The Lunchbox Lesson

Each weekday morning, my day begins the same way. I roll out of bed and make the kids’ lunches. I pack a sandwich in a Tupperware box and then gather the fruit, granola bar, and cheese-stick, and shove them all in the lunchbox. Some mornings, the items fit in the lunchbox with ease. Other mornings (if I’m too sleepy and not paying attention), I have to take everything out and rearrange the items. As I do this mundane task each morning, I am reminded of something one of my teachers taught me in rabbinical school.

Rabbi Ron Shulman, my homiletics instructor, once recounted a principle he learned from Dr. Stephen Covey, the author of “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” He explained that when filling a rectangular jar with rocks and pebbles, if you put the large rocks first, the pebbles will fill the remaining space, and both will fit. However, if you put the pebbles first, all the rocks will likely not fit as there is less room for the rocks. (Likewise, if I put the Tupperware in the lunchbox first then all the rest of the food items fit with ease. However, if I place the snacks in first, the Tupperware just won’t fit!)

Rabbi Shulman explained that what is true of space is also true of time. The “smaller” items (such as checking email or making phone calls) take up a great deal of time. They’ll take up all our time if we let them. He recommended that when crafting our weekly calendar, we make sure to schedule the larger, more important items first — such as making time for our continued study and writing. That way, all our goals will fit into our week. Applying the “rocks” principle is easy when making lunches. However, applying the principle in regular life is more complicated. We are engaged in many important, time consuming projects every day. How do we choose between competing priorities?

This week’s Torah portion begins with a conflict between professional and personal obligations. In the parasha, called Emor (Speak), God instructs Moses to speak to the priests about how to handle this dilemma. The ancient priests who worked in the Temple were supposed to avoid ritual impurity (which was acquired by coming close to a dead body). The portion begins with God specifying that the priest should nevertheless make an exception for “his closest relatives: his mother, and father, son, daughter, brother, or sister.” In this conflict between work and family, the Torah asserts that family comes first.

Oddly, the priest’s wife doesn’t appear on the list, but the rabbis of the Talmud clarified that the phrase “his closest relatives” surely refers to her, too. In reading this passage, I was struck by the idea that the person he was presumably closest to — his wife — wasn’t mentioned explicitly but was taken as a given.

This textual omission reflects a tendency in life. Sometimes, among our many tasks, the relationship between spouses can be taken for granted. This relationship is the foundation of the family, but we easily forget to prioritize it. My husband and I are coming up on our tenth anniversary this year. We’re still very much in love — and extremely busy with all the demands of our personal and professional lives. Recently, we realized that we should make more time to connect with each other. For the first time in a while, we went out two weekends in a row, not for any occasion, but just to be together.

Sometimes the power of Torah is in the questions it raises. This week’s portion asks: What is the biggest item in your lunchbox? Are you putting it in first?

Finding Our Place on the Map

My six-year old son, Jeremy loves maps. He enjoys playing with Google Earth and finding our home and the homes of his friends and family. The other day, I was reading the weekly Torah portion and left my bible on the table. Jeremy picked it up and discovered that it contains maps. “Where do we live on this map?” He asked.

I explained that this map was of Israel and showed him where his aunt and uncle live (near Tel Aviv) and where his cousins live (in Jerusalem). I also pointed out to him an area which contained his middle name (Judah) and a town with his father’s middle name (Shilo). I felt grateful that I could highlight the many connections he has with Israel’s places and people.

This week’s Torah portion also seems concerned with Jeremy’s question: Where do we belong on the map? The people are wandering in the desert but God instructs Moses to tell the people that they are heading to “a land flowing with milk and honey.” God explains the laws of how they should live to “be holy” en route and when they reach that special land.

The double Torah portion for this week is Aharei Mot/Kedoshim (After the Death/Holiness) and is particularly apt for this week’s observance of Yom Ha-Zikaron (Memorial Day for Israel’s fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism) and Yom Ha-Atzmaut (Israel’s Independence Day). The first Torah portion recounts God’s words to Moses after the mysterious death of two of Aaron’s sons. When his sons died, the Torah recounts that “Aaron was silent.” Sometimes silence speaks louder than words.

Anyone who has been to Israel on Yom Ha-Zikaron has experienced the poignancy of silence. On both the morning and evening of remembrance day, a siren sounds and everything comes to a halt. People stop their cars and stand for a moment of silence. I experienced this myself when studying in Israel during rabbinical school. I happened to be in the library (which is already fairly quiet) when the siren rang, but this silence had a unique power.

