Thoughts on No Longer Being the Parent of Children - Shelach Lecha

On this auspicious occasion – the Bat Mitzvah of my youngest child. Mazal Tov Eliana. I thought I could compare myself to God.

Spoiler alert, that might not mean what you think it means.

But here’s a way to retell the story of the spies, in fact it might be the simplest and most straightforward way to tell the story.

God says to Moses, appoint spies – let them to scout out the land.

And Moses sends spies – to scout out the land.

And the spies come back and say, “It’s a good land,” and then most of them say, “But we don’t think we can take it.”

And God is furious, that God decrees none of the generation of the spies deserves to make it into the Promised Land.

And if we were to construct a parable – a Mashal – LeMah HaDavar Domeh, as the Rabbis are so keen to say, what is this thing like?

One might suggest a suitable parable would be a parent who says to a teenage child just before they go out for the evening, “Sure, go out, stay out as late as you like.” And when the child comes back with a phone that ran out of battery hours ago at two in the morning, the parent is there, sitting on the stairs looking furious, so furious that the child gets grounded for the rest of the summer.

Any resemblance to the life of any parent and any child here, in Shul today, is of course, entirely co-incidental.

Or perhaps, it we are looking to make our parable a little less unfair on the parent maybe this.

Mashal, Lemah HaDavar Domeh – what is this like, but the child says, “but you told me it was OK to stay out as late as I wanted.” And the parent responds, “what I meant was for you to take a mature and sensible decision as to the right time to come home.”

As I say, any resemblance to the life of any parent and any child here, in Shul today, is of course, entirely co-incidental.

It’s not the first time I, as a parent and a lover of the Torah, I’ve been troubled about the way instructions are set forth by God. After all, I’m not only a parent, I’ve been a child as well.

Way, way back in the Book of Genesis, God put the first human being in the Garden of Eden and says to them, eat anything you like, just not the fruit from this one tree, right here in the middle of the garden.

And when Eve and Adam eat from the fruit …

Mashal LeMah Hadavar Domeh – what parable could this be compared to?

A parent who says to a small child, you can play with any of the toys in the room, just don’t play with the computer that’s plugged in, switched on and sitting in the corner of the room.

And when the child is found to have been playing on the computer …

And, of course, Adam and Eve shouldn’t have eaten the fruit, and of course the child shouldn’t play on the computer, but what would say about the parenting of a parent who puts a child in a room with a computer and walks away having told the child not to.

Of course these two examples aren’t really the same; in one case the parent told the kid what to do and the kid did it and got in trouble. In the other, the parent told the kid what not to do and the kid did it and got in trouble.

But I wonder the extent to which any of the children here – any of us who have ever been children, might be struck by the way in which being parented can sometimes feel like that.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Any resemblance to the life of any maturing adult here, in Shul today, is of course, entirely co-incidental.

But there is something deeper, I think, about this comparison between being a parent and – forgive the hubris and possibly even the heresy – God, creator of heavens and earth and everything in it.

There is the classic Rabbinic idea that God felt somehow desperately alone in God’s absolute perfect power and so sought to create this world so God would have something with which to relate – something to point to as an achievement in life. And the thing that God decides to create – you, me, all us humans – is not some kind of blind automaton, that robotically does exactly what God wants, precisely as God wants it. The thing that God decides to create – you, me, all us humans – is a creature endowed with a certain freedom of choice, a certain jumble of competing instincts and inclinations, a being that grows from immaturity towards maturity, but sometimes – let it be admitted – not always perfectly moving from one to the other in a uniform straight line.

The thing that God decides to create – you, me, all us humans – is a being who is not minutely controlled by God – not a computer game avatar toggling left or right depending on which key is pressed, but somehow makes up our own mind to love God, and follow in all the paths that God sets out for us without being moved about pixel by pixel.

And yet there is this paradox at the heart of the creation of the first human being and every human being since. You can’t have a human being with freedom of choice who does exactly the thing we want them to do.

That’s just not how it works.

And the thing that God has to learn to do, and it takes some of the greatest leaders of our tradition to help God into this relationship with us, all of human creation, …

The thing God has to learn to do is find a way to allow us space to explore a bit, fail a bit, fail badly sometimes, maybe even many times. The thing God needs to learn to do is not bring Mot TaMut – thou shalt surely die – retribution on God’s creation every time they – we – trip up and eat of the fruit or bottle it and fail to realise of course we can take the land, or pass the exam or succeed in any journey to which we apply ourselves seriously. There’s even a Pulitzer-winning book, God: A Biography, by the former Jesuit seminarian, Jack Miles, in which the author suggests that God finds it so difficult to be in a relationship with human beings who trip up, fail, fail badly even sometimes, that God goes into a sort of withdrawal – what the Rabbis call Hester Panim – hiding of the Divine presence is a consequence of God finding the way in which live out our freedom of choice NOT to do the thing that God wants us to do too difficult.

