May/June 2010

Dear Friends,

A tantalizing and frustrating experience takes place while you’re driving on the highway. You turn the radio on and get a faint, intermittent staticky connection with a broadcast that grabs your attention—it might be a song you love, or a fascinating news report. The reception magically grows stronger, then, after five or ten minutes, starts to fade. Been there?

I mention this because it strikes me as a good analogy for the way life and all its semahot (joys, times of bliss) happen to us. As we travel down life’s highway, we swell into a vibrant, potentially satisfying experience in this world, then quickly fade out—before we’ve had a chance to take it all in. No, I don’t mean to turn morose or morbid on you.

My point is that the cycles of time catch us on the wing. We try to listen in on what really matters, and we get delicious, deeply delightful pieces of it, but it happens so fast, and we don’t get enough of it to make it all make sense or get our fill of it. Our lives feel improvised as we struggle with all of the “static,” those “radio signals” that are so hard to make out. There are but moments of awe, beauty and grace. Still, something does get through to us. Jewish time provides us a way to deal with that wondrous yet insufficient taste of life’s infinite bounty.

Our holiday cycle features the Pilgrimage Festivals—Sukkot (with Shemini Atzeret its tail end), Pesah and Shavuot, the last of those sacred occasions this year beginning on the eve of May 18. Judaism offers holidays not to glut or exhaust our sense of what the physical world can offer, but to use the things of this life as a hint, an alluring foretaste (as the Rabbis put it) of transcendent ecstasies awaiting us in the World to Come. The harvest motif (each of those three festivals is associated with a different crop in the yearly agricultural cycle of eretz yisrael) teaches us to think of physical nourishment as a means of strengthening our souls for an ongoing, eternal soul journey.

The pleasure we get from what we eat and drink—and from everything we do with our hands and feet and entire bodies and all our senses—is not just for its own sake but reminds us of divine stuff: there are things that exist in this world but extend into other worlds.

We’re not expected to swallow it all and leave it at that. If we heard the entire song while traveling down life’s highway, then what would be left for us to look forward to in the continuation down the next stretch of road, the one just around the bend—the one beyond our physical horizon, the one in our mind’s eye? Something must be left to the imagination.

This reminds me of the midrash (Torah interpretation) about the Ten Commandments, which, tradition says, the Jews received from God on Shavuot. The first word is anohi (“I,” in which God discloses God’s self to the people Israel). The rabbis debated what exactly we heard God say at Mt. Sinai: did we hear all of the Ten Commandments, or only the first of those commandments, or only the first word—anohi—of the first commandment, or only the first letter—alef—of that first word?

But alef is practically silent; it is mere static, a crackling in the throat. If so, then what exactly did God give us? Ah, but (to repeat) something must be left to the imagination!

When, while traveling down the highway, you hear static on your radio dial, don’t mistake what you think you hear for meaningless noise masking nothing but silence. There could be a comforting voice, a sublime melody behind it. The apparent confusion of the world around us conceals a divine purpose, which it is our purpose to keep searching for as we travel on.

Love,
Rabbi Seth