Our reading begins this week with a passage demanding explanation:
See that I place before you this day [both] blessing and curse. The Blessing, if you will listen to the Commandments of Hashem your God which I command to you this day. And the Curse, if you do not listen to the Commandments of Hashem your God, and you stray form the path which I have commanded to you this day, to go after other gods which you have not known. —11:26-28
Put this way, it is obvious which we should choose. We all want blessing, and we certainly don’t want to be cursed, so of course we should go one way and not the other, right? So why does this need to be laid out for us in such stark terms? And why, for that matter, do we look around us and see people make wrong choices?
The answer, of course, is that it’s not always so easy to stay on the straight and narrow. Challenges and temptations come up on a daily basis to make it more difficult for us to choose the correct path. Sometimes, in fact, it is the wrong choice that looks like the right way to go. The Yalkut Shimoni offers a parable:
It is like a person sitting at a fork in the road, with two paths in front of him: one begins with smooth ground and ends up among thorns, and one that begins with thorns but ends with smooth ground. And he informs passersby and says to them: what you see as a smooth path, for two or three steps it will be smooth, but in the end you will be among thorns. And what you see as a path that begins with thorns, for two or three steps you will walk among thorns, but in the end will be on smooth ground.
In Jewish thought, life is a series of choices that we make every day. We have opportunities to do Mitzvos, opportunities to do the opposite, and must also balance the worldly things that we must do to pay the rent, put food on the table, get the car repaired, and the list goes on. Every person, at their level, has choices to make, to choose a higher path than before. And it is frequently true that the wrong path looks like the smooth and easy road.
There is a parable told about a Chassidic Rebbe performing the Tashlich ritual on Rosh Hashanah. This ritual is itself a parable, as a person goes to a body of flowing water and, metaphorically, throws away the sins of the previous year. Some have a custom to throw actual bread crumbs into the water, to symbolize this process.
So the story (which is almost certainly an allegory, not a true account) goes that after the Rebbe did so, one of his Chassidim ran into the water, collecting all of the Rebbe’s breadcrumbs that he could. Why was he going swimming on the holiday, and why was he collecting the Rebbe’s crumbs? He explained: “What the Rebbe considers sins, to me are Commandments!”
Although we know that people operate at different spiritual levels, I found this hard to understand. Bad behavior is still bad behavior, even if it pales in comparison to the truly bad acts of less spiritual poeple. So how could anyone call them Commandments?
But then I heard it said about the Chofetz Chaim, Rabbi Yisroel Mayer Kagan ob”m, that one Yom Kippur he repented for seven minutes of laxing off from Torah study that he did the previous year.
That’s an unimaginably low number! A person cannot learn literally every minute, even allocating time for eating and sleeping. We need time to relax and unwind, and are always tempted to do more of that than strictly necessary (to put it mildly!). And that’s when I understood what the Chassid meant—if I only wasted seven minutes a day that would be a great accomplishment, much less a year!
This is why the Torah tells us that the Blessing and Curse are placed before us. These were not simply one-time events in the past, but represent the choices that we can make, every part of every day, to choose a path of greater blessing. And we can always choose the path of Blessing now, even if we made a whole series of bad choices in the past! So let’s focus not upon the past, but the better choices that we can make right now.
Image Credit: Laura Iverson on Clker.com.