And as a parent, thinking back to that time, dear Eli, when you and your brothers weren’t even a twinkle in our eyes when I think back to those romantic days so many years ago, I have an empathy with God’s frustrations at me as a failing human. I feel a certain level of empathy with God finding it impossible to have a creation of God’s own efforts who of their own free volition chooses to have precisely the same aspirations and goals and sensitivities as a parent would wish for a child.

But that’s not the only thing I feel, and on a day like today, it’s the least of my emotions. The overwhelming emotion that just floods out everything else is the intense sense of pride in seeing the different decisions you make, even as you make decisions I would never have made. Yes, you still drive me occasionally to the point of distraction, but if forced to choose between some automaton that would perform precisely as programmed and the reality of a real human being who makes their own exploratory way in the world. I would take you. Every time.

There’s that wonderful Yiddish phrase – to Shepp Nachas. Shepp means derive, or something like that. And Nachas is the thing you feel when your daughter has her Bat Mitzvah. Other examples are available, but this is the one I’m going with this weekend. It’s wonderful and quite untranslatable, but it requires two things – on the one hand, you only feel Nachas when there is something you have put into this extraordinary creation. But on the other hand you only feel Nachas when your child has found their own way and their way is different from your way, or even from your wife’s way, it’s her own way.

And now, with, certainly your brothers, and even increasingly you – my newly Bat Mitzva’ed adult – and don’t you know it – capable of making your own decisions and controlling your own future in your own increasingly independent way, I wonder if God isn’t merely in retreat having given up on us as useless, but rather is up there Shepping Nachas. God deserves to Shep Nachas, even if we fail, and goodness we fail.

And this thing called parenting, that we experience, it becomes a different thing, at this point, from this point.

Parenting can no longer be the categorical announcement of instruction. It can’t even be the half-opened-up suggestion that, sometimes, is followed and sometimes isn’t and when it isn’t is followed up with the grouchy face of the parent who told their kids to choose their own time to come home and finds the kids arriving at 2am. It has to be a willed desire to Shepp Nachas in the ways in which our creations are not like us. It has to be a willed desire to empower choices even when we don’t understand the choices, or would never make those choices ourselves.

Arik Einstein, the great Israeli singer and lyricist, perhaps put it best.

Hagozalim sheli azvu et haken
parsu knafayim ve'afu
Va'ani tzipor zkena nisharti baken
mekave me'od shehakol yihe beseder

My chicks have left the nest
spread their wings and flew away
I am an old bird left in the nest
I hope that all will be well

Tamid yadati sheyavo hayom
shebo tzarich lehipared
Aval achsahv ze ba li kacha pit'om
az ma hapele she'ani ktzat do'eg

I always knew the day will come
to say good bye
But now when it is here
no wonder I’m a little tender

Ani yode'a shekacha ze bateva
vegam ani azavti ken
Aval achshav ksheba harega az
machnik ktzat bagron

I know it is the way of nature
I left the nest as well
But now when the time comes
I feel a lump in my throat.

 

The time comes to hold this gift of being a parent with such fierce love, that we let go, and send a blessing on your future flight. And prepare still to nudge and boss around and insist and hold to account, but knowing that the pathway leads only towards the option of seeking Nachas.

And feeling deep love.

We should all be so blessed.

Even God.

 

How To Bend the World Towards Love - Parshat Shelach

 It’s exam season, here’s a little physics, for those of us who still shudder at the thought of spending these weeks desperately trying to remember Newton’s First Law of Motion, or some such.

An object, Newton articulated, will remain in uniform motion, in a straight line unless compelled to change its state by the action of an external force.

I’m not, you are probably relieved to hear, going to give a sermon on exam stresses, or Physics. But I am interested in the way in which we travel – in uniform motion or in a changed state – through our lives.

I am interested in the way in which once set in motion, we continue – which is fine if we were set in motion running directly alongside every other human being in the world, each of us set in motion exactly in unison, so we can all travel together in this lonely world.

But what if, for whatever reason, we weren’t set into the world in such perfect alignment with our fellows? What if, what with us all being unique and individual and even deliberately created unique and individual, we were created in diversity – different attitudes, different abilities, different goals, different loves and different hates. If that is the case, then the straight lines go off in opposition.

I mean, if that is the case, and I think that really is the case, then the journey through life would be one of increasingly discovering one’s aloneness, one’s opposition and the loss of fellow travellers. And it really can, in this strange world in which we live, too often feel as if we are increasingly siloed and at odds and in opposition.

