Rabbi’s Shabbat Message From Israel

This one was a first. I stopped at my neighborhood fruit stand this afternoon for some fruit for the room for Shabbat. And the very- Sefardic owner wished me “A Gite Shabbos.” A Yiddish quipping Moroccan Jew? Maybe the world does have some hope for speaking each other’s language. Would that the rest of our human dilemmas be as simple to resolve as a Sefardi wishing an Ashkenazi a Gite Shabbos followed by the crisply nasal response “Shabbat Shalom u-me-vorak” For the past two weeks in Jerusalem, about 130 rabbis (and a few cantors) from the US, Canada, Israel and South America have been assessing the origins, changes in meaning and application of this broad concept of “tikkun olam.” It immediately becomes clear that tikkun olam is not a matter simply of exchanging words or gestures and then, having felt good over those gestures, to return to the enclaves of sacred self. The fact is, we have responsibilities to ourselves and these are primary. The old “just enough resources for one” conundrum is Talmudic. If two people are lost in the desert and only one has his personal water canteen, he is under no obligation to share it with the other person if it means both will die. “Chayecha kodmim”– Your own life takes precedence. On the other side, Torah teaches us that a Jew is supposed to walk in the world with eyes attuned to need. Don’t walk past the fallen animal of your enemy. Return your competitor’s PDA. But be careful not to meddle too much. Everything is mitigated by an eye to the needs tempered by our own needs. From all of this, however, emerges the basis of our eyes darting between ourselves and others. It is the language of mitzvah. We engage in a wide range of activities, observances, rituals and behaviors not because they are self-gratifying but simply because they are the right thing to do. We assert that God is the basis and God’s commandments are the blueprint we follow in fixing this world. God is neither Ashkenazi, Sefardi, Persian, or any other of the Jewish ethnic divides and in fact would, if God were human, simultaneously express wishes for an enjoyable experience of the day of rest in every language Jews ever spoke or ever will. But strengthened by the force of my tradition and inspired by its words to walk in the world with an eye to repair, I now move to a time of no repair– to one of prayer and peace, to one of more food than I should be eating, to one of a sense of wholeness with my essence which can only be found in Yerushalayim.

Shabbat Shalom and a Gite Shabbos
–Rabbi Ned Soltz