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.
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