October 8, 2022
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parshat Ha’Azinu
October 8, 2022 — 13 Tishrei 5783
Serendipity
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
Serendipity. When was the last time that you personally experienced serendipity?
Serendipity is defined as something good happening to you accidentally. The classic case is finding a twenty-dollar bill in the pocket of a coat you haven’t worn in a while. When you find that twenty-dollar bill, you weren’t looking for it, you just find it, it sparks joy, maybe even the feeling that there is some benign force that has our back.
But is serendipity limited to something good happening to us accidentally? Is there any way to exercise some agency over serendipity? Is there any way for us to make serendipity happen?
I want to share two serendipity stories that can offer us two different levers to bring serendipity into our lives, a feeling of a joyful connection to some larger helpful force.
The first serendipity story concerns a woman from Golden, Colorado who was losing her eyesight. Her doctors advised her that they could substantially improve her vision if they did Lasik surgery. But Lasik surgery would cost $5,000, and the woman did not have the money. One day she gets a call from a probate attorney, who had represented her grandmother, who had passed away some weeks before at the age of 94. In her will, the grandmother had left her granddaughter with $5,000. The granddaughter used the $5,000 for the Lasik surgery, her vision dramatically improved, and she says, and I quote: “I can’t think of a better way to remember my grandmother than to wake up every morning with 20/20 vision. Every morning when I wake up, I think of her.”
What is the relationship between all these events—the grandmother’s death, her bequest of $5,000, the granddaughter’s need for just that amount of money at just that time, and the tremendous good this bequest did in restoring the granddaughter’s vision? Do we see what rabbi Larry Kushner called invisible lines of connection? It is of course totally possible to look at this story and see nothing but coincidence.
But the Torah has this concept of otot u’moftim, signs and wonders that let us know that a benign force has our back. The Rav, Joseph Soloveitchik, has this evocative imagery of God winking to us behind the clouds. Could we see the $5,000 that made possible the vision-enhancing surgery as a divine sign and wonder, as God winking to us behind the clouds?
What would it do to our sense of the universe if we trained our eyes to see invisible lines of connection? This issue comes up all the time. I remember once one of our members was taking an Aliyah to commemorate the yahrtzeit of his father. His father’s name was Murray. As he was driving to shul, he found himself behind a truck that was crawling. His car was crawling behind it. Then he noticed the sign on the truck: Murray’s Plumbing and Heating Supplies. Now what are the chances of that?
Yes, you can explain that rationally. No invisible line of connection. He had a yahrtzeit for his father Murray. And some employee of Murray’s Plumbing and Heating just happened to be driving on Commonwealth Avenue at the exact time that our member was driving to shul to observe yahrtzeit for his father Murray. Coincidence. But what would it do to our sense of the cosmos if we also could open ourselves to the possibility of mystery, a connection that we cannot explain, but a connection that could make us feel that there is some benign force in the universe that has our back.
Our first serendipity move is to ascribe meaning to what could also be seen as fortunate coincidence.
Our second serendipity story comes from a podcast with the felicitous title Serendipity
Stories. This story launched this series. A woman named Joanna Kalafatis is the daughter of Greek immigrants to America. That is a crucial fact in the story. She is a first-generation American, the daughter of hard-working immigrants, who taught her the importance not only of education, but of getting educated in a field that is practical. Getting educated in a field where, after you graduate, you can earn a good living.
In high school Joanna Kalafatis is drawn to the world of drama and theatre. She goes to college at Columbia, where she would have loved to have pursued drama and theatre. But the voice of her parents is always rattling around in her brain. So instead she studies economics. Practical. She can get a job. She didn’t love it. It wasn’t her. But so be it.
Her junior year at Columbia she decides to study abroad. She goes to Cape Town, South Africa, and something happens that changes her life. All the serendipity stories on this podcast begin the same way. It was an ordinary day when… It was an ordinary day when Joanna was walking to school when a drunk driver of a van ran into her. She was rushed to a hospital in Cape Town. She spent several months convalescing. When she was healthy enough she flew back to America where she spent several months learning to walk again. And somehow she was able to graduate with her class on time and walk to receive her diploma.
What a horrible story. What a terrible story. If this could be serendipity, who needs it?
And yet the Serendipity Stories podcast launches with this horrible story. Why?
Because as she looks back at her life, Joanna Kalafatis reckons this injury as the crucial moment when she began to live the life she wanted to live. After the accident, she realized how tenuous is our existence, how fragile, how here today and perhaps gone tomorrow. And therefore she realized she needed to live the life she wanted to live, and not the life that her parents wanted her to live. She changed her major to study drama and theatre, and ever since college she has made a happy and successful living as an actress in Los Angeles.
Now Joanna Kalafatis never would have picked this accident off a menu, if she had had the choice. But she did not have the choice. Nobody has a choice. Nobody gets to pick what they want off the menu of life. What all of us get to do is interpret the entrees that land on our table.
How do we see the hardest chapters of our life—the tragedies, the sudden onset of adversity we did not want, did not deserve, did nothing to bring on, but is just our reality? One of the hardest teachings in Judaism, one I have never loved, one I have never felt capable of performing, is a mishna from the tractate Berakhot, that we should thank God for the bad things in life even as we thank God for the good things in life. It had never felt real or doable before I encountered Joanna Kalafatis’s story. But her story offers a helpful lens, a second angle on serendipity: how have our hardest experiences, the ones we would never ever pick off the menu, how have they nonetheless had a positive impact on our lives?
Our second serendipity move is to own our own story. Life is not just what happens to us. It is also, crucially, about what we do about it.
What is even better than serendipity that just happens is serendipity that we make happen. Ascribe meaning to what can also be seen as fortunate coincidence. Own our own story. Life is a lot about our attitude, how we see it, how we adjust to it, the positive changes we make in response to the ups and downs of life. If we can master these two moves, we may or may not find more twenty-dollar bills in our old coat pockets. But we will experience a universe with greater connection, resilience, joy and love. Shabbat shalom.