Sermons and Divrei Torah
Keeping It Small
by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein
(Sermon - Yom Kippur 5763)
A friend of mine, Rabbi Danny Gottlieb, shared with me the following
story: Once, in a small village, there lived a poor tailor who just barely
subsisted from Shabbos to Shabbos. He worked hard all week long, sewing and
mending and stitching and fixing. And on Shabbat, he would sit at his table
and enjoy a little restful time with his only child, a charming and beautiful
daughter. But he had a strange habit. Each Friday afternoon, after he closed
his small shop, he would gather up the fallen pieces of material, the wasted
ends and the odd shaped remnants, and he would lovingly sew each one into a
tiny, perfect square, and put it inside a box with the squares he had created
the Fridays before. Week by week he would turn each misshapen little shmatte
into a perfect, tiny square. One happy day, his daughter became betrothed to
be married. She tearfully came to her father to inquire about a wedding dress,
knowing they could never afford one. With joy and excitement, he took her hand
and led her to the back of the shop. There upon a hanger was the most magnificent
wedding gown the town would ever see, made of tiny little squares, each one
different, each one perfect, sewn together into a gorgeous pattern.
The secret is: to be ready, willing, and able to take small pieces, and weave
them into something of immense value.
The High Holy Days themselves are so dramatic, so imposing, designed to make
us feel the grandeur of the day, that sometimes it is helpful to experience that
loftiness through smaller lenses. Concentrating on seeing the trees for the
forest is the notion behind the confession, when we meditate on, and then
verbalize, each small seemingly unnoticed failing and mistake. We remember the
small details, we craft each thought and each word, for the yud, the smallest
letter, is also the grandest, as it is the first in the four letter name of God.
A couple of months ago I was speaking with a student whose father is in the
advanced stages of senility. I asked him how he was coping with it, and his
answer was profound; so profound I asked his permission to quote it tonight.
Here is what he had said: “You know, I realize that my father’s
world has become very small. It’s now my job to keep that small world
safe, and comfortable; and to keep it simple. Since I’ve come to that
realization, caring for him has become much easier. It seems so much more
manageable.“
Keep it simple, and small. Safe and comfortable. Why do we have to be so
complicated all the time? We are convinced that we need all these complicated
tools to simplify our lives. How many phone numbers do you have to memorize
in your life: your home phone, your home fax, your work phone, your work
fax, your cell phone, your spouse’s cell phone; how many passwords do
you carry, your bank, your credit card, your alarm system, your voice mail
at home, your voice mail at work. I’m exhausted just from memorizing
all these numbers, designed, I’m told, to make my life “easier.”
But what if we really could make our lives easier? This summer I took my kids
to the circus. I hated it. My family always feels like a three ring circus-
why should I pay good money to see someone else’s? I simply could not
concentrate on any of the acts because there were three acts going on simultaneously.
Simplifying would help us focus on one act at a time in our lives. Many Hasidic Rabbis
were famous for taking one mitzvah, just one mitzvah, and becoming perfectionists in
that one. One day a disciple of a rebbe asked him, “Which mitzvah did your father
consider the most important?” “Thats easy” he answered. “Whatever
mitzvah he was doing at the moment.” Simplifying would enable us to be in the
moment we are in, to do what we are doing fully at the moment we are doing it,
and appreciate what we have while we have it.
What if we made a vow to make it our job this year just to keep our small world
safe, and comfortable? I think we’d feel that it was so much more manageable.
Our worlds are sometimes so big, so complex that this “smallness” might
come as a blessing to us. Whenever someone asks you how you are, aren’t you
tempted to say, “I’m on overload, I have too much on my plate, I can’t
even stop to tell you how I am because it would take too much time to unpack all the
levels of the answer tot hat question!” Think global, we are taught. The personal
is political, we are told. We think we have to conquer new worlds to make a difference.
