November 5, 2022
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parshat Lech Lecha
November 5, 2022 — 11 Cheshvan 5783
Known
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
This past Monday morning I got both an email and a text from my wife Shira, who was out of town. I knew it was trouble when the first word of both the email and the text was honey. Honey means that she is about to ask me to do something she knows I won’t want to do.
Honey, today is Halloween. And I know you just got home from an overnight flight from Israel. But we don’t want to be Scrooge. We don’t want to be the only dark house on our street. So please go to CVS and buy candy, and turn on the lights to let the kids in the neighborhood know that you are so happy to give out the candy on Halloween. XXOO Me.
How can I say no to an email that begins with honey and ends with XXOO Me?
So with ample time before the Halloween festivities began–5:00 on Monday–I ran over to CVS to get the candy. When I first got there, the clerk said it was too late, they had long ago sold out of Halloween candy. I said I get that, but my wife wants me to get the candy. Can you please help me? Wait one minute, the clerk said. He left. I waited. I prayed. And God made a Hanukkah miracle on Halloween. It turns out there was one big vat of bags of Halloween candy that had not yet been opened. It was late, but I could buy this candy. And buy this candy I did. In droves. I was so overjoyed by the miraculous delivery of candy at the last minute that I bought 5 big bags of candy. This is perhaps more detail than you might care to know, but I got Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, both the bigger size, and in miniature, Kit Kats, Snickers Bars, Babe Ruth Bars, Carmel Twix Bars, and M & Ms with carmel filling, chocolate filling, peanut filling. I went to the self-check out lane at CVS, where all these months later I still cannot figure out how to do it in a seamless, uneventful fashion. The machine is always mad at me, and always stops cooperating in the middle of my transaction, saying help has been summoned to help you finish the job. At last the store manager arrived to help me to finish the self-check out, raising the very issue of whether it was really a self-check out, and I walked out of the store with five big bags of candy.
I get home, I put the candy in big bowls, I turn on the lights outside our front door, warmly inviting the children of Newton to come get their candy, and I go to the dining room and work while waiting for the doorbell to ring. It was a little surreal. I was reading Danny Gordis’s one volume history of Israel for my Sisterhood class the next morning waiting for the door bell to ring. I read that Assyria destroyed the Northern Kingdom in 721. Ding dong. Trick or treat. I give out the candy. I go back to Danny Gordis. Babylonia destroyed the First Temple in 586. Ding dong. Trick or treat. I give out some more candy. Rome destroyed the Second Temple in the year 70. Ding dong. Trick or treat. I give out the candy. And so it would go. However, it turns out that five big bags of candy, was perhaps excessive. I had, all told, 8 kids.
The next morning, Shira calls. How did Halloween go?
I tell her that I feel like an idiot, that I bought so much candy, it came to 50 dollars, only 8 kids came, and now we are stuck with all this candy that we won’t eat.
50 dollars, she said in a brief instant of incredulity. And then she said, no matter, all good, thank you for doing it.
Now why do I share this sad miracle tale of the uneaten Halloween candy? Because it ties to a central theme of our readings in early Genesis, and a central theme for all human beings: the need to be known in the ways that we want to be known. That happens at two levels.
The first level is how we are known publicly. All the characters in the early Genesis stories are known by some single big public move. Cain is known for killing Abel. Abel is known for being killed. Adam and Eve are known for eating the forbidden fruit and getting banished from the Garden of Eden. Sarai is known as akarah, the barren one. Abram is known as the knight of faith who goes where God tells him to go and does what God tells him to do, and because of that faithfulness, Abraham will be known as the father of nations. Jacob will be known as the deceiver, and he will acquire another identity as Israel, also known as the one who wrestled with God and prevailed. Joseph will be known as the dreamer who makes his dreams come true.
Our tradition calls how we are known publicly as keter shem tov, the crown of a good name. What do you want to be known for, are you known in that way now, and what tweaks might you have to make to be known in the ways you want to be known?
