Month: April 2022

The power to decide.

That is real freedom.

I think that most people have behaviors that they are not happy with.  These can range from speaking lashon hara, to anger management, to truly addictive behaviors.  These behaviors can take many forms and come in various shades.  At times we manage to control them, and at times we do not.  Some behaviors are so automatic that we lack awareness about them.

Why do we do things that we do not want to do?  How does that even make sense?

Even more puzzling, why are there some behaviors that may be difficult to control in some circumstances but which are not a struggle at all in others?  An intriguing example for me has to do with the laws of meat and milk.  I love ice cream, and if it is put in front of me, I will either eat it or at the very least have an internal struggle about it, if I think that I “shouldn’t” have it.  That very same (dairy) ice cream, if put in front of me after I have just had a meat meal, will not even trigger a minor struggle in my mind.

How can this be?  Is it not the same brain in both circumstances? 

And how is this related to Pesach?

At the risk of sounding extreme, I think that learning to control our behaviors is THE purpose of our lives.  And I think that the laws of the Torah are a gift in that they give us some insight into how to accomplish this.

Let’s think for a second about the internal struggles that occur when we behave in ways that we are not proud of.  On the one hand, we know in our higher mind that we do not want this particular behavior.  However, in the moment, on some level, we do want it.  Why the dichotomy?  Why can’t we just listen to our higher mind?

Interestingly, when something is ABSOLUTELY off limits, most of us will not struggle.  This may differ from person to person, but I am sure you can think of examples of things which perhaps other people struggle with but you do not, because it so clearly out of bounds that you don’t even consider it.

The problems start in the gray area.  For example, if smoking is something that is acceptable in society, and/or is not against halacha per se, then someone who has a smoking habit will have a hard time breaking it.  But I would venture to say that if that same person had a sick child who was at high risk of dying from the second hand smoke of that parent, that parent would in most circumstances be able to control themselves, at least in the presence of the child.  This is proof that we do have control.  The difficulty is in drawing the line.

When Bnei Yisrael crossed the Yam Suf, there was a clear line drawn between us and the Egyptians.  Between our belief system and theirs.  It’s not that there weren’t some challenges to this – for many years there was a strong temptation to go back to the “old ways.”  But really, that line was never fully crossed again and over time it got easier to maintain the separation.

It would seem like freedom is the ability to do whatever we want.  But what do we really want?  It seems like sometimes we ourselves are in conflict.  We want the chocolate cake but we also want to be thin.  We want to be calm and stress free but something triggers us and we find ourselves “wanting” to lash out.  So it is way too simplistic to define freedom as the ability to do what we want, because what we want is often not clearly defined in our own minds. 

I would like to posit that TRUE FREEDOM is the ability to separate our higher “wants” from our baser desires.  Freedom is the ability to do what we really want – what our higher self wants, without being enslaved by our baser, more animalistic side.

True freedom comes from consistently knowing where to draw our lines.  Sometimes we are given that information (as in the laws of the Torah), and sometimes we have to figure it out for ourselves. 

This is the beauty of being human.  Animals were only given one of these types of desires, and they have no choice, really, but to act upon them.  We, however, were given the ability to live on a higher plane and not be enslaved by them.

May we be redeemed this Pesach from at least one lower level, unwanted behavior.  By knowing where to draw our lines in the sand, by taking a firm stance with regard to what we really want and who we want to be, we can cross our personal Yam Suf, and thus experience true freedom and joy.

Chag Kasher V’sameach

Pesach is a time of miracles.  Great, big, movie-level theatrics types of miracles.  Amazing, right? Water turning to blood, frogs jumping around wherever you look, golf-sized balls of hail and fire – you name it.  And of course, the splitting of the sea is probably the most famous and awesome of all miracles.

But what is the message for us, nowadays?  Is it that G-d is All-powerful?  Well, yes.  But I would like to suggest that it is more than that. 

Let’s start with the event that signaled the beginning of the actual escape from Egypt and for which the holiday of Pesach, or in English – Passover – is named.  The tenth plague was different than the nine that proceeded it in that the Israelites were told to sacrifice a lamb and put the blood on the doorposts.  Based on this action, Hashem would skip the homes with the blood and only kill the firstborns in homes without the sign on the doorpost.

I would like to focus on two aspects of this event.  The first is the idea of Hashgacha Pratit.  If until now, the contribution of our people was monotheism and related to the creation of the world, now we were being set up to bring a different concept into the consciousness of the world: the idea that this One Great G-d is also involved in the details.  He is aware of and acts in accordance with the human actions in the world that He created.

Let’s pause and think about that for a minute.  We are talking not just on a global, historical level, but on a house-to-house individual basis.  This is a difficult concept for us to swallow sometimes: why would G-d pay attention to little-old-me?  After all, He is infinite, created the entire world, and there are billions of people in the world.  Why would He care about me? I’m less than a speck in the scheme of things. 

I believe that one of the main messages of Pesach is that He absolutely is involved in our lives, on an individual, house-by-house and person-by-person basis.  The message of Pesach is that G-d is both capable of and indeed desires to give individual attention to each of His creations.  He can skip over one house and not another, intentionally. 

The second aspect of this event is that we were active participants.  How did G-d decide who to skip over and who not to?  He asked us to be part of the team.  If we do our part, we can count on Him to do His part.  And that is a message that is also far from trivial.  When we take a step, show our commitment, G-d is there, watching over us.  The message of Pesach is that we have a relationship with G-d. A relationship! With G-d! If you think about it, that is nothing less than awesome.

The second event, which cannot be ignored of course, is the splitting of the sea.  There are those who claim that the splitting of the sea was not necessarily a supernatural miracle. According to some scientific modeling techniques, it can be shown that a very strong wind for a certain period of time could have that effect. 

OK, let’s take that for a minute as a given.  What are the odds that exactly at the right moment, when Bnei Yisrael were about to be attacked by a mighty and powerful army, this “natural” event occurred?  And that just as the army reached the sea, the waters fell back down on them, killing them all?  I think it stretches the credibility of any reasonable scientist to say that that is within the realm of possibility.  Generally, when scientists are confronted with almost infinitely miniscule odds, they calculate those odds as zero.

So this brings us to the additional incredible aspect of Pesach: the idea of G-d’s intervention in this world on the basis of time.  This is probably the subject of a whole different blog, but let’s remember that time is a construct that G-d created and thus is not bound by it.  Every once in a while, we may get a glimpse of Hashgacha in terms of timing: something happens exactly then, or events converge in a certain way such that something significant happens.  Sometimes we can even look back at past events and see how they tie into things that are happening now.  If you pay attention to these types of things, you start to become aware of them more and more, and you start to realize that the odds of all of these things happening in just this way are almost negligible. 

But whatever we are capable of seeing is just the tip of the iceberg.  If you start to contemplate the enormity of orchestrating the world while still providing us with the freedom to choose how to be a part of this orchestra, then you truly begin to get a glimpse of the awesomeness of G-d as an active Entity in our lives.  This Shabbat, Shabbat Hagadol, we can contemplate this gedula, this awesome greatness, to whatever degree our limited minds are capable of contemplating it. 

So remember, a miracle is not just a fireworks-type of event that makes us look up and say “wow.”  It is found in the daily happenings of our individual lives.  We as Jews represent this on a national level.  But on an individual level, we must recognize it and embrace it as well.