August 8, 2025
Author(s): Rav Hazzan Aliza Berger,
Parashat Vaetchanan
Five Little Monkeys!
August 8, 2025 – 14 Av 5785
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
Just about every night, before bed, we read one of Eder’s favorite books, usually a few times in a row. Eder loves many books, but for the past few weeks, his absolute favorite has been Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed. He loves it so much that he often doesn’t have the patience to wait for us to read it to him—he will take it out and read it to himself. He recites the story with joy while out walking or riding in the car, and often, after he announces the doctor’s pronouncement will emphasize the story with “that’s what happened.”
Recently, Eder has started improvising within the story. It started on a visit with his grandparents. We’ve been spending a lot of time with him working on please and not just screaming when he wants something. In the middle of his dramatic recitation of No More Monkeys, he paused and said, “the doctor should have said please.” For that week, every time he told the story, it was about how the doctor could have gotten what he wanted if he just said please. There was a week when every rendition of the story involved monkeys injuring different body parts and getting booboos that needed a kiss. And then, my favorite question, “where’s the Dada monkey?”
Listening to Eder’s questions and comments on the story has made me realize that despite growing up with this cute rhyming story, I had never really thought about it. I had always written it off as a story to teach kids to avoid jumping on the bed. But now, thanks to Eder, I’m thinking about so many different pieces of the story in a new way. Why do we, in a story for toddlers, model the kind of speech that we wouldn’t appreciate in real life? Why do we tell stories that feature absent fathers and mothers who are out of control? Why tell a story where every single monkey falls off the bed? Why not tell a story where the monkeys learn and find ways to play that don’t involve getting hurt?
Now, you may think I’m losing it. Oh no, pregnancy brain and sleep deprivation and suddenly the rabbi is hallucinating Torah in toddler literature. But I think this is a dynamic that we all fall prey to at one time or another. All of us have stories we’ve inherited that we’ve never interrogated or stories that we’ve written for ourselves that no longer serve us. It’s very easy for these stories to become ingrained in our psyches to the extent that they dictate how we engage with the world around us. It’s very easy for us to just repeat without ever wondering why.
I’m thinking about this a lot personally right now. Many of you have kindly asked when I am due and I’ve given so many evasive answers: this fall; Rosh Hashanah time; sometime in September; soon. The truth is, I have avoided answering this question because I’ve been afraid of getting too attached to any particular story. When Eder was born, I spent months telling myself his due date was April 30th, only to wait in frustration another 18 days for his arrival. When he didn’t come “on time,” I was a mess. And I had a vision. I had always told myself I would have a home birth like my mother did. I was so attached to that vision that I spent eight days in labor before I was even willing to consider I might need medical attention. In retrospect, I think I spent so much time living in a story, I didn’t stop to think about the values that inspired that story or about the conditions in which that story actually served me. This time, I’m trying to stay away from stories all together.
We all have our own version of this. I was talking with a young adult who is out dating and trying to find her partner. Every time she meets a promising guy, she starts imagining their life together. She imagines how he will propose and where they will get married and what they will name their kids. It’s become such a trend that her friends have admonished her that she should only imagine a future that could unfold in a coffee shop. Everything else, they say, she should wait to consider until it unfolds. Because the more stories she tells herself, and the more she imagines an idealized future, the harder it is to recognize when she’s actually dating the wrong guy and the more devastating it is when they inevitably break up.
This week, I was so shaken reading the news from Israel. For almost two years, there has been a story put forward by Bibi Netanyahu that more war and more intensity and more invasion and more control of Gaza will yield success and will bring back the hostages and will protect Israel for the future. And I can’t help but feel that this is a story which is not serving our people, not serving Israel, and not serving the world. But here we are, we’re so, he’s so, the security cabinet is so tied into this story that they can’t see what is actually going on. Oh my God, the heart break.
It’s so good that we’re here today. We all have stories that we need to break out of and that’s what today is all about. Today, in addition to marking the shabbat of consolation, we celebrate Tu B’Av, often called affectionately Israeli Valentines Day. But this day is so much more than a frivolous expression of love.
Generations ago, our people were caught up in their own stories. Lives felt much more proscribed—then you could only marry someone from your own tribe; and often would only interact with people at your same socio-economic level. Your life unfolded according to a story you could recite from birth. But our ancestors realized that they were becoming too limited. There had to be more.
So they crafted the holiday of Tu B’Av. According to Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel, on this day, women would borrow white clothes and go out into the fields and say to the men they would find there, “תנו עיניכם lift up your eyes and see.” (Taanit 31a) Literally look beyond the story you’ve been telling yourself! Whereas the rest of the year, you could only see the future that was proscribed for you, on Tu B’Av, you could write a new story. On Tu B’Av, you could marry anyone from any tribe. On Tu B’Av, anything was possible.
We need our own version of this now. We need to lift up our eyes. We need to see new possibilities. And we need new stories.
Which brings me back to Five Little Monkeys. I met a mom at the park this week who shared her incredible story with me. She has two toddlers, who are three months apart. She calls them her miracle twins. After years of infertility and countless cycles of IVF, doctors told her she would never be able to carry her own child to term. At the time, she was devastated. And it took her a long time to set aside her dream of pregnancy and to even explore surrogacy or adoption. Finally she and her partner found a surrogate and the surrogate quickly got pregnant. Three months later, she found out she was pregnant. Now she has two beautiful children, and she thinks the reason for her beautiful family is simple. Once she got out of her attachment to what should be, once she was able to adopt a new story, a whole world of possibilities unfolded.
We are all shaped by the stories we tell. Thankfully, those stories are ever evolving. We have the power to rewrite and reshape the destinies of our dreams.