Like the linking of the two Torah portions, the juxtaposition of the two holidays makes the clear statement that the celebration of Israel’s independence is only possible because of the sacrifices of those who died. Only because of their suffering and that of their families, are the Jewish people able to live on the Torah’s map.

On Tuesday, Israel celebrated its 62nd birthday. There’s a great deal of worry in the air about Iran developing nuclear weapons, the current strains in U.S.-Israel relations and future prospects with the Palestinians. Nonetheless, the news doesn’t overshadow the fact that people in Israel continue about their daily lives — getting married, having children, running errands, and engaging in normal business.

This week, we celebrate the fact that the Jewish people have a place on the world map and remember those who gave their lives to make it so.

Just another Boring Day

Each day, when I pick up my son up from school, I ask him: “How was your day?” His answer is always the same: “Boring.” When I then ask him what he did, he tells me about activities he enjoyed, who he played with on the jungle-gym, and the new things he learned. Whenever I see him at school, he’s running around, happy as can be, and doesn’t want to leave at the end of the day. Still, his initial response is always that it’s boring.

If I read this week’s Torah portion and was asked: ‘How was it?’ the first adjective to come to mind would be ‘boring’ – or even gross. If a contest were held for the least-exciting Torah portion of the year, this portion would win by a landslide! This week’s double portion, called Tazria-Metzora (Delivery-The Leper), deals with an ailment called Tzara-at which can afflict the skin or even a house. Thankfully, this condition no longer exists today. The portion describes the process for diagnosis and recovery from the disease.

Although the portion is filled with detailed, yucky descriptions of skin rashes and mold, it also contains one of my favorite teachings of the entire Torah. In describing the diagnosis procedure, the priest is instructed to examine the affliction on the patient’s skin and then to “look at him.” The priest is required to examine the infection, but also to see the whole person.
Often in life, flaws are readily apparent, but we need to look at the whole picture to see the strengths too. The pain of life is easily recognized; the blessings require a second look.

Today is Yom Ha-Shoah where we recall the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust and the promise to “Never Forget.” For myself (and many in this generation), we have been so inundated with Holocaust movies, books and images that we couldn’t possibly forget. The real question is: what do we do with this memory? How does remembering change us?

The first and most important result of remembering the Holocaust is that it spurs us to speak out against injustice – and particularly against genocide all over the world. “Never Again” is a powerful call to action.

Yet, on a personal, spiritual level, the memory of the Holocaust is harder to swallow. The Shoah reminds us that the world is an unsafe place and that people have tremendous capacity for evil. Since I knew about the Holocaust from a very young age, to this day I occasionally have nightmares with terrifying, Holocaust images. For me, the memory of the Shoah has been like a kind of spiritual darkness that is always with me.

However, more recently, I’ve discovered that remembering the Shoah can also have the opposite spiritual affect. It can bring vibrancy to commonplace moments. In her acceptance speech at the Oscars in 2008, Holocaust survivor Gerda Weissmann Klein recalled “those who never lived to see the magic of a boring evening at home.” She said that there is no better way to honor the memory of those who died “than when you return home tonight, to realize that each of you who know the joy of freedom are winners.”

The memory of the Holocaust can give us a second pair of eyes with which to see our lives. Like the priest, it can help us see the bigger picture. By comparison, so many of our problems are trivial. Our complaints are not worth complaining about. Even the most boring moments of our lives are spectacular.

The Ferris Wheel of Life

The other day, my son Jeremy discovered an unopened birthday present in his closet. It was a Kinex Ferris wheel building set. We took out all parts, and I was instantly overwhelmed. The game had 25 pages of assembly instructions! Despite my reservations, we started putting it together. The process was inordinately complicated. Although the box said it was for ages seven and up, I wondered why I, being three decades older than that, was having such difficulty figuring it out. Maybe I needed a Ph.D. in engineering.

We kept going step by step, and we became hooked. Bath-time came and went; bedtime passed, but we couldn’t stop. Even though it took all evening (and much of the next day), Jeremy was completely engaged throughout — helping to find each piece that we needed and snap them in. I must admit, it was the most fun we’d had in a long time.

I wondered why this was so much fun. What about this game so captivated our energies?

Like the center of a Ferris wheel, this week’s Torah portion is smack in the middle of the Torah. The parasha is from Vayikra (Leviticus), the central book of the Torah, and the portion called Shemini (which means eighth) contains both the central words and the central letter of the Torah. The ancient rabbis actually counted the letters of the Torah (which must have taken an awfully long time) and determined which was the middle letter of the Torah.

