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September 23, 2023
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parshat Ha’azinu
Distance Travelled
September 23, 2023 — 8 Tishrei 5784
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
Every August there is a show called Hard Knocks about the training camp of an NFL football team. This year the show focused on the New York Jets because of their new quarterback Aaron Rodgers. If you are not a football fan, Aaron Rodgers was a legendary quarterback of the Green Bay Packers where he won both a Super Bowl and the Most Valuable Player of the league four times—two times in the last three years. Rodgers was thought to be the missing piece that would help the New York Jets compete for a Super Bowl this year. The Jets had a lot of stars on their team, but they were missing a great quarterback. Aaron Rodgers was that great quarterback, their missing piece. His presence created tremendous excitement and expectations. Hard Knocks devoted five full episodes to the building, mounting, surging, soaring excitement that the Jets, so mediocre for so long, were now about to have their moment.
I watched all five episodes. I did it for our congregation since I was searching for High Holiday content. The basic plot line of all five episodes is: yay!! Aaron Rodgers is coming to New York. The excitement mounts.
Then came the first game. It did not follow the plan. On his fourth play, Aaron Rodgers was badly injured, suffering a torn Achilles that is going to cost him the rest of the season. So much hype. So much build up. So much anticipation. All gone—poof—in a matter of seconds. And because he is turning 40—40 is very young for a Temple Emanuel member, but very old for a National Football League player—it may be that the injury will cost him the rest of his career, as apparently rehabbing from a torn Achilles is quite brutal.
Why tell this sad football tale the day before Yom Kippur on Shabbat Shuva?
Because hopeful expectations dashed by sober reality is not a phenomenon limited to Aaron Rodgers or the New York Jets. It is universal. It happens to us all. Its universality is evidenced by how many ways there are to describe it. The Scottish poet Robert Burns observed that the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry, which inspired the title of John Steinbeck’s great novel. There is the Yiddish wisdom “man plans, God laughs.” Or as my late father in love used to say: life is what happens after we have made other plans.
How do we think about those times when a gap exists between our best laid plans and reality? Obviously, it is is hard and sad and dispiriting, a total drag. And, is there also another legitimate way to look at this gap that can be redemptive, hopeful, helpful?
In the tractate Berakhot, 34B, the Talmud asks an evocative question: who is at a higher moral level? The person who walks the straight and narrow, who never strays; or the person who strays, who sins, who had that chapter in their life of sewing wild oats, who zigged and zagged, and who ultimately came to rethink, repent, repair, and redeem?
You might think that the straight and narrow walker is at the higher level. But perhaps surprisingly, the Talmud teaches that the zig zagger, the straying sinner who repents, is at the higher level. Rabbi Abahu teaches: makom sh’baalei teshuvah omdin, tzadikim gemurim einam omdin, the ba’al teshuvah, the penitent, stands at a higher level than the person who was always righteous. Why would that be?
I suspect it has to do with distance travelled. The person who strayed, got it, repented, restored, renewed, has travelled a distance, has been on a journey, and the Talmud prizes our journey more than our perfection. All the zigs, all the zags, all the chapters, all the mistakes, all the learnings, make us more human, more empathetic, more resilient. The writer Agatha Christie once famously observed: “I married an archeologist because the older I grow, the more he appreciates me.”
No one would choose what happened to Aaron Rodgers or his team. We never would choose that version of disruption happening to us. But when it does happen, it provides us with more distance to travel, more chapters to write, more zigs and more zags that add to our story.
Which means that our question on Shabbat Shuva is: Can we treasure the distance we are called upon to travel? Can we treasure our zigs and zags that we did not ask for, did not want, did not deserve, but happened to us, leaving us with no choice but to innovate in ways that can summon our resilience?
A man named Harvey Goldberg was happily married for 47 years until his wife passed away in 2018, leaving him widowed in his late 60s. He was a cardiologist. One day he was treating a patient who said she wanted to fix him up with her cousin, a woman named Freda Levenson, who had been married to her first husband for 34 years before he died when she was in her late 60s. Dr. Goldberg said fine, he would be willing to meet Freda. The patient gave Freda the doctor’s cell. Freda texted Dr. Goldberg, and the widow and widower started talking. Their first conversation lasted for more than an hour. They just had so much in common. They both knew what it was like to have a loving, faithful beautiful marriage for decades. They both knew the joy of children and grandchildren. They both knew the pain of the illness of their first spouse. They both knew how bereft it felt to come home to an empty house at the end of the day.
Harvey Goldberg lived in New York City. He assumed that Freda also lived in New York City. After all, who doesn’t live in New York City? But to his surprise, after he had forged this connection, he learned she lived in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Long story short, they talk on the phone every day. They visit each other respectively in New York City and Shaker Heights. During the pandemic, when New York City closed down, Harvey Goldberg moved to Cleveland to spend the pandemic with Freda Levenson.
Thirteen days ago, on September 10, Harvey Goldberg and Freda Levenson got married in the Cleveland Botanical Garden. Their procession featured a “parade of flower children,” the couple’s many grandchildren. Harvey still works and lives in New York City. Freda still works and lives in Cleveland. They are figuring it out. In her late 60s, in his early 70s, they will be doing a commuter marriage. For them distance traveled is both literal and metaphorical.
We would all love our life to be seamless and painless, to have every prayer answered, every dream fulfilled, every joyful expectation matched by joyful reality. But when that does not happen, as it sometimes does not for us all, there is now a different story to write.
May we find deep meaning and deep blessing in that different story, in the distance we travel, the journeys we make, the ups and downs we weather, the resilience we cultivate, in the unfolding drama that is our own life. The distance we are called upon to travel this year, may we not only travel it, may we treasure it. Shabbat shalom and g’mar chatimah tovah.