In his classic book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey offers an exercise that reveals the work we might need to do to be known in the ways we want to be known. Covey invites the reader to go to a quiet place and imagine that you are attending a funeral. It turns out it is your funeral. You are attending your own funeral at 99 or 100 or 120. Four people will speak: a family member, a friend, a work colleague, and somebody from a community of meaning that is important to you. What would you want them to say about you? Are you now living the kind of life that would prompt those words? If not, what tweaks do you need to make?
I once did this exercise with a person who realized that he would want people to say that he had respected their time by always being on time. That he was punctual. The problem was he was not punctual. He was chronically late. He realized that if he wanted to be known as a person who came on time to respect other people’s time, he had to change his game. His new mantra would be coming early is coming on time and coming on time means being late.
Being known publicly as we want to be known is important. But there is a whole other level of being known that goes to a person’s inner character. Less what we do that the world can see, more who we are on the inside that only those who know us best can see. The author James Michener puts it this way:
“For this is the journey that [human beings] make: to find ourselves. If we fail in this, it doesn’t matter much what else we find. Money, position, fame, many loves, revenge are all of little consequence, and when the tickets are collected at the end of the ride they are tossed into the bin marked FAILURE.
But if [we] happen to find [ourselves] —if [we] know what [we] can be depended upon to do, the limits of [our] courage, the positions from which [we] will no longer retreat,… the secret reservoirs of [our] determination, the extent of [our] dedication, the depth of [our] feeling…, [our]honest and unpostured goals—then [we] have found a mansion which we can inhabit with dignity all the days of [our] life.”
What is the inner character for which we want to be known by the people who know us best and love us most? That includes the big issues that James Michener notes, like the secret reservoirs of our determination. But it also includes all the idiosyncrasies that make us human. Do you remember Robin Williams’ character’s soliloquy in Good Will Hunting. Robin Williams is a therapist whose wife has died. He talks to Matt Damon’s character about love, and what it means to really love somebody with all of their flawed humanity. What he loved most in his marriage, what he misses most now, is loving somebody completely for who they are, and being loved completely for who he is.
The only way to be loved in that way is to love in that way. That is at the heart of brit, of covenant, between God and Abraham. God and Abraham say to each other, in essence, I see you as you are, and I love you anyway. Abraham says to God: You tell me to go to the land that I will show you, Canaan, and I will bless you, but I get there, and there is a famine, we are literally starving, we have to move again. But I love you anyway. God says to Abraham: You are not exactly Mr. consistent. You challenge me when it comes to saving the criminals of Sodom and Gomorrah, but you don’t challenge me when it comes to sacrificing Isaac or banishing Ishmael. But I love you anyway.
Who is it in your life that sees you for who you are, and they love you anyway. Whom do you see for who they are, and you love them anyway.
Which brings me back to the 50 dollars that I spent on Halloween candy. When I confessed this ridiculous mistake, and that Shira was coming home to bags of candy that we would never eat, and had no way to use or give away, Shira’s answer of initial incredulity, 50 dollars?, was followed quickly by no matter, all good, thank you. That was her seeing me for who I am, and loving me anyway. I am immoderate. When shopping for food, perhaps because I am a grocer’s son, I always buy too much. When I was a kid working in my parents’ store, I always appreciated the customers who bought lots of food. Now that I am an adult, I am that customer. After 40 years, Shira has embraced that quirk in my character.
How do you want to be known, by the public, and by the people who know you best and love you most? What work will get you there?
Being known in the ways we want to be known is the opposite of easy or automatic. It takes work all the days of our lives. But the good news is that when we do that work, when we love that way, we will be known as we wish to be known, not at the end of our days, but right now, while we are still in that glorious adventure called living our lives. And if you want to celebrate that glorious adventure by eating Snickers Bars, Kit Kats, Babe Ruth Bars, or Reese’s Peanut butter cups in all sizes, come see me. It is yours, for free. And unfortunately, this offer lasts forever. Shabbat shalom.