The letter is a vav — in the middle of the word gachon, which means belly. The context is the laws of keeping kosher, where God instructed Moses and Aaron to tell the people not to eat any animal which crawls on its belly. So, that letter is the belly button of the Torah, literally!

In the Torah scroll, this vav is written bigger than the others (with the ancient equivalent of a larger font) to draw attention to it. What difference does it make? Why did the rabbis bother with this tedious, time consuming exercise?

Like a spoke in a wheel, the letter vav is a straight line, extending vertically. When used as a prefix, it means “and,” and therefore is very common in the Torah. In fact, some special Torahs are written so that almost every column begins with the letter vav. These Vav Torahs are especially expensive because they’re tricky for scribes to write. Again, why is this innocuous, little letter so significant?

The vav is important for the same reason that the Kinex set was so much fun. Since vav means “and,” it highlights the connections between words or ideas. Rather than operating in isolation, the words are bound together. As the vav’s vertical line bridges between above and below, it shows that heaven and earth (or the human and divine realms) are inextricably linked. Each of us is connected to each other, and we are all linked to God. Therefore, the vav embodies the essence of Torah. (Indeed, the laws of Kashrut are intended to remind us of our connections to animals, to fellow Jews worldwide who follow these practices, and to God.)

Likewise, the Kinex game was fun because we enjoyed discovering how these seeming isolated parts fit together into a larger whole. People love puzzles of all kinds not only for intellectual stimulation but also because they reflect the spiritual essence of the world in which we live. Like Lego pieces, none of us is alone. We are all part of a web of intricate links to each other, to all living things, and to our Creator.

It all “Kinex.” If we understand this truth, then we comprehend the entire Torah.

Zooming In and Out

My six-year-old son Jeremy recently became obsessed with Google Earth, a computer program which shows a satellite picture of the world. When you type an address, the program zooms in and displays an aerial photo of exactly where the building is located. Jeremy loves inputting the addresses of family and friends and watching the program go to each place.

Since Jeremy started using this program, he and I have been engaged in an ongoing debate. He was taught in school that we live on earth, but he doesn’t believe it. He claims that since when you zoom out you see the earth, and when you zoom in you see our house, this means that we don’t live on earth. I’ve been trying to explain to him that the program demonstrates that we do live on earth. So far, neither of us has managed to convince the other.

In this week’s Torah portion, God and Moses also reach a similar impasse. The Torah reading for Shabbat during Passover is appropriately from Exodus. It recounts that in a moment of crisis, Moses begged to see God’s presence. God explained that no one can see God and live but agreed to make God’s goodness pass before Moses. God instructed Moses to stand in a cleft of a rock and agreed to reveal God’s back (but not God’s face).

What does this enigmatic scene mean? The Hatam Sofer (of nineteenth-century Hungary) explained that we can’t see God directly, but can only recognize the difference God has made after the fact.

In this interchange, Moses conveys the essential frustration of human life. Hindsight is 20/20. Our choices are easily evaluated in retrospect. Yet since we don’t know the future results of our actions, we often can’t tell whether we’re making mistakes until afterwards. Moses’ plea to see God directly reflects the human desire for a sign to know in advance whether we’re making the best decisions. God’s reply — that one can only ascertain God’s presence in hindsight — is sad but true.

Yet, perhaps God was suggesting that to really see God, Moses needed a different vantage point. Often when we look at our lives close up, we get confused and mired in our daily struggles, but when we look from a distance, we get a better perspective.

In the Passover seder, there’s a song which helps us to attain a birds-eye view: Dayenu (which means ‘It is enough for us.’) The song reviews Jewish history and offers thanks for each particular blessing along the way. These blessings include: being freed from slavery in Egypt, given the Shabbat and the Torah, and brought to Israel. The song reminds us of the preciousness of freedom and of the Torah’s guidance — gifts which can so easily be taken for granted.

I recently read People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks a moving novel about the history of the Sarajevo Haggadah. The book recounts stories about people in different periods from the Haggadah’s creation in 1480 through the present — including the expulsion from Spain in 1492 and the Holocaust. Viewing my life from the perspective of the characters in the story, I suddenly felt this overwhelming gratitude to be living in contemporary times. The day-to-day difficulties I face felt trivial in comparison to these epic struggles for survival.

This Passover, may we zoom out to recognize our blessings and zoom in to help those who are suffering, here on Earth.