When Acceptace is Complete

This week’s Torah portion is Toldot, generations. It tells the story of the original dysfunctional Jewish family. Rebecca gives birth to the twins, Esau and Jacob. Jacob pressures Esau, who agrees to sell Jacob his birthright. Later, Isaac, the twins’ father, wishes to bless his firstborn, but Rebecca overhears Isaac’s plan and substitutes Jacob, who impersonates Esau, and receives his father’s blessing. The Torah tells us that the boys were very different: it says, “The lads grew up and Esau became one who knows trapping, a man of the field, but Jacob was ‘tam,’ whole or complete, abiding in tents. Isaac loved Esau, for game was in his mouth, but Rebecca loved Jacob.” Love is elusive – difficult to define or explain. It is hard to know just why we love someone, but we can ask the broader question, why do we love at all? This question takes us back to B’reisheet, the first Torah portion. This portion dignifies the emptiness in each human that is described metaphorically as the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Given that each human being has the feeling of not being complete, I would suggest that we love to become whole; to compensate for our own lacks and deficits. In the case of Isaac, he seemed to love Esau because Esau was a man of action, whereas Isaac was a more passive personality, evidenced by his compliance at the time of his father’s almost sacrificing him. Jacob, a quieter personality than Esau, was loved by Rebecca, the courageous and spunky young woman who left her family, friends, and native land to follow a strange servant to a new land where she would marry another complete stranger. In this family, opposites seemed to attract. But the fact that the parents Rebecca and Isaac could not love the boys equally points to a lack of acceptance of themselves. If they could have truly accepted themselves, with their faults and strengths, then they could have accepted their sons and loved each of them, perhaps not equally, but individually and fully. In child rearing, I am fond of saying that it is necessary to say YES to the whole person. When many of us were growing up, we had the experience that our parents accepted parts of us and not other parts, creating inadequacy, loss of self esteem, inner conflict, and self hatred. If we could truly love and accept all of ourselves, we could love and accept others. It is a failure of self love, a failure of self acceptance that leads to our projecting our self hatred onto others and dividing people into those we like and those we do not like. To heal ourselves, we have to be God to ourselves, the loving accepting parent we may have never had, in order to become a compassionate brother or sister to our neighbors. I am not however recommending the abandonment of common sense. Our quality of judgment about people is one of our necessary and useful gifts. One of the Chassidic masters, Rabbi Naftali, said that “innocence by itself is not necessarily a good quality.” But the quality of judgment can lead us astray, giving us an excuse for the refusal to accept others in their totality, the way God accepts us. My most recent tool for myself, which I use to talk to myself about people who are harder for me to love is that: the person is a wonderful, loving person, but that the person has a hard time showing that side of themselves to me. In order to fulfill the commandment in the Torah, Love your neighbor as yourself, we have to love and accept ourselves, choosing love over judgment, albeit with clear eyes. It is a skill that can be acquired; a habit of loving that will come back to us as the richest of rewards. Through the ability to accept and love our whole selves, we can become whole; experiencing the Divine love between people that we are meant to give and receive. Each of us was born to be loved and to love greatly. As we approach this holiday season, may we allow ourselves to love each person for who they are, knowing how alike we all are, knowing and accepting who we are: fallible creatures who make mistakes, but also magnificent, loving, and Divine.

