How We Change (portion va-yishlach)

Two steps forward, one step back. More often than not, this is the way we make progress in this life. True change for the better is rarely linear. We make resolutions, succeed and fail, succeed and fail—and with luck and hope and a great deal of effort, in the end, we succeed a little more than we fail. If we expect to turn on a dime, we will inevitably be disappointed. But when we recognize that progress is incremental—when we learn to be patient with ourselves and with others—we can slowly transform our lives and our communities.

By way of example, consider this week’s portion, Va-yishlach, in which our forefather Jacob receives a new name. After an all night wrestling match with a mysterious divine being, Jacob tells his opponent: “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” The vanquished angel responds with a strange and wonderful blessing: “Your name shall no longer be Jacob but Israel, for you have striven with beings divine and human, and have prevailed.”

It’s a classic Hollywood ending—almost. Jacob, who has previously received his blessings through conniving and deceit, earns this one the hard way. And he whose name means “heel” becomes the Godwrestler , a spiritual role model for all who follow. What a story of redemption—surely everyone should live happily ever after.

But there’s just one problem: after being promised, “you shall no longer be Jacob”—just a few lines later, and on and off through the rest of his life, the Torah calls him. . . JACOB.

Why is this? How can it be that the blessing, won from the angel, is only partially fulfilled? It’s puzzling—and it’s also deeply human. For in truth, this is the way create change in our own lives. In Judaism, there is no real counterpart to what Christians call “being born again” in which one undergoes a sudden, complete and enduring transformation, like Paul on the road to Damascus. For us, this does not ring true. Jewish tradition affirms the possibility of teshuvah but recognizes that this sort of conversion is incremental and includes lots of falling back into our old ways. Sometimes we are Israel, our new and improved selves. And sometimes, even many years after beginning the process of transformation, we go back to being Jacob, the old self that we had hoped to leave behind.

And so we bear our two names—bayt ya’akov, the house of Jacob, AND b’nai yisrael, the children of Israel. We are earthly connivers and wrestlers with the divine, fallen and angelic, striving for holiness and sometimes settling for a great deal less.

We are now two months past Yom Kippur. This week, reflect on some of the resolutions you made for this new year, 5772. Where have you succeeded? Where have you failed? Don’t let the failures cause you to give up—remember, progress is slow, but it is also real!

Finding God

Last week, at a family education session for our Jewish Journeys program, I taught a lesson on tefillin. As I walked around the group with the pair of batim—the boxes that are wrapped upon the arm and the head—I noted that the bayit (box) worn upon the head is made up of four separate compartments, each containing a passage from the Torah. The bayit for the arm-tefillin, by contrast, is comprised of just one large compartment, which contains the same four biblical passages all written on a single strip of parchment.

After making this observation, I then asked the parents and students why they thought the tefillin were configured this way. This is one of those classic Jewish questions—the open-ended kind, with an almost infinite array of “right” answers—and the participants offered some terrific responses. My favorite came from one of our students, Gage Pendleton, who was attending with his grandparents, Freddie Fisherman and Terry McKay. Gage proposed that the four compartments on the tefillin for the head correspond to the four senses associated with the head (sight, smell, hearing, taste) while the one compartment worn on the arm corresponds to its associated sense of touch. I love this midrashic explanation, which points to our senses as pathways to perceiving the presence of God and/or holiness in the world and in our lives.

That sacred Presence is also at the heart of this week’s Torah portion, Va-yetze. On the run from his aggrieved brother Esau, Jacob falls asleep in the desert and dreams of a ladder connecting heaven and earth. When he awakens, he utters one of the Torah’s most memorable lines: “God was in this place, and I did not know it.”

There is a paradox here. Jewish tradition teaches that God is everywhere, all the time. And yet, we are so often oblivious to the Divine Presence. If, as Rabbi Menachem Nahum of Chernobyl teaches, the presence of the Creator is within each created thing, then why don’t we know it? We have this nagging suspicion that God is ubiquitous; we just can't seem to find God.

