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August 6, 2022
Author(s): Rav Hazzan Aliza Berger,
Parshat Devarim
August 6, 2022 — 9 Av 5782
Fishing for Miracles
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
I have a confession to make. Many of you know that I love fishing—a passion I discovered after I met Solomon. But I haven’t been completely truthful. Because, you see, it’s not just that I love fishing, I particularly love beating Solomon at fishing.
Ever since our first fishing trip together, I have always managed to catch more fish and better fish than Solomon. From the beginning, Solomon joked that I had an advantage—that the fish were drawn to a spiritual connection. Every time we would go, Solomon would laugh and tell the crusty old boat hands about his wife, the rabbi, who catches more fish and better fish even though she has only been fishing now for a couple of seasons.
But all that changed on our recent trip to Canada. We went out cod fishing out of Lunenberg, Nova Scotia. As usual, we joked about how long it would take me to catch my first fish. But when we sunk those lines into the water, I was in for a surprise. Unlike every other fishing trip, my line was quiet and still. But Solomon was catching fish like there was no tomorrow. Within a short window, he caught enough cod to feed the 12 friends we were visiting that night, and then started offering fish to the families around us who did not have his incredible luck. He quickly became the most popular client on the boat. I quickly became the world’s worst sport.
Up until that point, I hadn’t realized how much of my love of fishing had to do with my luck in fishing. Also, up until that point, I hadn’t thought it was luck, really. Somehow, I had convinced myself that I was just a superior huntress, that all the years of knitting and piano had made my fingertips more sensitive, that I had an intuitive sense of the fish. But on that boat in Canada, I employed exactly the same strategies I do on every boat, I was the same person with the same skills and the same track record, but my result was so different.
The next day I demanded that we go again. Solomon joked that I couldn’t stand him winning. To be honest, that was true. But more than Solomon winning, I was so distraught by my abject failure. How could I go from being an epic fisherwoman to someone who couldn’t hook a single fish? Sadly for me, I had no better luck the second day. Instead, I was forced to confront a truth I had successfully evaded for quite some time.
Isn’t it interesting the way our minds work? I mean, just speaking personally, there is a craziness to my pre-Canada thinking. It is absurd to think, no matter how sensitive my fingertips, that I could somehow intuitively channel the skills needed to be a successful fisherwoman without training or practice. It was absurd to interpret my initial success as talent and not luck. On the other hand, it was also absurd that when I failed, I automatically equated that failure with luck and not talent. Why do we always seem to attribute the good things in life to things we worked for and the bad things to external forces we can’t control?
I think that’s partly why our rabbis work so hard to change the narrative. Today is Tisha B’Av, the day on which our ancient Temples were destroyed and the anniversary of countless tragedies throughout Jewish history. The natural human response to tragedy is to shirk responsibility, to blame it on bad luck. But that’s not what our rabbis do. Our rabbis don’t teach that we just happened to be a weaker military power in a time of ruthless, war-hungry regimes. Instead, they teach us that our Temples were destroyed because of us. Because of idolatry, because of adultery, because of bloodshed, because of שנאת חנם, because of baseless hatred, because we couldn’t shape up our behavior, we lost our Temples.
Our rabbis double down on blame rather than bad luck as a way of balancing out our natural inclination to shirk responsibility. Where it would be so easy to blame the universe for our suffering, the rabbis want to make sure that we don’t avoid the kind of introspection that could help us to improve for the future.
But there is more. All of life is a dance between luck and skill. None of us can control what happens to us, none of us are all-powerful nor are we completely plagued by bad luck. And so, life is a dance of perspective—how do we respond to the curve balls that the universe throws our way? How do we proceed when we’ve been cut down by loss, by failure, by dashed expectations? How do we keep our hearts open to new possibilities?
Let me share a new teaching I learned this year. If you look in the Talmud, at Taanit 29a and Sota 35a, you’ll see a radically different explanation for Tisha B’Av. According to these teachings, the suffering of Tisha B’Av wasn’t due to idolatry or hatred, it was a consequence of something that is seemingly way more benign. Do you remember the episode of the spies? The whole drama when Moses brought the people to the edge of the Promised Land, and they were so afraid to enter that they sent emissaries who came back and fanned their fears? According to these texts, when the spies returned and shared that the land was filled with powerful giants, the people began to weep with fear. They were so overcome with negativity, so plagued with a sense of failure before they had even tried to occupy the land, that they couldn’t stop crying. In this moment, God the frustrated leader said something to the effect of, “I’ll give you something to cry about.” אַתֶּם בְּכִיתֶם בְּכִיָּה שֶׁל חִנָּם — וַאֲנִי קוֹבֵעַ לָכֶם בְּכִיָּה לְדוֹרוֹת. “You’ve cried baseless tears—I’ll establish a day of crying for generations.”
God’s response to the people’s pain here is not exactly admirable—certainly not the way we would like God to respond to our pain and our fear. But despite the problematic theology, I think this has a very important teaching for us. In essence, God is saying that how we interpret a situation can determine the way we experience that situation moving forward. If we approach life like our ancestors in the desert, so convinced of our bad luck, so convinced that the world will eat us up and destroy us, then life will unfold in such a way that our fears are realized and affirmed. But, if we manage to maintain the clarity that all of life is a dance between luck and skill, that we can encounter new possibilities at any time, then we can create potentially a new reality.
During World War II, Israel (which was then called Palestine) was under British control. Because of tensions between Arabs and Jews and a desire to appease nearby Arab countries, Britain had put a stop to Jewish immigration to Palestine and forced the new immigrants who had already arrived to live in horrible, sex-segregated barracks in Atlit that resembled the concentration camps many had just fled. It would have been easy for our ancestors to give up hope then, to say we have always been and will always be persecuted whether we live in Egypt or in the so-called Promised Land. But our ancestors were able to dance with the possibilities of life. They knew we have a track record for being on the receiving end of suffering, but they also knew that they could turn the tide. They created secret bullet factories on kibbutzim and manufactured the weaponry they needed to free imprisoned immigrants and protect Jewish immigrants in Israel from violent attacks. They organized in secret, dreaming of possibilities beyond the scope of history. And that indefatigable spirit meant that they were prepared. After the Partition Plan was accepted, after they declared Independence and were suddenly attacked by five Arab Nations at the same time, they were somehow able to fight back and to create a miracle that generations of Jews could only dream about. That happened not just because of luck, though there was some of that, but because they managed to shift their perspectives from being perpetual victims to being active agents who could turn the tide of history.
The lesson of Tisha B’Av and the lesson of life is this: Life isn’t just luck and life isn’t just skill. Life is all about perspective.