Dear Friends,

I am in the airport. La Guardia’s charmless low ceilinged area B is slowly filling up with my fellow travellers. There is no Starbucks in this part of the airport. The ubiquitous coffee spa offers soy milk (unlike the other airport coffee lounges). There is a kashrus site, which opens up entirely new possibilities. All is not lost.
There is something about airport energy that appeals to my latent love of people-watching, which was thwarted in my flight to the States. I sat next to a lovely young from couple with a baby. Junior would wake up whenever I turned on the light, which left me in the dark for the twelve hour flight. I had an entire night planned; writing, reading, catching up. I was left in silence. It was a good opportunity to sleep an entire eight hours, and then to face up to the fact that aloneness can open your heart to think, and to feel. Seeing yourself is the best kind of people watching. It’s easy to avoid; all of us are busy doing things and taking care of whatever is next on the list. When you look at some of the insights the Torah provides, you can vicariously “people watch” the greatest people when they were alone.  

This coming week’s Parshah, Vayishlach finds Yaakov in the unenviable position of trying to move his entire family of twelve sons, four wives not to mention large numbers of livestock, without a van.  He had to cross the Yavok River. This meant making trip after trip until everyone and everything was on the right side. It was then that he discovered that he had left some small dishes on the wrong side. If this was me, the dishes would still be there. It would never have occurred to me to cross a river at night to save them. Yaakov saw life from a different angle. To him, everything he saw/experienced/encountered was part of a whole. Hashem’s providence is what brought him to the specific moment in time, the specific place, and the specific potentials that he faced at any given moment. It was inconceivable to him that the dishes had no purpose; if they were given to him, they are part of the backdrop that Hashem presented him with. Response is meant to be thought out, positive, real. He crossed the river.

When he was alone
The man-angel-inside-outside
Found him

The sages say that he did battle with the spiritual force of Eisov, his twin and convoluted mirror image. He was never absolutely alone. He was with Hashem constantly. Eisov was always alone. Every human was a competitor, and every object prey. Eisov’s world is there for him to use, explore, and describe endlessly and ultimately conquer. The conquest excludes Hashem. It is all self-directed. To him, the only relevant question vis a vis the dishes would be, “Do I want them”. Because Yaakov never excluded Hashem from his moment to moment reality, to him the world has a purpose beyond it being the ultimate consumer venue. The tricky part of the story is that Yaakov had to face Eisov’s angel within himself as well as from the outside. Believe it or not, this all has to do with Chanukah, the creation story, and the Ten Commandments. Read on.

The world was created with ten statements (let there be this… let there be that, beginning with the spiritual light and energy of the first day, and ending with the creation of the first humans on the last). The word that describes the outside of the world is nature. The Greeks explored nature from many angles. They could describe the cosmos, the workings of the human body, the logic of cause and effect, and to a large degree what makes people tick. The inside of the world, its meaning, and most significantly, what we humans are meant to do with it were irrelevant to them. We see things very differently.

For us, purpose, can’t be ignored. The Ten Commandments, which are the skeleton of all of Torah, is the framework that Hashem gave us as a key for unlocking the world of meaning and purpose. Beginning with G-d telling you that you are not alone, that He is there, involved, and can break His rules, He began the ten commandments by referring you to the story of the exodus. It ends with the commandment in which we are told not to covet what other people have. You have everything you need to uncover your own purpose. You don’t need someone else’s tools, any more than a diamond cutter needs a rolling pin. You also have to learn how to treasure your own tools, use them, and never waste their possibilities. Don’t leave anything on the wrong side of the Yavok River. Fight against Eisov who wants you to live on the surface. He has created the consumer culture in which you are urged to conquer the world and everyone (not just everything) who is in it to give you a sense of empowerment. This battle is usually fought when you are alone, when no one else can see what is really going on inside.
Chanukah was an exception. It all was public. The lines were drawn clearly. You either believe in spiritual purpose, or you don’t.

Now the good news.

If the world worked by the laws of nature, the Maccabees would have lost.
But it doesn’t!

