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Drash
for Shabbat Eikev I think it is not uncommon for a thoughtful person to wonder at times about what God really wants. I have the fantasy that God decided to answer that human need to understand by giving the answer in a clear, human-sized communication. This answer is the Torah. At first this seems to be a multitude of answers. God wants us to do many things, some of them contradictory, but the essence is one commandment - to love God and to love one another. Now how is it possible to command an emotion? It is not possible. Emotions spring up and die, some ephemeral as grass, some as strong and long-lived as an oak. The one thing they have in common is that emotions are spontaneous, they cannot be commanded. If we view love as something other than emotion, I think we can understand this commandment. How do we know when someone loves us? By the words? Yes in part, but the essence of the emotion is action. When a child brings a grubby bouquet of wildflowers to his mother, doesn't that say "love" more than any words? When the child's hand creeps into the father's hand while walking, when the face is lifted up for the goodnight kiss, when the lover's touch on the shoulder in a crowd marks out the beloved, no words are necessary. The lover wants to please the beloved, and that requires knowledge and understanding. If her favorite color is blue, a pink vase is not an expression of love, no matter how costly. If he likes art, a gift of tickets to a NASCAR race is not an expression of love. The finding out is love, too, because it shows that the preferences matter. This is why significant gifts are fraught with so much tension. If we know and love the person, we want know what they want. Sometimes the actions come first, and the emotion later. We don't have the privilege of experiencing firsthand the great miracles of the Exodus from Egypt, the original gift of the Torah, and the survival of the harshness of the wilderness. If we are attentive, we will see that we are surrounded by our own miracles that are even greater than these. People live who once would have died. Babies are born who once would have never made it to term. We share what we have with those who have less. We are concerned with the well-being of people on the other side of the world. We love and are loved. Are these not miracles? We have what the people of the Exodus did not. We have the entire Torah, the written words and the thousands of words of commentary that followed. They had to act in the dark, groping for understanding, and sometimes they stumbled. We have the light of the brilliance of scholars to help us see our way, and sometimes we stumble. What they did, and what we do is the same - we get up and continue on the way, trusting that we will reach the promised end. I call this the Great Experiment. God chose a certain small group of people to give the answer to the question to see whether that would make a difference in the world. A simple experiment involves taking a group that is otherwise similar to the rest of the population, and changing one thing. Take a group of plants and play music to one part of it and observe the growth rates. Take a group of mayflies and subject one portion to radiation and observe changes. Take a group of people and give them the answer to the question "What does God want?" and observe the reaction. If you want to know how the experiment is turning out, go look in the mirror. How are you living in response to your own understanding of what God wants? Shabbat Shalom. |
