?
The searing question of pain is compounded in this week’s parasha as Jacob’s family descends into the grasp of Egypt.  At first it is a most that benefits everybody.  Prosperity swiftly turns to anguish as Jacob’s children becomes slaves to their present-day neighbors.  Why such pain?  Why must generation after generation endure agony?
In connection with the Torah reading, the Midrash offers:  A farmer needed to yoke his cow.  The cow had no desire to have the wooden plank placed and tightened around her shoulders so she balked. Turning her neck this way and that the farmer could not put the yoke on the animal.  So what did he do? 
The farmer went to the shed and led her calf out in front of the mother.  Pathetically bleating the calf caused the cow to lurch protectively forward. Because of her child the cow allowed herself to become yolked.
It was foreseen that Jacob would have to migrate to Egypt (15:13) long ago.  It was part of the pact that God made with Father Abraham.  There were countless ways to facilitate Abraham’s descendent leaving Canaan for Egypt but God decided to bring the calf first to induce the mother.  The Holy One declared: "He is My firstborn.  Shall I then bring him down to Egypt in disgrace?    I will draw his son before him, and so he will follow despite himself.”  Jacob was forced to go down to Egypt.
So God wants us to suffer?  He ordained the slavery?

Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai said: The Holy One, Blessed is He, gave three good gifts to the Jewish people, and all are acquired through suffering: Torah, the Landof Israel, and the World to Come. (Brachot 5a)

Chassidic teaching explains that two counter-objectives had to be achieved. On the one hand, Jacob had to be compelled to relocate to Egypt -- a voluntary migration would not have been an exile! Galut, by definition, is a place where one does not want to be -- a place that is contrary to one's intrinsic self and will. On the other hand, the fact that Jacob arrived in Egypt in honor, glory and in a position of power as the father of that country's ruler, rather than as a prisoner in chains, meant that he and his descendents would never truly be subject to their host country. Thus the key to Israel's eventual liberation from Egypt was already "programmed" into the circumstances under which their galut 

Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai [the author of the "Zohar"] taught: "Come and see how beloved is Israel to the Holy One, the Source of all blessing. Wherever Israel went into exile, the Shechina went along into exile. They went to exile to Egypt, the Shechina went with them as it is written, Did I not appear to your ancestor's family when they were in Egypt [enslaved] to the house of Pharaoh (Samuel 1:2-27. They went to Babylon in exile and the Shechina went with them, as it is written, because of you I was sent to Babylon (Isaiah 43:14). And when they will eventually be redeemed, the Shechina will be redeemed along with them, as it is written, Then the Lord your God will bring back your captivity and have mercy upon you (Deut. 30:3). The verb used in the verse is not veheshiv, the proper grammatical way to express bringing back someone else in Hebrew, but veshov which expresses the idea of returning oneself; to teach you that God Himself returns along with Israel from its exiles. (Talmud, Megilah, 29a)

 

The Mikveh

A mikveh is a pool of water.  In fact, the word mikveh literally means pool, or collection (of water).  The very first time it is used is in the opening passage of the Torah, Genesis 1: 9-10, where God commands the waters be gathered together (mikveh) to reveal land.

The primary stipulation that separates a mikveh from say a swimming pool is that a mikveh must be composed of “living waters.”    The “living waters” have to flow from some naturally occurring source of water:  It cannot be static. 

Water purifies.  It is the source of our being.  After all, our body mostly made of the stuff.  We instinctively recognize that the intrinsic qualities of water as where we all came from.  For all those months of gestation we were rocked in fluid, protected in a soft cocoon of water inside our mother.  Just hearing the sound of water calms infants and loosens up the mental calluses from adults.  That is why so many of us head for the beach during vacation.  We are soothed and buffeted by the return to the primordial waters.

Judaism recognizes the need for a return to the place of our beginning as well as renewing the ground of our being.  One beautiful midrash tells of Adam’s deep pangs of loss after the exile from Eden.  He wept.  What did Adam do to ease his angst?  He went to one of the rivers that shot from the center of the Garden and immersed himself in the waters as an act of teshuvah, repentance.  And later, in Temple times, the kohanim, priests, used to dip themselves into the waters of the mikveh before their religious rites.  The waters helped to transform the mundane into the holy.

Travel through Israel and Europe and visitors will be astonished to find mikvehs appended to or close by all the ancient synagogues.  It was the practice of our ancestors to immerse in its cleansing waters before approaching the Holy One in prayer.  Each morning they would arise, place themselves into the cool waters and pray for a clean and whole heart before approaching their Maker.

Eating is a holy endeavor.  So many folks bring their new pots and pans to the mikveh to immerse them in the unique “living waters” to make them suitable for blessing and consuming the foods prepared on them. 

Those who convert to Judaism are required to immerse themselves into a mikveh.  The act of submersion in the waters becomes a moment of transformation; of leaving the old self behind and taking on a new identity. 