Perhaps God hides in plain sight. The problem is that we, like Jacob, are so often asleep—even during our waking hours. Our eyes and ears and nose and mouth and hands become so pre-occupied with trivial matters that we forget to notice the holiness that is all around us. God is in our various and sundry places, all of them, yet we, so often, do not know it.

Our challenge, then, is to awaken our senses. Thus the four compartments of the tefillin on our heads and the one on our arms, which remind us that our first and foremost religious obligation is to pay close attention. When our senses become portals to holiness, we can experience the Divine in all things. Thus do we become the heirs of our forefather, Jacob, finding that God was there all along, even when we did not know it.

Heroes and Villains (portion Toldot)

My son, Jonah, recently asked me: “Do you know any bad guys?” Like many boys his age, he is intrigued by the super hero stars of comic books, movies, and TV: Spiderman, Batman, Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, and the rest of the pantheon. And as anyone who has ever shared an interest in this genre knows, for every Super Hero there is also a villain—a really evil Bad Guy.

Since I have yet to encounter the Joker, Lex Luther, Doctor Octopus, Rita Repulsa, or any of their ilk, I can honestly respond that my experience with Bad Guys is, thankfully, quite limited. As a boy, I liked the Justice League just as much as Jonah now does, and I still enjoy the guilty pleasures of a clear cut, black and white, good vs. evil story like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. But as Jonah gets older, I want to offer him a more nuanced approach to morality. These days, I tell him that while I have met a very few truly Bad Guys (and Gals) in my fifty years, I believe that far more often, the problem is that basically decent people sometimes do bad things. As adults, our lives are not populated by either Super Heroes or Arch Villains; they are, instead, filled with ordinary men and women who are a mix of good and bad—just like ourselves.

This week’s parashah, Toldot, tells the story of Jacob and Esau. As twins, they begin as bitter rivals even before they are born, struggling for pre-eminence in Rebecca’s womb. Over the course of Jewish history, our sages come to equate Esau with pure evil; he becomes the archetypical anti-Semite, a symbol of the oppressive Roman empire and later medieval persecutors of Jews. But this is an anachronism. I find the biblical character of Esau to be rather sympathetic. He may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but he is not a typical villain, nor is his brother Jacob—our conniving and devious forefather—a typical hero. As Rabbi Harold Kushner notes: “The twins are complementary, each representing one-half of a complete personality, each having qualities the other lacks and lacking qualities the other possesses. . . When the Torah describes them as struggling within Rebecca’s womb and continues to portray them as rivals growing up, it may be telling us that these two sides of many people are struggling within each individual for dominance.”

In other words, life—and morality—is complicated. We all contain both Jacob and Esau, even as each of them contains the other. We are capable of both heroic acts and callous cruelty. Our challenge is to rein in our evil instincts and inclinations, to act on the basis of what Abraham Lincoln aptly called “our better angels.”

Or, as I might say to Jonah: “I’ve met both Bad Guys and potential Super Heroes—in my own mirror.” The challenge is to incline toward the Super Heroes.

Growing into Love

One of the most poignant moments in “Fiddler on the Roof” comes when Tevye turns to Golde, his wife of twenty-five years, and asks: “Do you love me?” To which she responds, “Do I what?” and suggests he must be suffering from indigestion. But Tevye is persistent. Reflecting on his own arranged marriage and the more modern ways of his daughters, he asks again—and in the end, Golde concedes: “For twenty-five years I’ve lived with him, fought with him, starved with him. Twenty-five years my bed is his. . . if that’s not love, what is?”

