Reaping Blessing Through Wrestling

You should never argue with a crazy mind
You oughta know by now...
It seems such a waste of time
If that's what it's all about
If that’s movin’ up then I’m movin’ out.
(Billy Joel)

Wrestling is hard work.  It can be painful in the moment, and it can leave a person exhausted and disfigured.  In this week’s Torah portion, Jacob wrestles, and comes away with two things: a lifelong limp and a new name.  Israel - one who wrestles with God - becomes his name, and it also becomes our name, the name of all of the descendants of his father and grandfather.

One of my personal mottos is na’aseh venishmah, literally “we will do and we will understand,” but what I understand to mean “do the next right thing.”  Sometimes we need to do in order to understand.

This is also a place of intense wrestling - wrestling with the godliness within, wrestling to understand God’s desire for me.  If I don’t understand, then how do I know it is the right thing? What part does gut feeling play in some of the most important decisions I might make as a result?

As a place of wrestling, it is a place of scarification, a place that cuts into me with permanence. Doing the next right thing requires knowing when to wrestle, when to keep up the fight. It also demands that I know when not to wrestle, when to let go, when to walk away from the fight. Sometimes that’s the hardest thing - letting go before the wounds get to deep. 

There are things to give up on, and there are things not to give up on.  I had a conversation with a colleague, recently, about responding pastorally to a family around suicide.  I have been on both sides, having lost a brother and a close friend to suicide, and having officiated at funerals for suicides.  I understand suicide to come at a moment when an individual has given up on everything.  I see that - but I don’t fully understand it, and I hope that I never will.

But actually, that’s the key word - hope.  It is a remarkable thing, always creeping up when the wrestling - when the decision about how to wrestle and when to let go - is at its worst, when I think I’ll never figure it out.  Hope creeps in and reminds me of one of my other personal mottos, gam zeh ya’avor, “this too shall pass.”  Clearly, this is something that someone in the midst of suicide cannot or will not grasp.  But for me it has led to some of the most beautiful experiences in my life.

I wrestled, angrily, with God over infertility.  I couldn’t stand the pain.  I shouted and a quarreled with God as friends and colleagues brought child after child into this world. But even when I laughed in disbelief, hope crept in - day after day, month after month, year after year.  Today, I dance with Torah today because my son desires it.  My son, the beloved neshama I thought I had lost during those days of wrestling.  He came only after I let go of the wrestling.

When I wrestle with God over things big and small, hope creeps in, I remember that this too shall pass, and I try to do the next right thing, even when I don’t understand it.  Even if things don’t get better on my timeline, the world brings so many blessings that it’s worth the fight.

Fixity and Flexibility

The hardest part of religion (or any part of life, frankly), for me, is that which is fixed.  I don’t like to follow rules.  The more rules you give me, the more I rebel - inside if not out.  Tell me that I have to do something a certain way, and that’s the only way I don’t want to, almost can’t, do it.

Perhaps this is a case of “point a finger out and three are pointing back.”  When I ask people to do things, I sometimes expect them to be done a certain way.  

Over the years, though, I’ve grown more flexible in the latter (I think) than in the former. I’ve grown deeply aware that things can get done well and properly even (and sometimes especially) if it isn’t done the way I expect it to be done.  But if someone tells me something has to be done a certain way, I still fight.

When I’m working on a project, large or small, I am prone to extreme flexibility - not setting anything in stone ever.  As a rabbi, if I am leading services, I frequently make choices in the midst of the service, based on who is present or a feeling in the moment, to add or skip a song or reading.  At a bigger event like the Community Day we did last Sunday, our Hebrew School students sharing their learning from the first third of the year, I am open to changes in the order of presentations even after the program is printed.  

I like the fluidity of water and dreams, ever changing and changeable.  In this week’s Torah reading, Jacob sees the ladder with angels ascending and descending.  As I understand dreams to be of us, I see Jacob processing his world.  When he wakes and says, “God was in this place and I, I did not know!” I think he is saying that his heart, which knew, was telling his head, which had not grasped that God is everywhere.

Head and heart.  Different parts of our body, in both of which thought forms and action derives.  Forgive me a bit of spin - the head is the place of fixity, of fixed ideas and of “set-in-stone” action, and the heart is the place of fluidity, of open ideas and flexible action.  

Both head and heart, both fixed plans and flexibility, are valuable.  When we choose to attend an event -- a play, a religious service, a carnival -- we expect certain things, because those event names carry some fixed meaning.  But if every play is the same, if every religious service is identical, sameness becomes droll.  We want something different -- a new inflection for Tevye or MacBeth, a different sermon or an innovative prayer that reaches out to where we are, a new ride at the carnival.

God of Jacob, dreamer of angels, dreamer of heavens, hear my prayer!  Give me courage not to require others to do things "my way," and strength to be flexible to all that comes my way, including fixity demanded by others.