Hello, my dear community – “local call!” as I’ve been crowing when I pick up the phone to say hello to one after another of my friends and family. I am home from my journey – my southern-hemisphere tan already fading, experiences already becoming memories and settling in to my cells. It was a wonderful, rich, challenging time of travel. I am grateful for all of it. And so very happy to be home, in my real life, with the people I really love.
And of course I am hearing everyone’s news at once – illnesses, break-ups, losses, birthdays, new jobs and all the rest. And suddenly I remember how I felt when I came home last year from my first three months away. Life suddenly felt so “thick.”
Of course when I was traveling – even planting myself for five or ten weeks in one community, joining a group as a volunteer – no one really needed me. Last year and this year, when I rolled in to town, the director of the TB Centre gave me a list of tasks to do. And I did them as well as I could. But if I hadn’t come, someone else would have done those jobs. Or they wouldn’t get done. It didn’t really matter if I walked in at noon instead of 8 AM, or didn’t come in at all. “Thank you, Margaret!!” people would say if I managed to accomplish anything. Because no one had a lot of expectations either way… This year when I returned to the TB Centre, because I knew people a bit, I was more aware of inside squabbles, people on the outs with each other for one reason or another. But I had no reason to take sides. They weren’t my problems. I had few decisions to make and only the most temporary responsibilities. It was a nice, light feeling not to be in the middle of everything.
With Pesach – the Festival of Freedom -- around the corner, I find myself thinking about freedom, and so about this experience of my life going from thick to thin. Here at home, in my real life, I am connected to so many of you. So my life is thick. Some of this thickness has to do with my role as your rabbi, but a lot of it is just about being in life with you. Part of life in the web – real life, as opposed to travel – is a certain number of obligations and a whole lot of things it would be nice if I would occasionally get it together to do. So I should remember birthdays, check in with people who are sick, contribute to the various funds for people who are in need. I should have people over, volunteer for things. I should spend time with my friends, visit with my neighbors, get to know new people. I should show up at community events, cook and clean up for some of them. I should know who is having a hard time, and I should at least sometimes remember to ask how they are doing when I see them. I should rise up and help out as needed in a crisis. I should know a bit about what people around me are interested in and care about – and maybe now and then pass something of interest their direction. I should read the Beacon and listen to the radio and have some idea what is happening around here. I really should answer people’s e-mails and phone calls – which is not even to touch the matter of writing thank-you notes or any of those lovely and civilized things. And – l’havdil – on another level entirely – there is this country and world we live in, with all that they call for, from me and all of us.
So sometimes I do fairly well with at least some of this, and sometimes I really struggle. Sometimes obligations gang up, and it’s way beyond me to take care of even the really essential pieces. Sometimes, I’d say fairly regularly, to be honest, I feel a little overwhelmed by the thickness of it all.
Then I think about having a thinner life. I know people who have managed to weed out some of life’s more onerous obligations. Like all of us, I know a lot of people who wish they didn’t have to work, and a few people who actually manage to live without a job. I know people who spend big chunks of each year traveling. I know retired people, whose time is their own. I know people who aren’t in touch with their families. I know people who live fairly solitary lives. I know people who have fun all the time. I know people who struggle to fill their days.
My friend Rabbi Dayle Friedman has dedicated her rabbinate to fostering the spiritual lives of elders. For many years she worked as a chaplain in a large Jewish geriatric center, which offered levels of care for people with different degrees of mobility and cogency. Naturally the effort of the center was to meet the needs of its residents, especially those who were less able to care for themselves. I remember Dayle saying back then that even the frailest person can and needs to perform mitzvoth. It is no favor to just meet people’s needs. And so she would do things like help bedridden and mentally compromised patients in the nursing home to collect coins in a pushke and send tzedaka money to Israel. Every person, Dayle would say, needs to feel a sense of hiyyuv – of obligation.
So was I free these past three months, when it didn’t matter to anyone whether I showed up at 8 AM or at noon? In a sense, of course I was. I was free each day to make my own plan, to meet my own needs if I could, to pursue my own agenda. There was no one to compel me or prevent me.
It was wonderful to have that kind of freedom, that kind of looseness. I really did wake up, day after day, with no long list of what I should be doing instead of whatever I was doing. It was great not to be embroiled in any interpersonal conflicts. It was pleasant to be thanked for doing what would be expected if it were my real job. I could feel the lightness physically – I didn’t overeat or undersleep. My neck didn’t hurt. I didn’t have any tweaks in my back. I was smiley and vigorous. I wasn’t enslaved to my calendar book or my e-mail or my telephone.
But by the end of my stay in Cape Town this time I could see that changing a little bit. Someone – a friend – had asked me to do some rabbinical things for her family. And one hot, long day, when I really would have been happiest to go to the St. James pool for a swim, I had to shlep out and do those things. Another friend’s house was burgled. I called to see how she was doing and actually asked if there was anything I could do to help. She asked me to come over, and I weasled out of it. And felt guilty! My standard quip as I got to my last days in Cape Town was that the thing I dreaded had happened: I had friends!
So shoot, it was great to have a sabbatical. But if I was going to go getting embroiled in another web of community and friendship and all that, I may as well go back to my real one! Back to my thick life, where things are sometimes expected of me, where what I do or don’t do, and whether or not I show up, and who I am when I get there, actually does matter in some measure. Back to where the mitzvoth are many and the time is short.
Am I less free than I was loping around Jerusalem or Cape Town with no calendar book in my purse? What, then, is freedom?
I find myself thinking about the halakhic phrase kabbalat ohl mitzvoth – ‘accepting the yoke of the commandments.’ And I see that perhaps there is a paradox at the heart of freedom, in which one can willingly accept a yoke of obligation. If the yoke is placed on my back without my consent, then I am certainly a slave (even if I am paid a wage.) But if I have no yoke at all – if I have no path and nothing to plow -- I am not sure that I am really free. I am more like aimless, or lost.
I don’t think that lost souls are particularly free. I believe that we are born with a yearning to grow and thrive in body, mind and spirit. And that this growth happens best in a context of connection and commitment. Hence that paradox of welcoming the yoke of obligation. All of us are born into circumstances that we didn’t choose. And hopefully all of us have choices to make throughout life as well. There is an ongoing balance of choosing and accepting. We certainly don’t need to – and shouldn’t – accept every obligation placed on our heads. But I think we do well to choose some of them.
Even oxen are supposed to have sabbaticals. And I am blissfully grateful for the opportunity to take off my yoke for a bit – not to even mention for the experiences and challenges and, yes, especially, for the friends that filled my life these past three months and the three months in the beginning of 2006 as well.
But there is nothing like time where you don’t really matter to make you appreciate the yoke. And so, with Pesach coming in the blink of an eye, I joyfully (if a bit anxiously!) accept upon myself once again the yoke of obligation which comes of being in life with all of you. I accept that here my being and my deeds actually matter a bit. And that a community in which you matter may be a condition for actual freedom.
Have a most joyful and redemptive Pesach, my dear community.
© 2007 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Updated 04/01/2007(rge)