These matters—arranged marriage and love—are at the center of this week’s parashah, Chaye Sarah. After Abraham’s servant Eliezer chooses Rebecca to be Isaac’s bride, the two settle down together. Genesis 24:67 teaches: “Isaac brought her into the tent of Sarah, his mother, and he took Rebecca and she became his wife and he loved her.” This is the first time Torah mentions love, and as Rabbi Harold Kushner notes, the order of the verse is significant. He writes: “Isaac comes to love Rebecca after he marries her. Their love is the result, not the prerequisite, of their relationship.”

This is an important lesson for us. We live in a time of high-profile but short-lived celebrity nuptials. Our culture romanticizes love at first sight, the notion of instant soul mates living happily ever after. We place so much emphasis on the lavish pomp of weddings—and so little on what really counts, which is the hard daily work of building a marriage (or life partnership). If, to quote Sinatra (or, actually, his Jewish songwriter, Sammy Cahn), love and marriage really do go together like a horse and carriage, our problem is that we tend to put the cart (love) before the horse (the partnership)—while at the same time, denying loving same-sex partners the opportunity to share the ride. In any lifelong union—gay or straight—deep and enduring love is what is earned after the hormonal flush of infatuation ends. As with Isaac and Rebecca—and Tevye and Golde—it is achieved through the countless mundane shared acts and moments accrued over time when two people make a commitment to grow with and support one another.

I’ll end with an excerpt from Jane Hirshfield’s poem, “For What Binds Us”:

And see how the flesh grows back

across a wound, with a great vehemence,

more strong

than the simple, untested surface before.

There’s a name for it on horses,

when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh

is proud of its wounds, wears them

as honors given out after battle,

small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other

see how it is like a scar between their bodies,

stronger, darker, and proud;

how the black cord makes of them a single fabric

that nothing can tear or mend.

Leaving the Ark

This week we read the story of Noah and the deluge. This is one of the Torah’s best-known tales. It is the subject of countless children’s books and songs, and with its colorful rainbow and menagerie of animals, it is a favorite of illustrators as well. I will admit I have always found this a bit odd, since it is also one of our tradition’s most troubling stories—in which God, to be blunt, commits genocide. The destruction of every living thing on earth is pretty much the opposite of cute.

One would think that after many months in tight closed quarters with a bunch of animals, Noah and his family would be eager to leave the ark as soon as the flood waters recede. But according to the Midrash, this is not the case. God must actually command Noah to leave, insisting: “Go out—leave the ark—you and your wife and your sons and your sons’ wives with you.” Noah is inclined to tarry in this big, smelly sealed wooden box; he only departs after God insists.

Why this reluctance? Some of the commentators suggest that Noah is afraid his descendants will again defile God’s newly-created world and bring another flood upon themselves. In other words, Noah is paralyzed by his fear of what the future may bring. Others propose that Noah has simply become accustomed to his admittedly unpleasant and yet comfortably familiar surroundings. For him, the terror of the unknown—the re-established world outside the ark—is more powerful than the desire to escape his difficult current situation.

So often we, too, find ourselves in these circumstances. Change is frightening. We choose the devil we ” know rather than setting off into the wilderness that we don’t.

But sometimes we simply must go forward. God—or fate, or circumstances, or life—knocks on the portal, as it were, and tells us that we have to come out, move ahead, and face the unknown. This is the way we grow. A new world cannot be born until Noah emerges, despite his fear. So, too, for us. Interestingly, the Hebrew word for the ark—“tevah”—also means a casket. To remain in that closed, familiar world is, essentially, to choose stagnancy and death over life.

In this season of new beginnings, may we find the strength, faith, and courage to leave our “arks.

Oh Mercy (Kol Nidre 5772)

Many years ago, my family gave me a memorable Father’s Day gift: a blue sweatshirt bearing the logo of the fictional “Maven University.” Just below the very official looking school seal is Maven U’s motto: “Opinion Over Knowledge!”

