Learning to Walk
"Congratulations. You are a winner. You won 6 free rib steaks!"
We donated $100 to NCSY, one of our favorite organizations in the world, and unbeknownst to me, we were automatically entered into a rib steak raffle drawing. This might have been the first time that I actually won a raffle, but when the steaks arrived, I pulled out my calendar, crunched the numbers, and discovered that the total value of the 6 steaks was $103.99, offsetting our $100 tzedakah donation, with a $3.99 profit margin—cha-ching!
But now I had a dilemma: the $100 that I donated to NCSY was money that I owed and earmarked for tzedakah, so this led me to an interesting question in Jewish law: Being that my $100 donation led to a profit of $103.99, do I still "owe" tzedakah another $100? (Additionally, being that we served and enjoyed the steaks on Shabbat, that added another layer of intrigue to the halachic dilemma...)
I went to speak to my rabbi about what Jewish law would say in such a situation, and then it dawned on me how amazing it is that Jewish law has a solution and an approach for literally every single aspect of our lives. Jewish Law is called halachah, which literally means "to walk." Jewish law is there to provide spiritual, practical and emotional guidance and navigation through every single aspect in our journeys.
As Jews, halachah teaches us how to act and react during life-cycle events, such as bris, bar and bat mitzvah, chuppah and shiva; the Jewish calendar like Shabbat and holidays; daily rituals, such as prayer, blessings, tallit and tefillin; special events, like Torah ceremonies and siyum (completing a section of Torah); financial advice, as in tzedakah and honesty, and so much more.
Halachah contains so much divine wisdom guiding us through observance of Shabbat as a weekly spiritual and emotional oasis, the observance of Yom Kippur as an annual soul-cleansing opportunity, or the observances of shiva as a cathartic and emotionally healing experience.
Halachah had much to say about how we observed Tisha B'av yesterday. To an outsider it must seem strange: fasting, sitting on the floor, mourning and crying over a building destroyed thousands of years ago, halfway across the world. Where's the relevance to our lives today? Perhaps 75 years ago in the Warsaw Ghetto there was a connection, but not in 2020 in the USA? Leaving aside, for now, the discussion of anti-Semitism in our modern world, and how safe should Jews really feel in the Diaspora, let's remember that Torah is not just divine wisdom but it's also timeless wisdom, so there must be relevance and meaning for us even in our modern era.
Speaking of Tisha B'av, another point to ponder is what about the importance of joyful living and serving G-d with happiness? How does Tisha B'av jive with that?
Long before Kenny Rogers sang, "You got to know when to hold 'em/know when to fold 'em," King Solomon wrote: "There is a time to weep and time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance." King Solomon is teaching us yet another facet about halachah. Halachah doesn't just mean learning how to walk, it means learning how to tell time, Jewish time, and I don't mean starting a Jewish affair fashionably late.
What I mean is that every person has times of joy and times of sorrow, and halachah provides tools to identify and maintain balance throughout all of those times. Just as learning how to walk involves learning balance and rhythm, left foot, right foot, step and repeat, so too does halachah teach us how to live a balanced life. How to ride with the highs and lows of the Jewish calendar as well as in our personal lives.
Happiness does not necessarily mean jumping up and down. Happiness means experiencing inner peace, the feeling which comes when a person infuses both the good and the bad times in our lives with self-improvement and meaning. So in truth, a person who follows the rhythm of halachah as well as the observances of the timeline of the Jewish calendar can access tools to live a full and meaningful life. Commemorating Tisha B'av even in 2020 in the USA provides tools for us to find and infuse meaning even in the challenging times in our lives.
But enough about Tisha B'av. That was so yesterday. Today I'm getting ready to celebrate Shabbos—steaks or no steaks!
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Koval