People have asked my husband and I about our sabbatical plans this coming year,
knowing we will be spending some of that time in Israel. “Our plan” I tell
them, “is to bring peace to the region in the first two weeks, and then get some
touring in.” But we have to not only think globally, we also have to act locally.
Sometimes, we just have to have permission to keep it simple and it will get done.
Maimonides teaches this in regard to tzedakah, when he teaches his concentric circles
of giving. We all have limited resources, so he suggests dividing them wisely: first,
to yourself; then, to your immediate family; then, to your wider family; then to your
community, then to your village, to your province, to your country and then to the
world. While we might wish this guidance to be more universal, taking into account
our ultimate responsibility for the entire human race, it is in effect extremely
realistic and practical. Each of us has limited resources, and one of our greatest
frustrations is that we constantly forget—or deny—that we do. Then we
spread ourselves too thin, and we feel that stretch and its subsequent pain. We
are always harried, always frantic, always hectic. We need a holiday to relax,
and then we fill our holidays with so much activities that when we return home we
usually complain that we need a holiday from our holiday. We stretch our budgets
and then need to cut back. We wish we had more time, more money, more energy for
the closer of the circles, for the closest of the circles—ourselves and our
families—and then we wonder why we are rushed all the time. Maimonides
teaching is our permission to move inward just a bit, to start from the circle
closest to you.
So here is a Jewish concept of smallness I find helpful: In traditional circles,
a man is only allowed to walk four cubits without his head covered. Those four
cubits are called in Hebrew daled amot, and that phrase daled amot has come to be
a symbol of the necessary fence around us, to keep us safe and comfortable in our
own small universes. Each person, tradition suggests,has their “daled amot”
in which they move and walk and live. If we could just keep our own daled amot clean
and organized and holy, then when we left that small private pace and ventured out
into the larger world, each one of us, coming from a holy and grounded smaller space
would be able to manage and handle the larger challenges in front of us.
This year, can we keep our 'daled amot' in focus as we attempt to manage the
already unmanageable pace of our lives? Can we enrich, and deepen, and make safe
and comfortable the lives of the people next to us first? It is true that Hillel
said “If I am only for myself what am I” but he began with “If I
am not for myself, who will be for me?” Now I am all for selflessness, all
for volunteerism, all for giving, but do you know the story of the Giving Tree?
The tree gives and gives until there is nothing left of it. You can’t be a
good parent, or a good friend, or a good worker, or a good Jew, if you don’t
pay attention to your own life first. If you are not for yourself, who will be for
you? The life of the spirit demands that we pay attention to our needs this year,
that we eat properly, and exercise, and take the time to think and read and pray
and do the things we love and which give us a feeling of satisfaction. And then
we can be for others.
And then we can be for our kids. Move their circle just a little closer to our own. I
don’t mean take them to less museums or don’t travel with them: we are so
blessed to live in an era when we can fly around the world with kids, when we can
open up other cultures and ways of life to them. I mean can we deprogramme them
just a little so they feel they have valuable time with us now, when we are young
enough to enjoy them and run with them and climb with them and watch them grow?
People have heard me say many times that the best thing we can do for our kids
is turn off the constant babysitting of the tv; Ann Landers once wrote that
television has proven that people will look at anything rather than at each
other. A story if told of the little girl getting ready for school who asks her
mom to help her button her dress. “I’m too busy dear” the
mother says, “why don;y do you do it yourself” to which the little
girl replies, “My gosh! Whatever would I do without myself?” I know
this may sound strange, but I’ve written books and I’ve met with
dignitaries and I’ve been president and chairperson of fancy organizations,
but when it’s all over, I hope my kids say I was a good mom.
And then, we can be for our parents. A rabbinic colleague of mine tells a story
about a young girl in his shul who felt overwhelmed by her parents constantly
telling her what to do “because we are your parents.” One day, in
utter frustration and anger, she blurted out to them, “You know, one day
I will be big— and by then you will be small.” Our aging parents not
only get physically smaller—thats now a proven fact, especially among
women—but they feel their statures so much smaller by society around us.
