One of the blindnesses of human nature is our recurrent ingratitude and our appalling lack of memory. Saying please always comes more readily than stopping to say thank you. Somehow, acknowledging assistance never seems as urgent after we’ve already gotten the help we wanted in the first place.
Last year, the annual reading of Parashat Va-Era fell close to the new American Memorial Day in honor of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., the great Black civil rights leader.
One of the most moving speeches I have ever heard was a Kol Nidrei appeal of Sherry Miller, a past president of Congregation Eilat. She spoke lovingly of her childhood memories of her Bubbe and Zayde, and of the many beautiful Shabbat meals she enjoyed with them in her youth.
Ours is a society that almost worships titles. When foreign royalty visits America, the newscasters televise the thousands of Americans who wait for hours to fall on their knees for a king, a queen, or a prince. When the talking heads of radio or television want an authoritative fix on a current issue, they interview someone with a Ph.D., trusting the title to give the comments added weight and authority. When we need advice about children, we tend to ask someone with letters after their name, whether or not they have been personally involved in raising children.
We read Parashat Mi’Ketz during the celebration of Hanukkah, the commemoration of the rededication of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem almost two thousand years ago. In history, this period marks the assertion of Jewish national and religious freedom, a period of quasi independence that made it possible for Judaism to survive the onslaught of Roman rule in the centuries ahead. Spiritually, the image of a Temple rededicated invites introspection about our own internal rededication to our own highest ideals, to correlate our ways with God’s aspirations and mandate.
Dignity and honor are important attributes for most people. We zealously guard our own dignity, often over-reacting to perceived slights delivered by others. We recoil with horror from moments which compromise our own dignity, and we respond with rage when we feel belittled.
Ours is an age of busy people, scurrying around to accomplish more at work, at play, and at home. Agendas filled to bursting keep us bustling from one activity to another, always on the run, always a little late.
It is a sign of one’s importance to frequently look at one’s watch, or to always be near a phone. Our public activities – our image and our reputation – consume the better part of our attention and the lion’s share of our energy.
It is a truism of human nature that we often denigrate our own abilities while extolling those of the generations before us. Our grandparents appear to us as giants, perhaps a reflection of our size relative to them when we were infants, but also because we are able to look on the challenges of their age from the perspective of the passage of time. Events in the past look bigger, more romantic, more heroic than the puny happenings of the present. It is no surprise, then, that ancestor worship is so common to the peoples of the earth, and that even secular America treats th
One of the central dilemmas challenging modern men and women is that we turn for comfort and purpose to faiths whose central tenants we often find too simplistic or downright unacceptable. Even as we affirm the importance of being Jewish, even as we struggle to support Jewish education and to transmit Jewish identity, we harbor our own doubts--not just about peripheral details of Jewish life, but about the very core of our ancestral faith. How can we believe in a Creation of the world when we have seen the overwhelming and meticulous evidence for a Big Bang and for evolution?&nb
In a society that values the rugged individual, the go-it-alone type, above all else, it is often hard to fathom the biblical-rabbinic commitment to the community and to the people as a whole. We moderns are so used to elevating our own concerns above that over the society, to pursuing our private happiness, even when at the expense of others and of our planet, that we look with horror on any assertions of the priority of the communal and the shared.
