There are a lot of ideas floating around the airwaves. How to think how to eat what to say yes to what to buy how much we need; it all seeps in like a cult’s brainwashing even through the most innocent radio stations.
And I’m as prone as anyone. Sometimes after being about the world for too long I’ll start thinking I need something or I’m lacking something. Yet in two seconds or less the right words words of Torah ideas and values can restore me and remind me what I’m really committed to.
I know a young girl who decided she was going to do 45 minutes on her new treadmill every day no matter what.
For three days she does it. No problem. On the fourth day her MP3 with her exercise playlists breaks.
She wants to give up feeling the world isn’t supporting her. But someone helps her find a solution so she works out anyway. On the fifth day the treadmill starts smoking. But she exercises anyway. She could have concluded the world really doesn’t want her to exercise but instead she demands the company send a repairman that day and for some strange reason they listen.
Every day for two weeks something happened to hinder her commitment to do this good and very necessary thing for herself.
Her first step was to realize she needed to make a commitment to doing something essential for her health no matter what. So she bought a new treadmill. Bought a new MP3. Invested all her resources.
The same is true for our spiritual nourishment; our soul needs commitment and daily exercise.
The next step is to know that many things will try to stop us.
I have a friend who told me that she always used to find some creature when she checked rice for bugs. But for the past year she hasn’t found a single bug. “I’m worried ” she said. “Very worried. I’ve started to wonder if G-d has given up on me or is my checking not as thorough?”
She told me that once she checked barley and found nothing but right after she added it to her cholent she saw something moving — bugs in the barley. At first she felt frustrated she had to make a whole new cholent but then she realized how grateful she was for the test because she knew it was G-d testing her and trusting her to pass it. Like a pots and pans salesman who bangs on them to show their strength.
And I think of the Holocaust and my dear father-in-law z”l. I think of the first day he came to live in Eretz Yisrael at 92 years old. I remember how we ran up the stairs to his apartment for the first time with a bouquet of roses because he had written poems about his mother’s 100 rosebushes.
When we walked in the door and saw him sitting at the table he still had that air of a world we will never see an air that clung to him through the war and after. An air that clung to him way beyond the waters of the Danube in which he escaped. A majestic Jewish aura the Nazis couldn’t take from him although they tried.
His book recounts all the ways they tried to steal or rip or disintegrate his Jewish identity. And every day was a challenge to his existence as a Jew. But he’d committed to daven and put on tefillin every day. And he ran and hid and survived.
I don’t think the war ended in 1945.
It just has a new face.
When I am challenged by all the messages and pulls in the world I think of my father-in-law and see his face rock-solid against the forces that wanted him to betray his truth.
When Yosef Hatzaddik was challenged he saw his father’s face. —