One’s Place in the World (A Primer for Shavuot) |
Approaching Passover, the main theme is to rid your household of leavened bread—meaning the type that we normally eat—in all of its varieties, from loaves to crumbs and any mixtures in between. It is a huge operation because throughout the year those crumbs accumulate in the most unexpected places. Everyone has a story of a stale piece of bread found in an infrequently worn jacket. That’s a disaster in the making and as great as the wonder of what it was doing there, is the sense of gratitude that it was found in time. Often, the end result of this crazy Jewish spring cleaning is that the participants arrive at the table on the first night of Passover totally exhausted, just when they are called upon to tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt that lasts a few hours, in addition to being required to drink four cups of wine during the telling. Tap your head with one hand and rub circles on your belly with the other.
Not surprisingly with the Jews, there is a mystical correlation to this sweeping of crumbs from the kitchen floor, and that is to sweep the crumbs from our souls, to throw out the fat loaves of bread suffocating our hearts and preventing us from drawing closer to our Creator. It is the work of the heart, and it needs to be done in parallel with the work of the vacuum cleaner. This year I put myself to perform this inner cleaning to the best of my ability.
This was fitting for one who has taken on serious Jewish study in his retirement. First and foremost, serious Jewish study means one-on-one study with a chavruta, or study partner. Finding the right chavruta is important. Ideally, you want someone who is more knowledgeable than oneself so to be “pulled up.” But not too much more knowledgeable, so as not to find oneself unable to add anything to the studying that is of value to your partner. When you find the right balance is where the magic begins. My chavruta is a few years older than me, originally from Nir Galim, the moshav founded by Hungarian religious Zionist survivors of the Holocaust near Ashdod.
The mystery is what my chavruta sees in me. I have had some learning over the years, but compared to how we learn today, I came to our partnership woefully ill prepared. What that meant when we started about a year and a half ago was that I needed to prepare myself before our study sessions. Something like an hour preparation for a two-hour study session. This, along with our evening Talmud group and various classes on Jewish thought brought my daily study load to about five hours. For over a year I had felt that it was enough, that I needn’t demand of myself anything more.
That is, until just before this Passover, when I searched my soul for superfluous leaven. I found it in abundance. Mostly it involved the internal workings of the soul—isn’t that a never-ending fight? —but there was one actionable crust of mouldy bread that was easily rectified. Review. All this studying was wonderful for the soul, but without extensive review, it’s an in-and-out burger. True, something of the material is always retained, but there is only one test in Jewish learning: Can you pass it on? Having a general idea in your mind about some subject matter is far from being able to explain that subject matter to your chavruta, or for that matter, to your child, as the Torah commands.
I made the decision to begin reviewing, and that meant blocking out another part of my day. I would begin slowly, reviewing for only one hour a day. Since Passover was close, I decided that this new arrangement could wait a week until after the holiday. And that small deferment, that mañana moment, would become for me the crustiest and mouldiest morsel of leaven by far. That’s how I came to see it.
The great unravelling began at the very end of the first day of Passover. I hurried to get to synagogue for the evening prayer that would see off the first day of the holiday. After I had rounded the corner near my house and on to the straight stretch that led to synagogue, I noticed that I had a silent shadow. It was my younger daughter’s youngest child, a precocious six-and-a-half-year-old boy. He knew that if he remained undetected long enough that I would not have time to take him back and still make prayer on time. I paused and........