Home
Sitemap
Latest Updates

Trawling through my files in search of some inspiration for services this weekend, I came across a sermon I delivered exactly ten years ago (July 3rd) in… Norwich! That marked the end of a happy year I had spent serving the PJCEA as a rabbinic student - and was precisely three days before I was ordained as a Rabbi!

The sermon related to the Torah portion of the week, Chukkat, Numbers 19:1-22:1, and I’d like to share it with you this month.

***

Moan, moan, moan. What a miserable group of people Moses had to shepherd through the desert on their journey from Egypt to the Promised Land. How did he cope with them, with their lack of faith? Did they not have enough proof of God’s ability to deliver them from danger and starvation, that they doubted, time and time again? Recurring themes in the story of our people’s wanderings in the wilderness are complaint and intercession. The Israelites keep complaining to Moses, and Moses continually intercedes on their behalf, to save them from destruction and decimation at the hands of an angry God.

Understandably perhaps, the Israelites keep losing sight of the goal towards which they are driving – of blessing, prosperity and plenty in a land of their own. The big picture eludes them and they become wrapped up in the worry or crisis of the moment.

Well, doesn’t this happen to all of us? We tend to worry about the details and forget about the larger plan of our lives, a glimpse of which now and then can adjust our perspective. A full and fulfilling life is forged by ALL our experiences – both those we perceive to be positive, and those we perceive to be negative.

‘Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding’, writes Kahlil Gibran (in The Prophet), ‘Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain. And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy; And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields. And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.’

This is surely one of the implicit messages of the Torah. I am constantly amazed by the insights and knowledge of human nature expressed in it. One of the reasons for its enduring value is that it presents people as they are and life as it is. None of our biblical heroes is perfect – they each have their flaws, their own meshuggas (‘craziness’). Jacob, one of our patriarchs, the father of the twelve tribes, whose name itself becomes Israel, is portrayed as a deceiver and a trickster. Moses is diffident to the point of driving even God to exasperation with him, not a person that other human beings would have selected to lead them out of slavery in Egypt to freedom in their own land. David, the ideal king, from whose line tradition says the Messiah will spring, is a truly manipulative, conniving and frankly rather unpleasant character. Yet these are our models. It is through them that God’s plan is worked out. None of us is perfect. The characters in the Torah are figures with whom we can relate. Reading between the lines, we can gain hope from the fact that the Divine works through people just like you and me. That what we call the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ go together, that both are part of the whole plan. Life is not about acknowledging the good, happy parts and ignoring the bad, sad ones. It is about accepting all the parts.

If things go wrong for us, or do not turn out as we had hoped or planned, often we might find that unexpected gifts follow on. I have recently been reading an excellent book, Kitchen Table Wisdom, by Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen. She is a doctor who works mainly with cancer patients and has lived with Crohn’s disease since the age of fifteen. Her book is a collection of true stories from her life and the lives of many with whom she has come into contact. Remarkable stories of ordinary people, some of whom have been able to turn apparent disaster into blessing.

One of my favourites is the story she tells about jigsaw puzzles. She writes: ‘All through my childhood, my parents kept a giant jigsaw puzzle set up on a puzzle table in the living room. My father, who had started all this, always hid the box top. The idea was to put the pieces together without knowing the picture ahead of time. Different members of the family and visiting friends would work on it, sometimes for only a few minutes at a time, until after several weeks hundreds and hundreds of pieces would each find their place.

‘Over the years, we finished dozens of these puzzles. In the end I got quite good at it and took a certain satisfaction in being the first one to see where a piece went or how two groups of pieces fit together. I especially loved the time when the first hint of pattern would emerge and I could see what had been there, hidden, all along.

‘The puzzle table was my father’s birthday present to my mother. I can see him setting it up and gleefully pouring the pieces of that first puzzle from the box onto the tabletop. I was three or four and I did not understand my mother’s delight. They hadn’t explained this game to me, doubtless thinking I was too young to participate. But I wanted to participate, even then.

‘Alone in the living room early one morning, I climbed on a chair and spread out the hundreds of loose pieces lying on the table. The pieces were fairly small; some were brightly coloured and some dark and shadowy. The dark ones seemed like spiders or insects, ugly and a little frightening. They made me feel uncomfortable. Gathering up a few of these, I climbed down and hid them under one of the sofa cushions. For several weeks, whenever I was alone in the living room, I would climb up on the chair, take a few more dark pieces, and add them to the cache under the cushion.

‘So this first puzzle took the family a very long time to finish. Frustrated, my mother finally counted the pieces and realised that more than a hundred were missing. She asked me if I had seen them. I told her then what I had done with the pieces I didn’t like and she rescued them and completed the puzzle. I remember watching her do this. As piece after dark piece was put in place and the picture emerged, I was astounded. I had not known there would be a picture. It was quite beautiful, a peaceful scene of a deserted beach. Without the pieces I had hidden, the game had made no sense.’

When we accept certain parts of our lives and deny others, we can only see life a piece at a time. Like the dark pieces of the puzzle, the difficult and sad events of our lives are a part of something larger. The glimpses we have of something hidden require accepting as a gift every last piece.

Living through my brother’s illness and death, and the aftermath of my nephew’s sudden death, it was a great struggle to see beyond the immediate tragedy. I would give my right arm to have them back again but, of course, this is not possible. And yet, out of these enormous tragedies, came a strength I did not previously know I possessed, and the courage and resolution to follow the path I am now on, and which it has been my great privilege and pleasure to share with you this past year.

We are always putting the pieces together without knowing the picture ahead of time. The meaning that emerges at times we least expect – whether times of great happiness or times of great loss and grief – can be transformative. It gives a kind of strength that comes from a position of freedom rather than control, from an ability to approach life with a sense of adventure, to take joy in the newness of each day and what it may bring, to have faith that it is all part of the divine plan, to trust that each of our experiences IS a small part of a big, beautiful picture.

***

— Rabbi Rachel Benjamin