Blood is a powerful force in our faith too.  After their period, many women attend the mikveh as a demarcation line between death (blood, represented by the body’s flushing of a potential birth) and life.   In this sense, the mikveh represents the difference between the grave and the womb.  The laws governing this immersion are called “Family Purity” or Taharat haMishpacha.   In a similar way, people who have experienced bodily trauma also visit the mikveh as an act of renewal.

None of this is sensible in ways that can be logically explained or that are scientifically meaningful.  The mikveh is not about cleanliness or staving off infection or germs.  The mikveh is about comforting the soul.  It is about having personal time with God.  It is about acknowledging that we have a part of us that yearns to be set free from the mind-set that cements us to our real or imagined past.   We are soulful beings that need to be whole.

That Which is Difficult is Easy

 That which is difficult is easy, the easy is difficult. Why is this so?

We get through most of life's challenges by making snap decisions, knee-jerk reactions or having honed responses so finely that we do not linger over them. 

But present most people with an easy question like, "What is life for?" "What is your purpose in living?" And they begin to stutter and mumble.

"Oh," you say, "those are not simple questions!"  

I counter, "If every day we make decisions that are hinged upon our response to those questions we should know the answer.  Well, you go to work, open savings accounts, put money away for vacations, tell your kids they need more education, do all these things and so many more and you would never think to ask what is our purpose? The answer to that question should inform the rest of our lives.  The reason why we do everything in life should be our response to the question, "What is our life's purpose?"

 Nu?

The first man and woman in the garden had a single task: to maintain what had been created in Eden.  As we know that simple charge ended in failure. 

Noah was assigned seven commandments for his heirs.  As the Torah and history reveals, this experiment also failed. 

So what is the ultimate lesson that curtails humanity's appetite for wrongdoing?  How does Torah configure the destiny of humanity?  It answers, make him responsible for more than himself.  While this may seem counterintuitive, read on.

In the Talmud, we learn of one of the students a rabbi who became ill.  As the student was new to the Academy and not very well learned or known no one went to visit him.  When the master, Rabbi Akiva, heard that his student was sick he ran to his home to pay him a visit.  The brief tale ends with the student rising out of his sickbed and thanking his teacher profusely for restoring him back to life. The lesson? Everyone is obligated to visit the sick.  This is not a good deed. It is a mitzvah, a commandment.

"Those who do not visit the sick are guilty of spilling blood," declare our sages.

There is another story of a ship floundering in a fierce storm. One companion said to another, "This is the worst thing to ever happen!"  His companion replied, "No. Something far worse would be when someone asks you for bread and you have none to give." 

In these instances and one thousand more examples just like them, our responsibility in life, to God and to the world is not to hoard but a gift to be taken and shared. Giving gives life meaning.

Returning to the initial question posed at the beginning of this message, "that which is difficult is easy, the easy is difficult" is simple to understand. We fight against doing what we feel is imposed upon us (mitzvah).  That makes it difficult. But once we self obligate to do God's will we find it is very easy and our actions breathe meaning into life.  And on the other side of the equation, when we do that which is most expedient it provides no sense of real achievement.  In the final analysis, it leaves us empty.

So, what is the meaning of life? What is your answer?

By the Sweat of Your Brow

 The first human tale from Genesis has always energized me.  It consists of a perfect universe where the only flaw was God’s final creation...humanity.  Everything worked in harmony until man was invested with a single mitzvah of refraining from eating one specific fruit and this he could not keep. 

“And He said to Adam, “Because you ate from the Tree which I specifically told you not to eat, the earth is cursed on your account.  You will eat from it with pain for your whole life...You will eat bread by the sweat of your brow, until you, yourself, return to the ground....” Genesis 3

Many questions arise from this episode.  Here is one:  What is the meaning of this ‘sweat’?  Is it simply that humanity will have to work for its food where previously it was a gift?  Since the Torah uses its words with deliberation, the word sweat must not be redundant, unnecessary.  It must teach us something of depth, meaning.

            What do we know about sweat?  We know that it is salty, which is the reason why Jews customarily put salt on their bread before saying HaMotzie (reminding us of both the curse and the labor involved with making it).    We also know that salt changes the character of the food (the taste is altered) and of the land (where there is salt in the earth, little can grow).

            In times when purity was of utmost importance in Jewish life, a teaching emerges about the impact of sweat.  If a person were stirring a pot with ritually pure hands, but the pot is impure, her hands contract its impurity.  Where a person stirs a pot with hands that are ritually impure [they may have, for example, come in contact with death] and the pot was pure, the pot contracts the impurity of the hands.  Rabbi Yose comments that provided her hands dripped sweat into the pot.  Mishna Makhshirin

            Judaism is largely about recognizing that which inheres in all things.  Sweat transforms any item into something else.  It makes bread into a commodity that stems all the way back to the Garden of Eden.  Sweat allows us to contaminate, or be contaminated, without taking proper care.  Yet, perhaps the greatest benefit of sweat is that it allows us to appreciate the effort expended to make something happen.  Nothing, but nothing comes without labor, sweat.  I suspect that if we were to do something as inconsequential as thinking about where all our goods came from, it would permanently change our lives.