This week's theme was "Hidden Blessings." Mohawk and Seneca campers did a fantastic job leading two beautiful services. Thanks to all the staff who made this possible!
-Joy Getnick
CSL Judaic Educator
Dvar, Week 6
Theme: Hidden Blessings
V’haya Eikev; “And it will be, because you will follow.” So begins parasha Eikev. “And it will be,” God says, “because you will follow these laws and keep them and perform them, the laws that God swore to your ancestors.” God tells the Israelites that if they keep every commandment God would bless them with love and fertility, with grain, wine, and oil, with health and with military success, that if they honored each and every commandment they would arrive in the Promised Land, and their lives would be good, because they had followed God’s laws.
Each year during parasha Eikev I read “And it will be, because you will follow,” but yet I don’t. I don’t follow each and every commandment. In fact I feel I follow very few. I’m not Shomer Shabbat. I’m not kosher. I’m constantly questioning Jewish law and tradition, and exploring what seems to work for me at any given stage in my life. The same is true in my general life. I’ve never been a follower. I just don’t believe that one necessarily needs to follow a prescribed path. I think that we each blaze our own path, in our own time. But that’s me.
As some of you know, I left college after three days. Literally, three days. I got to school, and I fell apart. College wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t what I’d hoped. It wasn’t what people had told me it would be. And while I probably could have gotten it together and sucked it up, I just…didn’t. In fairness, at the time I felt I couldn’t. I felt like my life was spinning out of my control, and that if I stayed at school I’d literally curl up in a ball and die. And so I left. I threw some clothes into a backpack, grabbed my guitar, and took a taxi to the train station. And I went home, never looking back. Others questioned the decision. Others openly criticized. Someone even asked what it was like to have “failed college.” A part of me agreed with her assessment. It’s hard to argue that leaving college after three days isn’t “failure.” Yet a bigger part of me didn’t see it that way. I’d left because it was the right decision for me at that time. I left because I knew that I was in the wrong place for me, at that stage in my life, and that I needed to be somewhere else, anywhere else, but there. As it turns out, I was able to start at the U of R just a few days later, only three weeks into their fall semester. I registered for a full course load, caught up on all my classes, and graduated in three and half years. So as it turns out, I didn’t fail college, I just took a sudden, sharp turn early on.
Parasha Eikev tells us “you will do this, and it will be good.” It tells us to follow every law, even if we don’t want to, even if we don’t think we can, and make it work. And every year I read this and think “but I don’t follow every law, and I’m still alive. Maybe God just wants me to try to be the best person I can be, in light of Jewish tradition, in light of my heritage.” Or maybe not.
To me, Parasha Eikev raises questions to which I don’t yet have answers: How do we decide when we should stick something out and make it work? How do we decide when we should switch paths? Jewish traditions argue that one shouldn’t give up on something before fully trying it, and that only by fully immersing ourselves in something – a law, a tradition, a ritual – can we fully come to understand its hidden value. But for how long should one try something so incredibly difficult, overwhelming, or perhaps even emotionally or physically painful, and who’s to decide? Does anyone but us get to decide what or who we follow, and when?
V’haya Eikev; “And it will be, because you will follow.” Yes, and it will be, because I will follow…me, and me alone. I will do what seems right at the time, and I will live with the consequences, good or bad. Because only by staying true to myself, by listening to my heart and mine alone, can I ever hope to reach my Promised Land. Shabbat Shalom.