Beyond Hospitality

This week’s Torah portion is Vayera, which means, and God appeared. It is packed with events: Abraham’s welcoming of three travelers, who announce the birth of Isaac; Abraham’s questioning God about whether any righteous people in Sodom and Gomorrah will be saved; Lot receiving the Angels who save him and his family, when Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed; the birth of Isaac; the sending away of Hagar and Ishmael, and finally, the test of Abraham in which he is asked to offer Isaac as a sacrifice. This portion begins: And God appeared to him in the plains of Mamre; while he sat at the entrance of the tent in the heat of the day; And he lifted his eyes and saw, and three men stood by him; he perceived so, he ran toward them from the tent entrance, and bowed toward the ground; And said, My Lord, if I have found favor in your sight, pass not away, I pray, from your servant; Let a little water, be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree; And I will fetch a morsel of bread, that you may sustain your hearts; after that you shall pass on; seeing that you are come to your servant. And they said, do so, as you have said.
Several things are notable in this first section. Abraham ran eagerly to the men, then bowed deeply to them, calling one, My Lord. Torah commentary for this section always speaks about hospitality, how welcoming Abraham was. At this time, and even through the middle ages, there were no restaurants and few inns; and it was a matter of human survival and a universal law that one had to take a traveler in; feed that person, and keep even one’s enemy overnight and up to three nights, because their survival depended on it, and your survival might depend upon it tomorrow. Abraham not only welcomed the travelers, but attended to them as a servant would, seeing to their comfort and giving them his best foods. He honored the Godliness in them, treating them as he himself would have wanted to be treated. This portion then, begins with the theme of how we treat others. We sense our own inner royalty and are disappointed or even offended when others do not treat us with honor and respect. To act at every moment in such a way that we honor the royalty in others is the mark of a very high spiritual level. Based on the Mussar literature, Rabbi Zvi Miller writes, “Abraham’s ability to treat people like royalty reflected his profound understanding of the world.” But it is so easy for us to forget and even easier to deny the spark of God in others. Our sages say that certain people cannot enter the kingdom of heaven; and among those are scoffers: those who discount other human beings and treat them badly.
Lot, too, is seen as offering hospitality in this portion. Lot urges the men who come to him, to stay the night with him in his home and eat a meal there, knowing that the townspeople of Sodom will brutalize them if he does not shield them. But Lot shows a moral failing, offering his virgin daughters to the mob, in place of the travelers. The society Lot lived in was corrupt; out of balance, devoid of moral kindness, and Lot had absorbed some of its disregard for human decency; because it does not matter who we treat badly. As long as someone is mistreated, whether or not, like Lot, we have an excuse for our behavior, we ourselves are pulled out of balance. We transgress a law of the universe that we are all equal and part of each other. And this theme is continued in the portion, with the treatment of Hagar and Ishmael. Their banishment and the divisions it caused still are being played out today.
If we could act as though we believed that there is Godliness in each of us, we would never be able to treat each other the way we do. Rashi discusses Abraham’s use of the term My Lord. He asks whether Abraham was addressing the men politely or whether Abraham was addressing God. But in reality, every time we address another human being, we are addressing God. Abraham’s willingness to attend to the comfort of the travelers showed where his passions were directed: not to satisfying his own desires, but to serving. He found the greatest satisfaction in being of service to others, never putting himself above them, but imagining himself in their place with empathy. The very first words of the portion, God appeared to him, points to the intent of the story of Abraham and the travelers. Whenever we behold the true face of another, the intrinsic holiness of that person, God appears to us. Or rather, we bring forth the appearance of God when we honor another human being. It reminds me of the story about Rebbe Moshe Lieb of Sassov, retold by Elie Wiesel. “I saw two drunkards sitting in an inn drinking and drinking, silently. But from time to time they would stop for a brief exchange. Are you my friend Alexei, asked the younger one. Do you love me? Yes, Ivan, I do. I am your friend. They emptied another glass and dreamed their separate dreams in silence. Again the younger peasant said, Alexei, Alexei, are you really my friend? Do you truly love me, Yes, I am your friend, he said. After Ivan’s asking and asking, finally Alexei got angry. How many times must I tell you, Ivan that I am your friend? Don’t you believe me? Must I go on repeating it all night? At that point Ivan looked at Alexi and shook his head sadly. Alexei, Alexei, he said. If you are my friend, if you do love me, then why don’t you know what I need? Why don’t you know what is hurting me?” A society is known for the way it treats all its members, not just the wealthy, the powerful, or the famous; and we, like Abraham, are known for how we interact with others. Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because of how the people treated each other. May we spur ourselves to greater consciousness in our interactions with others, being willing to intuit their needs and find holiness in honoring them. May we not forget their Godliness when we speak to them. May we remember that we are each created with the spark of the Divine, and act to honor our own inner royalty by the honor we give to the spark of the Divine in each and every person we meet.