This is a classic Jewish gag, for there is something in our boisterous, Talmudic culture that underscores the humor. As the old saying goes, for every two Jews, there are at least three opinions. We are a people of pundits, a community of culture critics, with strong views on virtually everything. If ever you doubt this, just attend a Jewish meeting—any Jewish meeting—from the Israeli Knesset to the CABI board.

The sweatshirt still makes me laugh. It reminds me of the countless times that I have expounded on trivial matters about which I know astonishingly little. But just behind my amused smile lurks the disconcerting knowledge that the joke is really on me. When they chose this gift, my family knew me all too well.

Broaching strong opinions and making quick judgments is not always wrong; in some contexts it is absolutely critical. The ability to evaluate people and situations is one of our greatest, God-given gifts, essential to our wellbeing. We are constantly required to assess our surroundings, and to act on those assessments; our capacity to make such judgments is at the heart of being human. Torah recognizes this from the start, when our mythical forebears Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. As I envision the scene, they began forming and expressing opinions the moment they ate from the fruit—“Hmm. . . a little bitter, no?”—and we mavens have not stopped since.

However, on this day of moral and spiritual accounting, I must confess that I have acted far too often on the basis of “opinion over knowledge.” I have come to see my tendency to judge others as a personal failing. While this attitude may have roots in our Jewish culture, it more frequently emerges out of deep-seated fears and insecurities. Rabbi Harold Schulweiss suggests that one of our tradition’s most essential words is efsher meaning “maybe,” because it enables us to state our perspective with humility while recognizing the legitimacy of differing approaches. Efsher—maybe—is all about suspending judgment, suppressing certainties, and mustering the ego strength to open ourselves to views other than our own.

For many of us, that efsher does not come easily. We act as if our opinions represent absolute, unchanging truths when, far more often, they reflect our entirely subjective personal preferences. The fact that others dress or recreate or eat or even vote differently does not entitle us to cast aspersions on them. And yet we do—and yet, I have—all the time, because passing judgment over other people is so much easier than conceding that their perspectives are as legitimate as our own. To genuinely listen to those with whom we disagree is to take a risk, to show our vulnerability—and this requires courage. As Jack Kornfeld and Christine Feldman note in their book, Soul Food:

“Judgment is the refuge and the weapon of self-righteousness and fear. We bolster a sense of superiority by dwelling upon the weaknesses of others. We defend our own sense of right through highlighting the imperfections of others. Our judgments are [frequently] the visible expression of our disconnection and separation from others, from our own hearts. They arise from fear, and are a breeding ground of pain, alienation and division.”

Alas, so often we fall prey to our self-righteousness and fear. We yield to the temptation to judge, too hastily, too harshly, and too often. And every time we do, we become more and more like Lionel Bengelsdorf, the pompous rabbi in Philip Roth’s novel, The Plot Against America. As Roth brilliantly describes him: “He knows everything. Too bad he doesn’t know anything else.”

Rabbi Bengelsdorf would make an excellent dean at Maven University. Thankfully, most of us do not approach his level of arrogance, but we, too, pay a price when we raise opinion over knowledge. We cannot find contentment until we learn to suspend judgment. When our haste to judge deafens us to the diverse views of those around us, we harm our selves and our relationships in at least three important ways.

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First, our judgmentalism makes us hypocrites. Perhaps God is virtuous enough to judge others without discrediting Herself, but the rest of us are not. As Rabbi Joseph Telushkin notes, “One reason many of us have a higher regard for our own character than that of others is that we judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their acts, especially those acts we find annoying.” I am certainly guilty of this transgression. To cite just one example: For my entire life, I have preached the importance of wearing bicycle helmets to my children, pointing out and disparaging helmetless riders to them. Imagine, then, how I felt when I found myself sitting on the back of a motorcycle weaving through the frenzied streets of Pokhara, Nepal in monsoon rains—without a helmet! Now, I was the guilty party! I still don’t think riding helmetless is a good idea. But I try to be gentler in my assessment of those who do it, affording them the benefit of the doubt and keeping my opinions to myself. If we wish to avoid the sin of gross hypocrisy, we should take to heart the wise words of Rebbe Wolf of Strikov: “Remember that you are not as good as you think you are, and the world is not as bad as you think it is.”

