From Freedom to Responsibility

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, May 15, 2010

It is almost Shavuot, the holiday which celebrates the Jewish people receiving the Torah. We have been counting the days since Passover - 46 days, 6 weeks, 4 days. In ancient times, we would have been watching the wheat growing, for the early harvest but for the last two thousand years, these seven weeks have been marked by special study, in preparation for this important holiday.

At Shir Hadash this year we combined the traditional study from Pirke Avot with a focus on supporting the growth of young people. We are part of the Cornerstone project, a community effort to work together to develop assets, strengths, skills and positive outlook, in young people. They have found that young people with many of these assets do better in school and in life. The asset we are focusing on this week is a sense of purpose.

My confirmation students wonder a lot about the purpose of their lives. Daled students, is this something that you think about? How can we answer that question: What is the purpose of our lives?

Tuesday night, Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, author of many books on Jewish thought, will be teaching for our Tikkun layl Shavuot, our late night Shavuot community study. He says that the answer to the question, what is the purpose of our lives – is both easy and hard. The easy part of the answer for him, is that we are all malachim. The hard part is figuring out what our mission is.

What does that mean? Rabbi Kushner says that each of us is a malach. Malach is sometimes translated angel, but really means messenger of God. What he means by saying that we are messengers of God, is not that we have halo’s around our heads, or are always goody two shoes, but that we each have something important to do in our lives. The problem is that it’s not always obvious what that something is. Sometimes it’s not the big thing that we do in our lives, but some little thing. Sometimes it’s not something we are focusing on and concentrating on, but something else, that doesn’t mean a lot to us but means a great deal to the other person.

If you have been to a Bar or Bat Mitzvah here at Shir Hadash, you might have heard us read a poem he wrote about this - about how each of us has a piece of someone else’s puzzle, and about how at some point in our life it is our task to give that gift to them. That’s from Rabbi Kushner’s book, Honey from the Rock.

I’d also like to tell you a story from his book, Invisible Lines of Connection.

This story he heard from Shifra Penzias, whose father-in-law is the famous physicist Arnoldo Penzias, who discovered background cosmic radiation, and who herself is now a rabbi in Aptos.

It’s about Shifrah’s great aunt who was in Munich just after the Nazis took power.

She was riding home from work on the city bus, when SS Storm Troops got on the bus and began asking everyone for papers. If they were Jewish, they roughed them up and dragged them off the bus.

Her aunt began to cry, trembling in fear. “What’s wrong?” the man next to her asked. “I am a Jew,” she said very quietly. “They will take me away.”

At that moment the man got angry and began to scream at her: “You stupid cow. I can’t stand you. Why don’t you ever listen?”

The SS men came over to see what the fuss was about.

“What’s the matter?”

“Damm her,” the man said. “My stupid wife has forgotten her papers again. She always does this.”

The SS men laughed. They moved on.

Shifrah’s great aunt escaped, and eventually came to America.

She never saw that man again, never knew his name. But she lived.

Rabbi Kushner writes:

“You are going about your business when you stumble on something that has your name on it. Or to be more accurate, a task with your name on it finds you. Its execution requires inconvenience, or self sacrifice, or even risk. You step forward and encounter your destiny…

“You do not exercise freedom my doing what you want. Self-indulgence is not an exercise in freedom. But when you accept the task that destiny seems to have set before you, you become free…

“If everything is connected to everything else, then everyone is ultimately responsible for everything.

“Even on a bus in Munich.”

From Passover to Shavuot, the Omer is the season when we move from Freedom to Responsibility, Shabbat Shalom.