April 19, 2025
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Shvii Shel Pesach
Make Your Offering and Then Let It Go
April 19, 2025 – 21 Nisan 5785
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
In 1987 Oprah Winfrey read a book that changed her life. What happened to her as a result of reading that book, the unanticipated lesson she learned, remains fresh and urgent for her 38 years later.
The book, by author Toni Morrison, was a novel called Beloved in which Morrison attempts to show what it was like to be a slave. What did slavery do to the enslaved person’s inner life, to their psyche, to their soul? How did slavery shape not only the enslaved person, but also their descendants—even when slavery was over?
When Oprah Winfrey first read the novel, she fell in love with it. She just knew that she had to make a movie based on this book. Toni Morrison had never allowed any of her novels to be made into a film, but the author succumbed to the charms and persuasive powers of Oprah Winfrey.
Oprah worked on the film Beloved for more than ten years. She herself played the lead. She used her power and influence to get the film made. The film was 3 hours long, was intense, hard, and sad—and did not have a happy ending.
How did the film do? Alan Stone, a professor of law and psychiatry at Harvard Law School at the time, saw the film in Harvard Square when it first opened. He wrote:
Ten minutes into the film, I began to hear audible groans from my two companions, who subsequently predicted Beloved’s demise at the box office. They hated the film: they could not follow it…Baffled by the narrative…they like most filmgoers, missed the experience that Oprah wanted them to have.
Alan Stone’s friends would prove prophetic. The film cost 80 million dollars to make. It took in 22 million dollars at the box office. The first weekend it came out, even with Oprah’s star power, the film was beaten at the box office by a horror movie called The Bride of Chucky. It took ten years to make. It was pulled from the theatres after four weeks.
Oprah had been completely invested in this project. She worked on it for more than ten years. She believed in it. She really cared. And after all that personal care and investment, her beloved film Beloved did not land.
The failure of her film devastated Oprah. When she learned that Beloved got beat at the box office by Chucky, she shared that stayed home and ate a prodigious amount of macaroni and cheese, and she experienced a major depression. She observed: “It was the only time in my life that I was ever depressed, and I recognized that I was depressed because I’ve done enough shows on the topic. ‘O, this is what people must feel like who are depressed.’
All of which happened in 1998. Why am I bringing it up now?
Author John Maxwell observed that life’s greatest lessons always come from our failures, not from our successes. The more painful our failure, the more important it is to extract a life-enhancing lesson from that failure. That is just what Oprah did.
Roll the film forward from 1998 to 2023. In 2023, Oprah co-authored a book with Arthur Brooks, the Harvard professor and social scientist who writes about happiness. The title of their book is Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier. In the book Oprah shares the painful story of her deep investment in the film Beloved; how she cared; how the film failed; and how its failure caused her to spiral into a depression. And then she offered her learning: the ability to be attached and detached at the same time. Attached enough to care, to work and to do our best on something we feel passionately about; and then once we have given it our all, to detach, and let it go. Be fully invested in our effort, which we can control. Train ourselves to not be invested in the outcome, which we cannot control. Or as she put it years later:
It [the failure of Beloved] taught me to never again—never again, ever—put all of your hopes, expectations, eggs in the basket of box office. Do the work as an offering, and then whatever happens, happens.
Oprah’s life lesson is a complex double move. Hold on but let go. Be invested in, and then be able to disconnect from. Give it your all, but then be Zen about whether your all succeeds. Who among us would not benefit from being able to do that?
We are a trial lawyer, we work around the clock on the case we just presented to the jury, but we cannot control how it will go.
We are a doctor, and we really care about our patient, and we give it our all, the best modern medicine has to give, but we cannot control the outcome.
We are a teacher, and we planned our lesson meticulously, but who knows how our class will receive it.
We are in sales, and we have a presentation that we worked long and hard for, but who knows if the client will buy it.
This pattern of being invested in and then disappointed by happens in our personal lives as well. We bring children into the world and raise them with all the love, energy and wisdom we can summon, and they emerge into adulthood with struggles that we cannot control. We try to be dutiful adult children to our adult parents. But they too have challenges that we cannot control.
Oprah’s double move—to care and to let go—is hard. It is easy to care—and to be devastated because we care. It is easy not to care—and not to be devastated because we do not care. It is hard to care—and then to let go and not be devastated even though we care.
Oprah’s teaching helped me understand more deeply a famous teaching from Rabbi Tarfon: loh alekha ha’melachah ligmor v’loh atah ben chorein l’hibatel mimenu, it is not incumbent upon us to finish the job, but neither are we free to desist from trying. In other words, care, work, give it our all, make our offering, make it our best offering, and then let go of the outcome we cannot control.
But how do we do that? If we care enough to work hard, how do we just let go of the outcome? Let me share an insight I learned at our Pesach seder.
Our icebreaker was: what Mitzrayim, what narrow place, do you want to leave behind? One of the folks around the seder table offered, the Mitzrayim I want to leave behind is the need for external validation. I don’t want to have to live for other people’s compliments. I want it to be enough for me that I believe in the offering that I present to the world. Whether other people like it or not—I train myself not to care.
If we can do that, if we can become self-validating, that creates long-term sustainability. Recently essayist Roger Rosenblatt wrote a piece in the New York Times about how to be a happy 85-year-old. He writes that he himself is a happy 85-year-old. And one of the biggest ideas he offers is: do not listen to the cheers. Do not listen to the jeers. Listen to your own heart if you believe in the work you do. He quotes the Celtics great Bill Russell. As you know, Russell played for Boston when the town struggled with racism. Even though he led the team to championship after championship, Boston fans would say unkind things to him. Once his daughter said to him: Daddy, how can you play for a town that jeers at you? He said I don’t listen to the jeers. I don’t listen to the cheers. I play for myself. Channeling that energy, Roger Rosenblatt observed that if we can find joy and meaning in our work, that is worth a truckload of compliments.
Give your best offering to the world. And let it go. If we believe in our offering, that is all the validation we need. Shabbat shalom and chag sameakh.