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Judging makes us hypocrites. It also warps our worldview. In our over eagerness to pass judgment, we often isolate ourselves. As the Catholic priest and philosopher Henri Nouwen teaches, “Compassion cannot co-exist with judgment, because judgment creates the distance, the distinction, that prevents us from really being with the other.” Father Nouwen’s premise is so straightforward, though admittedly much harder to practice than to preach: when we judge our fellow men and women, we separate ourselves from them. The very act of evaluating them and their character transforms them from potential peers and partners into objects. To love another human being is to open oneself to him, to embrace her as she is, in all of her imperfect humanity. To judge another is, by contrast, to reduce him to a bundle of disparate parts and qualities, which we appraise to our advantage from a cool and comfortable distance. Judging throws up barriers. Loving tears them down. Judging is, in other words, the opposite of loving. Or, as a local church billboard recently warned: “Husbands, if you’re always right, you’ll soon be left.”

An old Irish folk tale succinctly demonstrates how harsh judgment distorts our vision. It tells of a man who suspected his neighbor’s son of stealing his missing axe. The man seethed every time he saw the boy, who dressed like a thief, walked like a thief, and talked like a thief. Then one day the man found the long-lost axe in the back corner of his tool shed. Of course the next time he ran into the neighbor boy, the man was amazed to see that in fact he dressed, walked, and talked just like any other young person.

How often our judgments pervert our perceptions and wreak havoc on our relationships! Our desire to be right so often comes at the expense of our happiness, for our rightness demands that others—even those we seek to love—be in the wrong. We grow in contentment and mentschlekheit when we learn to value compassion over criticism and humble wisdom over the maven’s arrogant expertise.

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Finally, our impulse to judge others can serve as a crutch, a convenient distraction from the hard work of introspection, accounting, and will that we must take on in order to improve ourselves. It is easy to complain about Congress and the president, the Democrats or the Republicans, liberals or conservatives—though sometimes, God knows, they all deserve the criticism. It is harder, and far more praiseworthy, to actually do something about injustice. But even the honorable and essential activism that goes beyond words and challenges oppression can become tainted if it distracts us from addressing our personal failings. This is not to say that we should refrain from the mitzvah of healing our broken world; it is to suggest that we seek a balance in this work, reserving the time and energy required to conduct a thorough moral accounting of our selves. Before we condemn even the very real flaws of others, we should first tackle our own shortcomings.

This is the lesson of the pious Indian woman who came to Mahatma Gandhi and asked if he would speak with her son about eating too much sugar. Gandhi replied, “Wait one week, and then bring the boy to me.” After seven days had passed, she showed up with the child and Gandhi implored him, “My son, you must stop eating sugar.” Awed by the presence of the renowned Hindu holy man, the boy immediately did as he was told. A month later, the woman came back to Gandhi to offer her thanks. After expressing her deep gratitude, she inquired: “Tell me, why did you ask me to wait a week before bringing the boy to you?” To which Gandhi responded: “Because when you first came to see me, I, too, was eating too much sugar. I could not, in good faith, tell him to stop until I had done so myself.” So, too, should our social justice work begin at home. Before we judge others, we should strive for integrity in our own life choices.

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The corrosive effects of judging too harshly and hastily are well illustrated in the classic tale of two Buddhists monks walking together on pilgrimage. One day they came upon a beautiful woman, sobbing by the bank of a raging river. She said she was afraid of drowning and asked if they would help her cross to the other side. Without saying a word, the older monk hoisted the woman up on his shoulders, carried her across the stream, then gently set her down. She thanked him and went on her way, and the two monks resumed their journey in silence.

