Rabbi Charles P. Sherman
Shabbat Ki Tissa
March 12, 2004
The Effort Determines the Reward
Once the manager of a movie theater was interviewing a teenager for a job as an usher. The manager asked: "What would you do if there was a fire in the theater?"
"Don't worry about me," the young man replied, "I'd get out all right."
Clearly that degree of self-love is not desirable in an usher who has to be responsible for the safety of others. We all understand that looking out for number one has its limits. Yet there are certain things we must do for ourselves. In some cases we cannot depend upon other people; we must rely on our own efforts to accomplish our goals.
I believe that often the things we do for ourselves, rather than those others give us, matter most to us in the long run. The effort which goes into the doing creates an added commitment. For example, consider the stone tablets on which God engraved the Ten Commandments. Our Torah records that "the tablets were God's work, and the writing was God's writing . . ." (Exodus 32:16) Moses brought the set of tablets down from Mount Sinai; but, as soon as he saw the Israelites worshiping before that molten golden calf, Moses threw the tablets to the ground and shattered them.
Later, after God decided to forgive the Israelites and re-establish the covenant with them, God called Moses back up to Sinai's summit to receive the Torah once again. But this time God instructed Moses to "carve two stone tablets like the first pair, and I will write on them the words that were on the first set, which you shattered."(Exodus 34:1)
The great commentator, Rashi, writes: God was saying to Moses in effect: 'you broke the first ones; you do the work of making yourself new ones.' And the Midrash suggests that God was not altogether happy with Moses for breaking the first pair of tablets. God wanted Moses to appreciate the labor that would go into carving two tablets out of raw stone, so the next time he would not be so quick to destroy them. And, of course, it was the second set of tablets which lasted. The first set, which God handed Moses ready-made, soon were broken. But the second set, the product of Moses' own hard work, survived. With that set, Moses began to teach Torah to the people of Israel.
Rabbi Neal Scheindlin extrapolates this lesson from the two tablet incidents. He says the tablets resemble our own experience in forming a Jewish identity. By means of this example, the Torah shows us that our Jewish identity lasts only when we carve it out of our own efforts. A religion which is ready-made, bought off the rack filled by our predecessors, will not necessarily fit us. We also may not take adequate care of it, so it can fall apart relatively easily. But a religion which we sew out of the cloth of our own experience will fit perfectly, and we will want to take good care of it and preserve it for a long time.
All of us have experienced the difference between something we have earned for ourselves and something someone handed to us. When we were teenagers, our parents sometimes made us earn the money to buy something we wanted instead of simply giving it to us. I still vividly remember my first automobile. I wanted my own car, felt that I needed it. My parents clearly indicated they were not buying it for me. I did all kinds of jobs to save enough to buy a used white Ford Falcon, and I also had to pay the insurance and the maintenance for that new possession. I never took it for granted, as I might have something handed to me on a silver platter.
I think we can apply the same idea to the field of religion. Every Jew has to work at making a Judaism for him or herself. While we should begin with the insights of those who came before us, we cannot simply take the religion others hand us unchanged. The Baal Shem Tov, founder of Chassidism, made this point in explaining the opening paragraph of the Amidah. Why does this prayer say that God is the "God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God Jacob?" Wouldn't it have just been sufficient to say that God is the God of our ancestors? Or God is the God of our patriarchs? The Baal Shem Tov explains that our liturgy makes the point that the God of Abraham was not the God of Isaac, nor the God of Isaac the God of Jacob. Each of them understood the Creator differently. Each of them had a unique relationship with God. That is why it says Elohei Avraham, Elohei Yitzchak vay-lohei Ya-akov.
And the same is true for us. Each of us must discover our own special way of relating to God. God has to be Eloheinu - our God - as well as VayElohei Avoteinu and Imoteinu - the God of our ancestors. If God is only the God of our ancestors, we may well conclude that God is not ours and leave God to them. Only when we believe that God is truly our God will we worship God and try to understand and carry out God's will.
I do not mean to imply that each of us is entitled to make up a religion out of whole cloth and call it Judaism. We are heirs to a tradition filled with insights into the nature of God and humanity, with unmatched ethical teachings and inspiring rituals. We ignore that heritage at our peril. Indeed, it is through that tradition, its texts and its practices that we Jews begin to approach God. Like any large project, this task of finding our own path to God cannot be successful without a good plan.
There is a story of a carpenter who built houses for a developer, following plans drawn up by his employer. After several years of hard work, the developer decided to reward the builder. "I want you to build a new house for yourself," he told him. "Go ahead; make it any way you'd like." Freed from the necessity of following a blueprint, the builder gave reign to his fancy. But without a plan, he didn't have accurate specifications; the house went up but it soon began to sag and break.
I. The texts of our tradition serve as the plans we must consult when we try to build a Jewish way of life for ourselves. Talmud Torah, the study of Jewish law and lore, must be the cornerstone of our efforts. Study exposes us to new ideas and enables us take a fresh look at old ideas. Study lets us enter into a dialogue with those who have come before us. As I said a few weeks ago, Torah study sometimes is like an ongoing conversation among all the Jews who have studied the text at hand. In studying our Bible, we find a commentator who lived in Spain solving a difficulty raised by someone who lived in France a century or two before him. Talmud study can even give us the eerie presence of a later writer asking a question which someone who lived before him had already answered. But such an apparent anomaly does not seem out of place, for Torah study is a continuum stretching back to Moses at Sinai. We put ourselves into the flow by studying, by pondering the thoughts of others and by seeking our own answers.