The Journey Beyond

This week’s Torah portion is Lech Lecha, the first historical portion in the Torah, it being about a real person. The portion relates God’s call to Abram, his going forth out of Mesopotamia to Canaan, God’s promise that the land will be given to Abraham’s descendants, the birth of Ishmael and the prophecy of the birth of Isaac, the covenant between God and Abram in which Abram and Sarai receive their new names, Abraham and Sarah, culminating in their promise to worship only God, and the rite of circumcision.
This portion famously begins, God said to Abram, Lech Lecha, go for yourself, from your land, from your relatives and from your ancestor’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation I will bless you and make your name great and you shall be a blessing.” The first few words, Lech Lecha, go for yourself, have intrigued scholars for centuries. Lech, go, would have been sufficient. The addition of lecha, for yourself, makes the sentence mysterious. Lech lecha can also mean: take yourself, go into yourself, and also, go beyond yourself. It is interesting that Abram needed to leave behind his family and the influences of his society in order to grow spiritually. In our lives, we are guided by our upbringing first, and then by the messages society continually tells us, In our upbringing, a tremendous amount of information was imparted to us, some of it vital, true, loving, and valuable; some of it false, misleading, and perhaps even detrimental to our further development. The society was different in our parents’ times. The assumptions were different and often they had beliefs that came from the society their parents lived in. Part of being an adult is testing, evaluating, retaining, and disregarding information from our past. Through Abraham, we are taught that, even as an adult, even an adult well past middle age, as Abraham was, it is possible to go beyond ourselves to be a greater blessing than we have thought is possible. The first step is to have the courage to leave the confines of the teaching of our society. I am always impressed that Sarah, without hearing God’s voice, as Abraham did, left the good shopping to live in the hinterland, the sticks, leaving civilization for a rude and crude existence. But their existence was much richer on the inside than on the outside. Society will always stress the outside at the expense of the inside. Abraham and Sarah chose the path of elevating and testing their inner abilities, rather than being concerned with the values their society fed them. They chose the path of inner growth and an attachment to the Divine. Many sages write about the potential of aligning ourselves with the Divine force in the world. Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson writes: Real spiritual progress requires that one leaves one’s current state behind. Yet as long as an individual’s growth depends entirely on his own power, his progress will be limited; nobody can exceed the bounds of his own understanding. The quotation, “Go out of your land, your native land and your Father’s house” is an instruction to abandon one’s ordinary way of thinking, to go to levels beyond and to transcend one’s own limits. With progress that is guided by God, there are no limits to the potential of growth.” By separating from the commonplace we can transcend our upbringing and cleave to the Divine force for goodness and purity in the world. It is a matter of identification. With what do I identify myself? How do I define myself? What is my mission and purpose? The S’fat Emet commented that the opening verse mentions the words, which I show you. He says this refers to that which a person cannot see on his or her own. The story of Abraham leaving home teaches that Divine guidance is there once we take the first steps to separate ourselves from the habitual. This includes habitual thinking as well as habitual action. We can cause blessings to flow when we align ourselves with the greater purpose of the world, transcending our upbringing as Abraham did, going beyond the self we think we are in the present, attaching ourselves to the root of goodness, service, and harmony, by becoming one with our inner spiritual potential. God chose Abraham, because of his inner goodness and potential, to be the instrument through which God’s presence and teachings became known in the world. We, too, can bring the Divine presence into the world and make the teachings of the Holy Scriptures manifest. May we take the journey, for ourselves, going into and beyond what we think we are, to the land God will show us, where the landscape is not quite familiar, but is filled with great promise and great blessings.