For the next few hours, the older monk walked in perfect equanimity, enjoying the beautiful countryside, while the younger grew bitter and distracted. Finally, he could no longer could keep his silence and burst out, "How could you have done such a thing? We have taken vows of chastity. It is forbidden to even talk to a woman let alone touch one."

The older monk looked at the younger with a sad but loving smile and replied, "Brother, I set her down hours ago. Why are you still carrying her?"

Like the young monk, we frequently set ourselves as the arbiters of good and bad, right and wrong. We bear the weight of our compulsions to judge, and they distort our vision, stunt our relationships, and degrade our capacity for empathy and love—yet, we, too, find it so very hard to set them down. Again and again, we succumb to our desire to be right, to claim the truth as our own and judge others by it. The great Israeli poet Yehudah Amichai illustrates the danger of this very human tendency in his poem, “Ha-makom sh’bo anu tzod-kim—In The Place Where We Are Right”. Listen to his words:

From the place where we are right

Flowers will never grow

In the spring.

The place where we are right

Is hard and trampled

Like a yard.

But doubts and loves

Dig up the world

Like a mole, a plow.

And a whisper will be heard in the place

Where the ruined

House once stood.

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Our challenge is to leave “the place where we are right” for the world of doubts and loves and sacred whispers. As we prepare for this journey, it is important to note that we will sometimes return to where we began, for judgments and strong opinions have their rightful place. Life would be almost impossible without the ability to assess and evaluate our surroundings and the other people who populate them.

On a societal level, too, judgment is indispensible. Without judging, there is no prophetic voice, no call for social justice, no imperative to repair our broken world. Tikkun Olam begins when we see bigotry and oppression, and proclaim, in both words and deeds, “This is wrong; it must not stand!” From Moses to Martin Luther King to a new generation of activists working for economic and environmental justice even as we speak, people have always turned their judgments and opinions into action—fortified by the belief that they are fighting for what is right.

In other words, both the vicissitudes of every day life and the core principles of Jewish social ethics demand that we sometimes enter that barren land where no flowers grow, that “place where we are right.” And so we may experience a kind of creative tension, tugged between the sometimes-legitimate need to judge and the dangers of doing so. As the writer E.B. White so humorously put it, “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it very hard to plan the day.”

So how do we live in this tension? How do we both improve and enjoy this broken and beautiful world that God has given us? Proper balance and perspective helps. While there is a time to judge and a time to refrain from judging, most of us tend to err on the side of judging too much. Our challenge in this new year is to focus our efforts on suspending judgment and being circumspect in expressing our opinions, particularly on matters we know little about. Maimonides offers a helpful analogy here. He notes that in order to straighten a bent reed, it is not enough to set it upright. One must, instead, bend it far to the other side and hold it there awhile, after which it will return to equilibrium. So, too, for us: if we who judge too hastily wish to break ourselves of this habit, we should start by going out of our way to avoid passing judgment whenever we can. And on those relatively infrequent occasions when we must still enter that “place where we are right” we should minimize our sojourn there, then return without further ado to the non-judgmental world of flowers and doubts and whispers.

Above all, when we are compelled to judge, we should do so generously, affording others the same benefit of the doubt that we would ask of them. In the Talmud’s words: “Dan et kol adam b’kaf z’chut—Judge everyone with the presumption of innocence.” When a person or incident can be viewed in multiple ways, we can make a conscientious effort to choose the interpretation that yields the most favorable assessment. Recognizing that this can be very difficult, we might follow the example of the great Hasidic Rebbe Elimelech of Lizhensk who began each day by praying: “May I see the good traits of others and not their defects.”

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On this most sacred Yom Kippur day, time and again our liturgy pleads with God to leave the heavenly Seat of Judgment and to occupy, instead, the Throne of Kindness and Compassion. In this traditional imagery, we implore divine mercy because we know that in a world of strict judgment, we would all be found wanting. And so we ask God to be gracious to us, to suspend judgment, to hear us out and love us as we are, with all of our human imperfections.