Study of the texts of our tradition enables us to understand the ideas of our ancestors, and this understanding allows us to begin forming our own ideas. Whether we agree or disagree with something in a text does not matter. What matters is that we confront the idea, explore its meaning and clarify our own thinking, and it does not even matter if we change our minds frequently. The process is what counts, for it is the act of studying and thinking for ourselves that opens the way to beliefs to which we can commit heart and soul.
II. The second step toward carving tablets of a covenant for ourselves is to explore our beliefs through prayer. Moses, who knew God better than any other human being, prayed for greater understanding. For our own part, we must develop the habit of prayer in order to feel God's closeness to us. Often, as we go about our business of daily living, God is distant from our thoughts. Yet God is always available to us. God is near to all who call upon God. We can reach God at any time we reach out to God. God is wherever we let God in.
But, my friends, prayer requires sustained effort just as any other skill does. That is why the central prayer of our liturgy, the Amidah, begins "Adonai sefatai tiftach ufee yagid t'hilatecha - Eternal God, open my lips that my mouth may declare Your glory." We ask God to help us pray, a recognition by the rabbis of the challenge prayer presents to all of us.
That is the importance of the aspect of Jewish prayer we call kevah - the fixed prayers. Only very rarely does the desire to pray overcome a person suddenly, unexpectedly. Prayer requires a mood we have to cultivate. Therefore, Judaism provides opportunities for regularly scheduled prayer - not just every week, but every day. Each of us must establish set times for prayer and stick to a schedule whether the mood feels right or not.
I deeply believe that a person has to develop his or her talent for praying just like any other talent, through regular exercise. The great pianist Arthur Rubinstein once described how this works. "If I miss one day of practice," he said, "I know it. If I miss three days of practice, the audience knows it. If I miss a week of practice, the whole world knows it." We have to exercise our capacity for prayer, for opening our hearts and lips to God each and every day if we are to derive benefit from our prayers.
Jewish prayer has a second aspect which sometimes exists in tension with the first. That aspect is called kavanah, intention or inwardness, spontaneity. While we must pray at regular times and say certain established prayers, we must also find a place for kavanah, a place for saying what is in our hearts. Prayer should never be entirely a matter of rote recitation, rather it should express what is on our minds and in our hearts at that moment.
Even though we have a siddur in front of us when we pray, a siddur which beautifully phrases much of what we want to say, there is still amble room for self-expression. Let us not subject ourselves to the tyranny of the editors and printers; instead we should take advantage of the places in our siddur which are designated for personal prayer. Our time for meditations and silent prayer is the most obvious. Yes there is always a suggested text in our siddur; the words of others help us to speak to God and may even inspire us, but they are only to be a starting point. The true goal of prayer is for each of us to feel close to God as an individual through personal expression.
III. So study and prayer are crucial to our growth as Jews. But there is a third step we must take to make the Jewish way of life truly our own. As we must think for ourselves and pray for ourselves, so we must do for ourselves. No one can perform a mitzvah for me. Yes, there are a few cases where I can designate another as my agent, but surely that does not provide the same satisfaction as fulfilling the precept with my own hands. Quite simply, none of us can have Judaism as a central part of our identity by letting someone else do it for us. Judaism is for those who like to do it themselves.
Performing the mitzvah ourselves allows us to feel the personal ownership of our Jewishness. The rabbis compare each of us who does mitzvot to a craftsperson. A Talmudic sage says that each craftsperson is jealous of his or her work. This means that he will do everything possible to preserve his handiwork and not allow others to handle it for him. So, too, when we do mitzvot for ourselves we will take care that they are done properly and in the most attractive manner possible. We will not want to allow the rabbi or cantor or anyone else to do them for us, for to do so would be to sacrifice the pleasure we derive from doing them. When we do mitzvot for ourselves, we know that our Judaism really belongs to us. We will have made it and we will strive to keep it.
Please turn in our siddur to page 26. You know that we have selections from Pirke Avot, that Talmudic tractate known as "The Wisdom of Our Ancestors" in our prayerbook. If you look on page 26 at Mishnah 5:26, it is a famous statement of Rabbi Ben Hay-hay. It says "L'fum tsa-ara agra - the effort we put into something determines the reward." I think that is a very important saying - what we put into our Jewishness will determine what we get out of it. The easy path is just to keep what our parents and grandparents left for us, with a warm feeling of nostalgia and loyalty for it. That requires little effort. Ultimately, of course, it will not last, since we have not invested anything of ourselves in it. We won't work hard to keep it.
I recommend another path, one requiring much more tsa-ara, which means both effort and suffering - the word tsuras comes from the same root. That is the path of discovering and recreating Judaism for ourselves through study, prayer and the performance of mitzvot, each of us can engage in this act of creation. It does not take big leaps or dramatic acts, only continual and consistent effort.
Let this week's sedra instruct us. We must carve tablets for ourselves to symbolize our covenantal relationship with our tradition, our heritage, and our God. The Judaism we carve out of our own experience will be as sturdy as the second set of tablets Moses made. It will last, for we will not allow our efforts to be in vain. L'fum tsa-ara agra; at times the search may be painful, but the reward will make it worthwhile. We will have shared in the work begun by Moses by creating a way of life based on Torah. We will have done our part in seeing that Judaism continues into the future and, if we do this, in the words of our sages, we will be happy and it will be well with us. Amen
This message reflects the teaching of Rabbi Neil Scheindlin.
