What Holds Us Together
A colleague of mine told me a story of one of his congregants, who had just turned 90 years old. This man, Max, had been captured during the Second World War by the Nazis as a teenager. Knowing that day might come, Max had trained himself to be a medic thinking that this would make him useful in the concentration camps, and he’d avoid death.
And because he trained as a medic, he did survive the war, but because he survived the war he ended up being in seventeen different camps over the course of the war. The evil he had witnessed was unimaginable, and my colleague asked Max just how he managed to survived.
Max told him, “That when the Nazis came for me, I told my mother that if she heard I was shot or hung that it might be true. But if they told her that I had starved, she shouldn’t believe them. Because there was no way that I would fail to survive so long as there remained a chance at all to live.”
Each day Max managed to figure out what he needed to do to keep going. After the war he created a very successful real estate company which he still runs. He attends services in the synagogue regularly, and without fail he credits G-d with enabling him to endure.
Max is the first one to admit that without his faith, he would have never survived the camps. Or, if he had managed to survive, he would have never made it through the rest of his life.
Not that G-d saved him, but G-d inspired him to be saved.
So of life’s hard times, we know well what they call us to. We know that there are few shortcuts that have any meaning to them…because the hard times cannot be ignored. And that is the very essence of these kinds of moments because they are unavoidable – life is woven with them. They are painful, demanding, bewildering, and tearing. It can be a phone call in the middle of the night, a terrible report from a doctor, an unexpected calamity and not only will our lives never be the same, but we know life will slow down to a crawl, where every moment is pulling and tearing at us.
We will look to escape it, only there is no where to go except to ourselves. And in turning to ourselves, in facing inwards we stand to discover what potentially is the most wonderful and beautiful thing about us.
In finding a true faith about what life can be, we realize that our faith is not something that will manipulate G-d to fix or solve our problems. We discover that our faith is something that can help us bear our problems.
We find it Jacob’s life – when in one of the most horrid moments of his life we are told that G-d shortens his journey to make it seem less difficult. And we find it in our own – our faith can shorten our journey through the painful, because it tells me that I am not alone.
But of life’s happy moments, they are easy to explain. In this morning’s portion we read of one of the great love stories of all time. Jacob arrives at the door step of his uncle’s home, a beautiful woman opens the door and he is at once smitten. When told that she is his first cousin he asks his uncle for the right to marry her. His uncle is happy, telling him that it is far better that she be given to a cousin than a stranger.
Jacob tells him that he will work for 7 years for the right to marry her. And so as he goes to work we are told that for him,
åÇéÌÇòÂáÉã éÇòÂ÷Éá áÌÀøÈçÅì, ùÑÆáÇò ùÑÈðÄéí; åÇéÌÄäÀéåÌ áÀòÅéðÈéå ëÌÀéÈîÄéí àÂçÈãÄéí, áÌÀàÇäÂáÈúåÉ àÉúÈäÌ.
“…those years passed like single days so was he possessed with love for her…”
Time in his joy and excitement pass by like a train at full speed; with his eyes firmly on the desire to have his love fulfilled his days and nights flow one into the other. Those seven years pass without pause, with him knowing that with each passing second he is closer to the thing he wanted and loved.
I can only think that he really loved this woman, and that this real love suspended him over the course of time.
But I don’t think I really need to explain this to you – before me are 2 families who are celebrating the bar mitzvah of their sons. I have also known these 2 boys since there were very small. And I know that these parents are bewildered over how the time has passed to this moment. The moment of their Bar Mitzvah appeared to you as a dream when the boys were born, and time has passed like a dream as they stand to become men.
In between there were hardships, but they were so very small compared to the love and joy these boys have brought to your lives. So you too know what Jacob experienced when the Torah tells us of 7 years passing like a single days…because the same has now happened to you.
But I have learned to understand that there are actually two ways that we live with time. I have learned with time that we either go over it, or go through it. The happy times seem to carry us over life, but the painful moments force us to go through it.
And it is in those moments, that we are tested to see just what kind of faith we have in life.
We are led to discover whether we have the faith of the fortunate, or the faith of the true?
Is it the kind of faith that only lives with us when things are good and easy, or the faith that carries us through our challenges?
This past summer, one night late I turned the TV on, and after finding nothing to watch discovered one of my kid’s DVD in the machine. I was going to take it out, but out of desperation I decided to watch it.
It was without question an emotional and very adult film.
The movie was ‘Finding Nemo’.
In it Albert Brooks plays a neurotic clownfish named Marlin who loses his wife and entire family of un-hatched eggs to a vicious predator.
All of them perish save one whom he names Nemo, after his dead wife’s last wish, with her making him promise to protect his young son no matter what. But we know children are destined to grow up, and over-protection always comes with a price. At the start of the movie Marlin tells his son Nemo;
“What’s the one thing we have to remember about the ocean?”
And Nemo said, “It’s not safe.”
“Ahh, that's my boy!”
And Nemo said, “It’s not safe.”
“Ahh, that's my boy!”
But this isn’t the end of the story, it’s just the start because little Nemo decides to swim off the reef to go into the open ocean and touch the bottom of a boat. Partly a dare from some kids during their first day of school, partly to prove his small flipper isn’t a hindrance, this act of defiance on Nemo’s part is a way to prove to his dad he can finally stop babying him.
So, Marlin’s devastation is unbearable when Nemo succeeds in touching the bottom of the boat, but is scooped up by a diver and taken away. It’s a heart breaking moment – the one time Nemo decides to live life, and the one time his father steps back ever so reluctantly to let Nemo live life – Nemo’s life may be over.
And with this, Nemo begins the great adventure of his life to find a life, and his father begins the great adventure of his life to save a life. Marlin doesn’t give up, and spends the rest of the movie searching for his son, and to have back what he lost, and to never lose Nemo again.
And during Marlin’s long search to find his lost son he meets another fish, and over a cup of salty sea water Marlin pours his heart out and tells her what happened;
“But the thing is I promised – promised - to never let anything happen to him.”
And she says to him, “But, isn’t that a funny thing to promise?”
“What is?”
“Well you can't never let anything happen to him. Otherwise, then nothing would ever happen to him…”
And she says to him, “But, isn’t that a funny thing to promise?”
“What is?”
“Well you can't never let anything happen to him. Otherwise, then nothing would ever happen to him…”
Life is about things happening to us.
And of the way we pass through these times let us be reminded what the great French writer Chardin once wrote, that “We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a physical experience.”
And as for me, I have found that the binding of the good and the bad, of the stark and the beautiful is found in a common cord. And that is the cord of love. It is love which brings us to the happy moments, and it is love which enables us to survive the difficult ones.
And of the way we pass through these times let us be reminded what the great French writer Chardin once wrote, that “We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a physical experience.”
And as for me, I have found that the binding of the good and the bad, of the stark and the beautiful is found in a common cord. And that is the cord of love. It is love which brings us to the happy moments, and it is love which enables us to survive the difficult ones.
It is love which binds us to the living, and it is love which ties us to those who are no longer alive. It is the tie that holds us together – in this world, and what is beyond this world – when life happens to us.
Shabbat Shalom