Hey, I know its not easy: I am the bologna in the sandwich generation of my
own family. My mother, who is here tonight, lives with us, and when we all
decided we wanted her to move in to our home, one of my children declared with
great wisdom, “You know, the commandment to honour your parents is not
really given to kids. It’s easy for us to honour you” he said, “cause
you give us everything we need and well, we still need you. I think the commandment
of honour your parents was given to people who are already older, parents themselves,
to make sure they still honour their parents, cause, they just don’t need them
so much anymore.” If you are young, or your parents are still young, store
this lesson away for the future: one day, you will be big and they will be small,
and they will need you maybe more than you need them, and it will be your job to
keep their worlds safe and comfortable, because thats what they did for you when
you were small.
And then we can be for our partners and our friends. If we are lucky, we have found
in our lives just a handful—less than a minyan, even—of special friends
whom we really love and who really love us. I don’t mean acquaintances,
business partners, “friends” from work. I mean a “chaver in
leben,” a real soul mate, a person you can tell anything to and hear anything
from. Like that hokey Hallmark card mug that says, “A true friend is the
only one who can tell you how stupid you really are being, and you still love
them.” Many of us labour under the false perspective of TV shows like
Cheers that we can walk into a bar and be friends with everyone there. Many
of us count our success in life based on how “popular” we are, left
over feelings from high school that the more friends we have, the clear the
indication that we are good people, worthwhile and valuable. Here is what I
have learned in life, after doing scores of weddings and baby namings and
funerals: all you really need when its all over is a very small circle whom
you trusted to take care of you when you were down, and who could tell you how
stupid you were being and still love you. The rest, as they say, is icing on
the cake.
And then we can be for our our Jewish community right here in Toronto. People
are always looking for something, it seems sometimes like we are such a
spiritually restless community. I think many of us are looking for the perfect
shul, the perfect day school, the perfect Jewish organization, the perfect
Jewish experience. Well, the bad news is we aren’t perfect so none of
those perfect Jewish places exist. What we do have is the potential to build
a spiritually satisfying community if we would invest in it as a focus of
our lives, not just wish for it and pine for it and complain about it. If
we would sew the corners of that little square, our community, with
concentration and energy and attention. If we didn’t expect it to be
done “for us”, if we didn’t want to sit back and be entertained
and educated and passively receive but if we were willing to do something,
to give something of ourselves to make that square shine.
Those then are our concentric circles, our small squares of fabric: ourselves,
our families and friends, our community. Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, a scientist
accused in the 50’s of being a Communist, denounced by his coworkers and
tried for treason, wrote the following after his trial, “ Each of us, knowing
his limitations, knowing the evils of superficiality and the terrors of fatigue,
will have to cling to what is close to him...to his friends and his tradition, to
love, lest he be dissolved in a universal confusion and know nothing and love
nothing.” Love and cling to what is close. Master that which is at hand
instead of conquering worlds far away. Practice a universalism rooted in the love
of the particular. If we would pay close attention to our small squares this year,
if we keep them safe and comfortable and familiar, we’ll feel safe, and comfortable.
Then we would be ready, and willing, and able to move out from there to the wider
community and its needs. Sometimes it’s easier to repair something big when
you start with the smaller corner.
By paying attention to each small piece, we, like the poor tailor, may be able
to make something incredibly beautiful. If each of us would demand of ourselves
that we carefully stitch the corners of our own small square until they are
perfect, we’d be ready to sew them together with another square which
had been stitched carefully by its owner, and then stitch those squares with
yet another and another, creating the pattern. And maybe then God will stitch
them together into one heck of a marvelous gown.
Sermons and Divrei Torah
Additional Resources
Elul: Period of Preparation
Yamim Noraim: Days of Awe
Rosh Hashanah: Introduction
Shofar Symbolism
The Custom of Tashlich
Yom Kippur: Introduction
G'mar Chatima Tova...