My friends, tomorrow afternoon we will read in Torah: “K’doshim t’hiyu…You shall be holy, for I, the Eternal, your God, am holy.” This is our sacred calling: to strive for godliness. We should not, therefore, ask of God anything that we do not ourselves aspire towards. We who seek mercy must be merciful. We who plead for compassion must be compassionate. And we who ask that judgment be suspended on our behalf must ourselves suspend judgment on behalf of others.

And then. . .

. . . a whisper will be heard in the place

Where the ruined

House once stood.

Ken y’hi ratzon.

The Rabbi's Tale--Response by Melissa Waylan

She looked at the expectant faces before her. The Rabbi found herself uncertain what to do next. As she stood there, frozen, her congregation became worried, “Rabbi?” they asked. “Rabbi? Are you okay?”, “Rabbi, what do you have?” Rabbi? “Why are we here?” “Rabbi?” “Rabbi?” RabbiRabbiRabbiRabbi.. the word echoed in her ears, becoming all she could hear...

A tug on her sleeve broke her reverie “Rabbi, What does it mean?” asked a small girl.

Then she knew exactly what she needed to do. She was a Rabbi. Rabbi. Teacher. Rabbi’s Teach. So she would teach. As Eijah taught her, so she would teach them.

She told them of her dreams, of the door and of it’s locks. She told them about the keys and the paths she walked to acquire each one. As she spoke the people didn’t just hear her words they shared her experiences. They too marched and sang and demanded in shrill and insistent voices the progress and transformation achieved by the Firebrands of their past. Standing beside them as they celebrated their triumphs and wept for their failures. Then they visited all the sacred places of their tradition starting with the tents of Abraham & Sarah and on through Rashi’s vineyard and into the new world seeing the continuous thread woven through history binding and recreating the Jewish people over and over again, with a different face, but always the same heart. Finally, they found themselves wandering the Sinai, the woods of medieval Poland, the streets of modern Jerusalem. At times they were alone. Other times they were surrounded by people they did not know. Often with empty hands but occasionally with a map in a language they could not read. Always feeling a little lost and a little found.

As she taught them each key in turn began to crumble in her hand. Slowly the copper key turned to ash, the water key to rust, and the gold key just faded away until each one was gone completely and her hands were empty.

When she finished she invited the congregation to come forward and open the doors together. They were confused, “With what? You had the keys and now they are gone. How can we open the door now?”

“The keys are not gone.” the Rabbi replied, “You have them now.” Surprised, each person searched their pockets and found they did, indeed, have all three keys.

“But what about you, Rabbi?” asked a concerned young man, “How will you open the locks?”

The Rabbi smiled a confident smile, “I will rely on you to take me with you into whatever future we find behind that door.” With that she gestured them forward.

As they approached the door with their keys the locks slid open in unison. As the great door swung open before them they were blinded by a great glare. It made them stumble back even tho they were at once eager and afraid of what might await them.

In a short time their vision adjusted and they saw the great light was nothing more than the sun, set high in the sky, on a bright spring day. Spread out before them was not the promised land, but their own town, their own country, their own world as they had left it. Full of the beauty and blight, kindness and chaos, hope and despair that define every day life.

Crestfallen, they turned to the Rabbi for an answer. “You said the beyond the door we would find Torah. But we only see before us the world, as it is today.”

“Yes.” explained the Rabbi. “Torah is not for a perfect place full of perfect people. Torah is for this world and for us as we are today. Now, go into the world with Torah and find your way.”

With no other option, the slightly disgruntled congregation went back to their lives. Lives which turned out to be not quite the same as when they left. Or rather, the world was exactly the same, but the people themselves were different. For they found as they went through their day to day lives occasionally they could feel the weight of those keys again. That reassuring tug reminding them they and their people carried the Torah with them where ever they went.