None Can Escape Grief

Before we start, please read this, by the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks.

I read it a few weeks ago, on the Shabbos of the applicable parsha, and I found it hit so many important points. 

As someone who has personally experienced the grief of losing a loved one SIX YEARS ago, I'm still unprepared for the welter of emotions I continue to experience. My next door neighbor has been motherless for seven years; we just understand each other. Grief has its own unspoken language. 

Rabbi Sacks provides a simple yet brilliant explanation for why Moshe hit the rock: He was grieving for his sister, who had been like a mother to him. 

MIND BLOWN. 

What continues from this idea is that even the greatest of our ancestors were HUMAN. The same humanity we experience, so did they. They loved. They lost. Then they became lost themselves. 

The education system they I went through, which emphasized the vast difference in madreiga between ourselves and our forebears, did me a disservice, I believe. We do know that they didn't always have the answers. They didn't always do the right thing. They were often torn between their hearts and their faith. 

They were not angels. The Torah was not given to angels, but to stumbling humans. Mistakes are a part of being human. We just have to go forward knowing and doing better. 

Then: 

What the parsha is telling us is that for each of us there is a Jordan we will not cross, a promised land we will not enter. “It is not for you to complete the task.”

What I took from this was: We each have our own task. It's not necessarily the same as someone else. Some of us have feelings of inadequacy, because they are incapable, for a myriad of reasons, of doing what another can with seeming ease. That is because we each have our OWN task. 

What @iwassupposedtohaveababy took it a step farther. 

In response, God has [Moshe] take a step back. Moshe is told he shouldn't be the one to lead the people into Israel. God knows that Moshe is about to lose another sibling and God understand that Moshe will need the coming time to grieve his losses. 

Although it may feel that Moshe is being punished for expressing his pain, this moment is more like a mentor telling you, "Hey, I see you have needs that aren't being met. It's time to take a break." 

It's okay that you're not okay. 

Moshe bore a lot in his life, and perhaps he reached a point when it became too much. Hashem then said, "It's okay. You're just one man, who did more in his life than ten men combined. Someone else can continue your work." 

I have my limitations, and I try to recognize them. I have a set time every night when I cease my labors. If I'm not feeling okay, I allow myself to rest when possible, even if I "should be" doing something else. Because I am only human, I'm not a machine, and I need to recognize when I'm at my breaking point.

We are all—ALL—too human.  

In and Proud

While I was born in the US, I was raised with European, old-world values, which would often have American contemporaries not quite getting where I'm coming from. 

In high school, the morahs couldn't really make up their mind: one minute it was all, "Eisav soneh es Yaakov," how the world hates us, etc., and the next it would be, "If you are an outwardly proud Jew, everyone respects you." 

Exasperated, I tried to counter their rather flawed logic, and said that we are not in our own country, and we shouldn't be flaunting our Jewishness, that my grandfather, who survived the war, said this. The teacher sneered, "Oh, so you believe in 'when in Rome.'" 

Another classmate, from the same background as myself, chimed in, but the morah could not or would not understand what we meant. I was in near tears as she insinuated that my grandfather, who fasted on Yom Kippur while starving in the labor camps, was not a proud Jew.

If we went out to the city on a rare Chol HaMoed outing, my father told my brothers to tuck in their tzitzis and wear a baseball cap. As for attending the Israeli Day Parade? Nuh-uh, not happening.

Some take this to mean that we are not proud Jews. Then I realized that "proud" nowadays means "out and proud." Meaning, if I am proud of who I am, that means I have to announce it to the world, and expect that world in turn to celebrate me. 

But what does my own personal pride have to do with the world at large? Isn't that my own, internal, business? 

Han works primarily with non-Jews. And you know what? They aren't always so nice about him being observant. I myself endured years of verbal smack about Judaism from my secular Jewish employer (to be fair, he was also sexist and racist).

Oh, there always a story here and there, about so-and-so who went to work somewhere and their boss had a wonderful experience with a Jew and because of that makes him head partner or something, but for every story like that, there are plenty of examples when an observant Jew was discriminated against by a non-Jew or even Jewish (secular) boss. 

In high school, they regaled us with stories about frum women who refused to shake hands with men, and how they were accommodated, and even admired. While in the NY Times The Ethicist, a woman wrote in, irate, that after a business deal her frum counterpart wouldn't shake her hand and Roger Cohen (cough cough), the ethicist at the time, affirmed her belief that this was sexist behavior and she was within her rights to no longer work with him. 

We can't have it both ways. Our people survived through thousands of years of violence and murder—now we're going to claim that to be a proud Jew means announcing it? Not so long ago, outward pride got you dead. 

My great-grandfather, it was said, was a Belzer chassid. He kept his streimel "in the credenza." Meaning, it never left the house. He wore it at his own table, never outdoors.

My Zeidy would say that if you want to be an "out and proud" Jew, make aliyah. That's our land, our place. But chutz la'aretz? Keep your elbows tucked in. This isn't our land. Yes, it did a wonderful job melding in all sorts of different races and cultures, but everyone experienced racism (even the Italian and Irish immigrants a century ago).  

I'm a proud Jew, even if you don't believe me.