March 18, 2023
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parashat Vayakhel-Pekudei / Shabbat Hachodesh
March 18, 2023 — 25 Adar 5783
Off Script
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
I am not proud of it, but one day while on a recent long flight, to make the time pass, I found myself reading a rom com, total beach reading. There were so many other worthier things I could have read. I could have read an analysis of the impasse on judicial reform in Israel. Or I could have done daf yomi, the study of a daily page of Talmud. Or with Passover coming up, I could have studied the Haggadah to get ready for the seders. But no, I read a rom com, light and breezy. I know it would be wrong to evade taking responsibility for this choice. I did it. I own it. I would never want to blame anyone else. I would never want to blame my wife Shira, for example. Even though Shira read it first and seemed to be thoroughly engaged while reading it. Even though Shira downloaded it on our family Kindle. Even though when I asked Shira for a recommendation, she pointed me to this book. Still reading the rom com is on me.
The novel features a woman named Nora who writes love stories produced on The Romance Channel. All of her stories follow a script. In fact, so much so, that she challenges one of the characters to offer her some random facts, from which she will fashion one of her scripted stories. She says to this other character:
Give me a gender, a location, and a career.
Okay…female, Chicago, real estate developer.
Okay, easy. Stephanie, a young urban real estate developer, takes a trip to rural
Illinois to look into buying a dairy farm and turning it into a corporate retreat center.
The young handsome owner of the farm doesn’t want to sell, and they butt heads. But
as she spends more time on the farm, she sees how important it is to the community,
and they fall in love….One day she gets a call that she needs to shut down the farm immediately
or lose her job. She leaves for Chicago. He is heartbroken.
Oh, no.
Oh, yes. But wait…one day he’s plugging along, and who comes back? Stephanie!
Yes!
She’s gone back to Chicago and has realized big city living isn’t for her. She’s going
to stay out in the sticks, and oh, P.S., she has a brilliant idea for how to save the farm.
The end.
Nora generates story after story that follows the script, each gets produced as a movie on The Romance Channel, and so it goes until her own husband, and the father of their two young children, walks out on her, leaving her a single mother. The writer of scripts is now living a life off script. Thus the title of this rom com is Nora Goes Off Script.
Why do I mention this just now? Because the theme of this rom com connects directly with both our Torah reading—and our lives.
Over the last three weeks, the Torah has laid out instructions for how the Tabernacle was to be built, a script. In our reading today, the Tabernacle is actually built in accordance with the script. The leitmotif in the reading is everything was built according to the script ka’asher tzivah Adonai et Moshe, just as God had commanded Moses.
There is a script. The Israelites followed it to a T. As a result of which God’s presence could be felt palpably. The Book of Exodus ends: u’chevod Adonai maleh et hamishkan, the Presence of the Lord filled the Tabernacle.
We all have scripts. And we all have prayers that our scripts will be followed, and that as a result we will be able to feel the Presence of God in our homes and lives and families. That we will raise our children to adulthood in happiness and health; they will work hard; they will go to a college they love and get a wonderful education; they will get a job after college that gives them fulfillment and a good living. They will find love. They will not know loneliness. They will get married. They will have children. They will live near us. We will do Shabbat dinners together, multiple generations doing life together, happy, healthy, connected. A beautiful script. And when it happens, we can feel God’s presence in our lives.
But it does not always happen. Sometimes it is not only Nora who goes off script. Sometimes it is we, and our children, who go off script. There are health issues, relational issues, professional issues, financial issues, lack of mazal issues. Life does not pan out in accordance with our script.
Which is why the Torah has a whole other mode of being. There is the Tabernacle mode, where everything follows the script. But there is also the wilderness mode, where almost nothing follows the script. Building a golden calf, the sin of the 10 spies and the panic of the people, dying in the desert instead of entering the promised land. All off script.
We know that when there is a good script that we follow, the presence of the Lord fills our lives.
How do we think about our time in the wilderness, when we are off script?
I have a friend who has a Hebrew teaching: eyn rah bli tov, every bad contains some good. Even the painful chapters can yield good if we are open to seeking it out.
In Nora Goes Off Script, that is precisely what happens. Nora writes a story that is not like her usual scripted story, not her Romance Channel template. It is a painful autobiographical story about the break-up of her marriage and the challenge of being a single mother. This story gets made into a movie. The producers want to film the movie in her actual home. The male lead, who plays her ex-husband, is played by the Leonardo DiCaprio or Brad Pitt type, a gorgeous male lead who in real life just happens to be single, and whose own mother had just passed away, making him think more seriously of the allure of home and hearth, of family and commitment. You will never guess what happens next. OK, I’ll tell you. Spoiler alert. The handsome actor playing her husband falls in love with her, and she falls in love with him, and they build a new life together. Ein ra bli tov, no bad without some good. That happens in rom coms. Does it happen in life? Does it happen here? Does it happen now?
Thursday morning, I was at minyan. Miriam, her mother Michelle, and her maternal grandparents Ruth and Sheldon were all there and took an Aliyah together. At the end of the service, I noticed Ruth saying Kaddish. I went up to her to ask her who she is saying Kaddish for.
It turns out that on the Katz side of the family, many family members perished in the Shoah. The oldest survivor, and the last survivor, was Miriam’s Great Grandmother’s first cousin named Helen Katz. Helen, from a town called Ilintsy in what is now Ukraine,
would have turned 100 today. But she passed away this past Monday, March 13, 5 days shy of her 100th birthday.
Helen was fierce, with an irrepressible spirit and resilience. Put it this way. When her husband of many decades, Philip, died 15 years ago, when Helen was in her mid-80s, she mourned her life partner. She then reconnected with an old male friend who had grown up in her hometown, Ilintsy, and she got remarried at 85. She always said yes to life.
In honor of Helen’s fierce love of life, the family had a script for how her turning 100 years old was to be celebrated. The script had two acts.
Act one was to have taken place yesterday, Friday, where one of her grandsons and his fiancé were to get married at her senior living home the day before she turned 100. Alas she passed away on Monday. That couple, and the family, were now off script. They got married anyway, not at the senior living home, but with a justice of the peace in Montreal because they felt that that is what Helen would have wanted.
Act two was to take place today. Thirteen members of Helen’s family were to celebrate Miriam’s Bat Mitzvah at Temple Emanuel right now. That was the script. But then Helen died, and the whole family is off script. The 13 members who were going to be here are instead in Montreal, in the midst of their week of shiva. But on the very day Helen would have turned 100—March 18—Miriam becomes a Jewish adult, and Helen’s legacy of fierce, of strength, of the irrepressible will to live, of resilience, will now live on in the newest adult member of the family, Miriam. It is as if Helen had turned to Miriam today and said: tag, you’re it.
When we find ourselves off script–and we will all find ourselves off script, because that is the human condition–may we find a different kind of good that will be beautiful in its own way. Shabbat shalom.