One person’s decision to fight the good fight opened the door to miracles. I am sure that this door is one that you all have had open in your lives at various times. Let the light of the first day seep in.
​Enjoy it!
Tziporah

Dear friends,

It’s easy to forget how unique every person is. The American elections turned generalizations into an art form. The tricky thing is that there is often a basis for the stereotypes, which is why they resonate with so many people. This is not only true when you think about negative stereotyping; it’s also true when you think about the way that you see the real tzadikim. Were they all perfect from day one?  Maybe not. Maybe they also had conflicts and struggles, and maybe those struggles were personal and unique.
Yaakov’s life could have kept him in therapy for decades. Knowing that you father loves your twin more than he loves you, living with a brother who despises everything that you treasure, leaving home in order to stay alive. The list goes on… His response to everything was to stay in reality and make choices from there.
The sages tell us that Yaakov’s primary trait was his sense of truth, and his ability to integrate it. Orchos tzadikim has an essay on truth. The author points out that reality is observed by the way G-d frames your life. If you reject reality by lying to other people and creating your own alternative reality, you are rejecting G-d’s blueprint for your life. If you lie to yourself, you are still not in touch with reality as He dishes it out. Yaakov could look at reality and find its meaning. When good things happened, he could see Hashem’s Hand. When he faced tragedy, deceit and the rest, he re-named it “challenge”, which is what it really was all along. Being able to live with reality is what made him free.

We all know people who are enslaved to their fears, insecurities, and desires. They wake up scared, and go to sleep scared. Their thoughts fly through their minds without much respite. All the maybes take up all of the space inside their minds and hearts. Maybe I’ll lose my job. Maybe they won’t like me, or what I stand for. Maybe I’ll end up alone, or poor, or rejected. Maybe I’ll have to give up what I treasure.
An interesting question in the Talmud is whether a slave really wants to be freed. One view is, “of course”, how can he not want to be equal to any other member of society? How can he possibly be content when he is someone else’s property? The other view is that he might enjoy the lack of responsibility and casual amorality of the life he is living as a slave.

When I saw the question I blush to say, that I fully understood the two sides….
What makes the issue more complex is that if the slave’s master knocks out his tooth or his eye, he must free him. If you see freedom as a goal, this is the best possible form of compensation. If you see freedom as a burden, (which the gemarrah sees as a real possibility), then by giving the slave freedom, you are making his life worse. You are doing the equivalent of putting salt on an open wound.

The Kotzker Rebbe resolved the question. He said that as long as someone is enslaved, it’s easier to stay where you are than to face freedom. The moment freedom is real (in this case after he lost his tooth or eye) then freedom is the most precious gift anyone could give you.

Are you free? Do you want to be free?

In the second chapter of Pirkei Avos, one of the greatest sages of all time, Rabi Yochanan ben Zakai, selects five of his students and gives them an assignment; find the best path to tread. They came to different conclusions. The first one is “ayin tovah”- have a good eye, which means looking at other people positively. It means not feeling that if they have more, it means that you have less. Their financial, family, religious, or emotional lives may objectively be better than yours. No one suggests that “all lives are equal”. They aren’t meant to be. The only way to do that, Rabbenu Yonah says, is by regarding your own life positively. It was designed by Hashem to fit your capacity to be the great person that you are destined to be. The other path, “ayin ra”, having a negative view of other people  inevitably generates slave mentality - you are not free to be yourself as long as you are engaged in the futile battle to live someone else’s life, with their tools and their destiny as the prize at the end of the road, you are never free to be yourself. The same principle applies to being a good friend or being a good neighbor. You can teach yourself to break out of the chains of tit for tat reciprocity. Do you think that you were born to be an underpaid social bookkeeper?  
The problem is that when you are a slave, living like a free man seems limiting! It’s easier to hold onto old fears, grudges, lose interpretations of the laws against lashon hara, etc. than it is to be free.
You are Yaakov’s descendant just like the rest of the members of The Tribe.

​The name of the Parshah is Vayeitzei meaning, “And he went “(in reference to Yaakov’s escape from Eisov by travelling to Haran). Maybe it’s good week to move on.
 
Always,
Tziporah