If that is the case, then surely the single most important lesson we could imagine, the single most important thing to discover is how to be, as Newton put it, an external force that can pull us away from our straight lines, bend us towards one another, align us, rather than leave us to our lonely straight lines of uninterrupted wandering.

I want to look at Moses, Moshe Rabeinu, in this context, and in particular, the remarkable moment in the heart of the story we read today.

The spies go off. They come back with a bad report – dibat ha-aretz. And the dibah, the Torah tells us, spreads through the camp, vyotziu dibat Haaretz - and soon everyone is heading off in their own directions of mistrust and fear and opposition. And the unity of the people is falling apart.

And it gets worse. When the report of these revolting spies reaches God, God decides God has had enough, “How long will this people despise me [says God,] I will smite them with pestilence and destroy them.” And here we have our scene, of the people heading off in their varying directions of diba – bad-mouthing the land and the leadership, and God, God, heading off in a direction of destruction.

And then along comes this external force, a force that succeeds in changing the will of God, and bending the straight lines from opposition and conflagration into something more hopeful.

Moses starts with a brilliant ploy – God, if you destroy the Children of Israel now, all the other nations will think it’s because you weren’t able to bring them into the Land as you promised.

It’s an appeal to God’s sense of self – God wants to be seen to be powerful. The Children of Israel don’t see that, so God is ready to destroy them, but wait, Moses says, if you do, everyone else will think you are lacking in power.

There’s a lovely comment on this in the Talmud Brachot.

“What,” the Rabbis imagine God responding to Moses (brachot 32a), “what do you mean the people won’t think I’m powerful, didn’t they see the miracles I wrought when the Children of Israel crossed the sea?” “Ah,” they imagine Moses responding, “they’ll think it was just that you were more powerful than that bumpkin Pharoah.” The Talmud doesn’t use the term ‘bumpkin.’

The way to change the will of God, the way to bend disparate and disparating forces in the world is to meet them where they are, and persuade them it is in their interests to bend, persuade them that the bigger truths of who they wish to be are only available if they change course. That takes guts and sophistication and a particular kind of emotional intelligence. All of which Moses possess.

But this opening salvo is just the warmup. Moses returns with one of the most remarkable speeches in all of the Torah.

"Now may God’s strength be made greater, just as you have declared: The LORD is slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.' In accordance with your great love, forgive the sin of these people, just as you have pardoned them from the time they left Egypt until now."

And God changes.

God replies, I will forgive them, as they request. We use that phrasing still, right through Yom Kippur – Vesalachti Kidvarecha. Moses saves the children of Israel, Moses bends the will of God towards compassion and great love, away from anger – justifiable as it may be – and destructiveness.

Again, the rabbis capture and amplify what is quite so remarkable about this brief speech.

Make great – they ask in Midrash Yelamdeinu – how is it great for God to let the children of Israel off the punishment that is their definite due? The answer comes - Make your aspect of mercy greater than your aspect of strict judgement.

There is even, in some scrolls, a tradition of writing one of the letters of ‘Make great’  supersize in our Torah scrolls. It’s the letter Yud of Yigdal – the letter that makes the word ‘great’ – Gadol – into a verb in the imperfect, incompleted form – you are not quite at your greatest yet, Moses is saying to God, you need to get even greater, and the way to do that is to develop the ability to forgive and show a capacity to forgive that, frankly, God has failed to show before;

And what a list of characteristics Moses reminds God are utterly essential to the way in which God wishes to be, even if they are not the way God has just said God will respond.

Slow to anger?

Forgiving sin and rebellion?

Sure God will punish the evildoers, but Moses allows God to find a place of softness, and Moses allows God to find the ability to define God’s self from that place of softness.

And Moses saves a future for the people of Israel.

Again, there’s a lovely Rabbinic moment – in Sanhedrin 110 a-b - when the Rabbis imagine Moses and God on the mountain, and God is giving dictation to Moses. I’m going to be slow to anger, God says, “Really?” Says Moses, “even to the wicked,” “Trust me,” says God, “You’re going to need it when they rebel.”

I love this kind of rabbinic interplay – sharpening and heightening the relationship between Moses and God. One leans into the other, and the other leans back.

God lift Moses up, higher than any human, and in return Moses pulls God higher, higher, even than God aspired to be.

This is how we can bend in towards one another, in a world where, without empathy, seeking out points of contact and calling each of us towards the person we wish to be – rather than that which we become when our tempers fray and our patience is tested.

This is how the world can be healed.

May we all be merited to find such encounters in our own lives – may we have people who can bend us towards better versions of ourselves.
And may we all have the courage to bend others, to lift them too towards their better selves so we may all live in a world less lonely and more united in love.

 

Shabbat Shalom