Well over a decade ago, my last-surviving grandmother passed away. A week or so after our period of mourning ended, my mother sent me some of her furniture, figuring (correctly) that I and my wife could use it in setting up our home. As the movers carried in my grandmother's furniture, I had an eerie sense that something wasn't right. This, after all, was hers, not mine. She should have it, not me. I realized then, in a more concrete way than before, that we really never own the things around us. We borrow them for a while, and ultimately we return them. Either we no longer need them (due to illness, moving, or death) or they cease to function, in which case we "throw them out" which is to say we return them back to nature and the natural order.
Given that we can never really own any thing, our lives, and how we choose to apportion our time, seems especially perverse. Modern men and women spend their most productive years in relentless pursuit. We pursue careers, ownership of cars, homes, clothing, appliances, art work, stock options, pension plans, life insurance, and a staggering variety of other possessions. Perhaps more than any generation before us, we are rich beyond belief in the accumulation of things.
Paradoxically, our wealth notwithstanding, we don't feel rich inside. Few of us have a sense of inner fullness, of an ability to derive emotional nourishment from within. Plagued by unease, by a foreboding disquiet, we know we lack some essential ingredient, we just don't know what it is. So we buy another suit, join another club, eat another meal out, seeking frantically to satisfy our eternal craving for we know not what.
Maybe that confusion or priority and goal also accounts for why so many find this week's Torah portion boring. In Parashat Naso, the Torah recounts, at great lengths, the gifts the chieftains of Israel brought to the newly-constructed Mishkan (Tabernacle): "When Moses had amounted and consecrated them, the chieftains of Israel, the heads of ancestral houses...bound their offering before the Lord.... The chieftains also brought the dedication offering for the altar upon its being anointed."
For the next twelve days, each tribal chief brought offerings to dedicate the new altar, and for twelve paragraphs, the Torah simply lists everything they brought. Even the most diligent of readers begins to glaze over by the third day!
Why would the Torah, normally so terse, so concise, and so dramatic, go on at such length with the dedication gifts of Israel's tribes?
Perhaps the insight of Rabbi Elazar of Bartota might help us understand. In Mishnah Pirkei Avot (the Teachings of the Sages), Rabbi Elazar instructs us: "Give God what is God's, for you and yours are God's. This is also expressed by King David: "For all things come from You, and we give You only what is Yours (I Chronicles)."
Rabbi Elazar understands that there is nothing wrong with owning things or with enjoying their use. But possessions are, at best, tools for better living, never goals in themselves. No thing can bring happiness, security, or peace. The spirit of each human being soars above the concrete limitations of our possessions, crying out for something more essential, something more eternal, something more neshamah-like to meet it face-to-face.
Today's environmental philosophers have translated Rabbi Elazar's wisdom into secular language when they tell us that we humans only have the power to take something out of the cycles of nature for a short time, but that sooner or later we must return it. We can either return the borrowed item in a way that lets the natural cycle continue to support a thriving biosphere, or we can return it in a way that threatens the continuity of life: "you and yours are God's."
We do not have ultimate possession of anything material. All that we own we owe, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel reminds us.
What we do acquire and own forever is our own character, our own deeds of lovingkindness and justice, our own piety. We own eternally the love we feel for others and their love for us. And we own, as Jews, an ancient and a sacred tradition that makes us God's lovers, God's partners, and God's children.
In those possessions, and not in mere things, a soul can hope to find contentment.
Shabbat Shalom.