Can we walk through the gates? B’har/Bkhukotai
I have three little stories to tell.
Last week was a really rough one. A week ago Friday was my first Covid vaccine (Pfizer--I know you wanna know), followed by aches and pains, sleepless nights, four days of headaches. The weird, hot and humid, then extremely windy and cold weather didn’t help.
As a result, I had to cancel my Saturday morning launch of leading services in the park.
Just as bad as the pain and discomfort I was in was the mental torture I put myself through--the catastrophizing: “What if I make the commitment and then I can’t follow through due to my unpredictable health? Am I still a Covid-long-hauler? Do I tell people that? Will they judge me? What if I never, ever get to do this, after all my preparation...making my own prayer books, etc., etc.”
Today I finally took a walk in the park after almost a week (and if you know me well, I’m in the park every chance I get), and I saw a man I often see. He’s a small, middle-aged, Latino guy who apparently had a stroke. I’ve been seeing for years in my neighborhood with his walker, slowly and deliberately moving along.
He comes to the steps of the pergola in the Conservatory garden and, up and down he goes, slowly, slowly. He’s shy and rarely makes eye contact. I imagine everything he does takes at least twice as long as it takes me.
Today another man stopped: “Good for you!” he called out to the Latino man in a thick Asian accent; “I’ve been watching you for four years! Four years! You never stop! Good for you! You never stop!” The shy Latino man was beaming.
And it felt like one of those moments when people from all walks of life, of different ethnic groups, meet in their humanity, one of the things I love about New York City.
I’ve been watching a British series on Netflix that at first seemed very depressing, but I decided to give it a chance. It’s about a man who is having a really hard time regaining meaning in his life since losing his wife to breast cancer. He’s angry at the world, continually thinks of killing himself, barely functions, and lashes out at everyone.
A series of things happen that begin to slowly bring him back to appreciating life. He begins to realize that he is not only hurting himself, but also harming others. Though it’s a process and not a Hollywood miracle of overnight transformation, he decides that at least he’s going to try--which he does. He begins to do little things to make other people smile and feel appreciated. His new thing is: “I can’t control the world, but I can try to make a positive difference in my little corner of it.”
This week’s readings, the last of the Book of Leviticus, have more laws passed from God to the Israelites on Mt. Sinai, and new (horrible) punishments doled out for failing to follow them and for breaking our covenant with God--our part of the deal.
It includes letting the land lie fallow so it may renew itself every seven years (the “Shmita” year), and also the year of the Jubilee, every fifty years, when, in a nutshell, all property is returned to its original owners and indentured servants go free.
There were three little things that stood out to me:
One exception to the redemption of property is within a walled city, where houses can never be redeemed, but remain forever in the hands of the new(er) owners (except in the case of the Levites). In towns not walled in, they can be redeemed.
Among the punishments for not trusting their new God is that they will run though no one pursues them, die by each other’s hand though there are no swords, and the earth will be forced to rest even if the people did not let it because it will eventually stop being able to produce, leading them to eat the flesh of their own children.
No matter what, God will still remember “His People” and will walk among them.
Though the Bible was written during a time when slavery was a given, somebody had some wisdom back then.
Along with not showing proper respect for the earth as the Torah commands us to do, this year, this pandemic, certainly feels man-made in so many ways, we are fleeing even when no one is pursuing us and maybe eating ourselves alive. We are walled in, both physically and spiritually.
But “God” promised to walk among us.
If I were fulfilling my part of the Covenant, of having true faith, would I be torturing myself with my catastrophizing thoughts?
Maybe that man I see doing his exercises, never giving up, despite the challenges life poses him, has real faith.
And the man in the British TV show? He’s like most of us; with his personal pain and tragedy, he has to work at his faith, even if it doesn’t mean believing in “God.” He has to find reasons for living and loving life, despite not having the answers, and he does.
We end each book of the Torah by reciting, “Khazak khazak v’nitkhazeyk,” meaning “Strong, strong, we will be strong.”
As we get closer to Shavuot, the holiday when we traditionally see ourselves receiving the Torah on Mt. Sinai as if we ourselves were personally there, we have another opportunity to redeem ourselves.
Individually, we can’t control the entire world (though we can influence it when we gather together as a whole), but we can make a difference in our own little corner of it. We can still choose to “walk with God,” to fulfill our part of the covenant by continuing to have faith in life, to find reasons to love life, to get in touch with our inner strength and continue to find more ways to support each other, and to discern when it’s time to go through the gates of our own walled cities into the freedom of redemption.
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