September 6, 2025
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parshat Ki Teitze
The Deep Meaning of the Daily Grind
September 6, 2025 – 13 Elul 5785
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
For many of us, this week has been the week of the big pivot. We pivoted from August to September; from summer to fall; from vacation to obligation; from light and breezy summer rhythm to an alarm clock that wakes us up to face the reality of a schedule. Back to school. Back to shul. Back to the High Holidays coming up with their invitation to take stock of our lives. All of which is very different from going to the beach or going to Tanglewood or climbing a mountain in New Hampshire or enjoying the gorgeous green of Vermont or the waters of Cape Cod, Nantucket, Nantasket, or Martha’s Vineyard.
In short, how do we think about a return to the daily grind?
I am reminded of a story I first read in 1995, in a collection called A 2nd Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul, edited by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen. This story is so old that the reality it describes for the most part no longer even exists. Before the age of transponders, the EZ Pass that allows us to go through toll booths without scrounging up quarters, there used to be toll collectors–people whose job it was to stay in a toll booth and make change for car after car. This second edition of Chicken Soup for the Soul told the story of the happy, cheerful toll booth collector. He had the radio playing, he was singing along, he was smiling, he warmly greeted every driver. He radiated positivity. But how was it even possible to radiate positivity at a job that seemed so tedious. These are his words:
I don’t understand why anybody would think my job is boring. I have a corner office, glass on all sides. I can see the Golden Gate, San Francisco, the Berkeley hills; half the Western world vacations here…and I just stroll in every day and practice dancing.
Toll booths have largely disappeared, but the need for a positive attitude about our daily rounds never goes out of style.
Think about September. Think about your back to real life reality. Think about your version of the daily grind.
If you are a student, it’s back to class, homework, papers, exams, labs, juggling academic and extracurricular obligations. It’s a lot.
If you are a parent, it’s back to drop offs, pick-ups, preparing real dinners, helping with homework. It’s a lot.
The daily grind is real for all of us in so many ways. If you are a caregiver, every day is a 36-hour day. If you are a doctor, your daily grind is the many challenges of modern medicine. If you are a lawyer, your daily grind involves the billable hour and finding clients and keeping them happy. If you are in sales, your daily grind is about hitting your numbers. If you are retired, you still face a daily grind. There is the problem of not enough time. There is the problem of too much time. So many folks who retire say: I loved the first few weeks, but now I have too much time on my hands. What am I going to do? What am I here for?
In short, to be alive, especially in September, but in reality at all times, is to face our own version of the toll collector’s dilemma: how do we find meaning in what we do, and in who we are, day after ordinary day?
It is in thinking about precisely this question that Judaism has one of its most luminous insights. There is a midrash that asks: what is the single most important teaching in all the Torah? One answer is: that human beings are made in God’s image, b’tzelem Elohim. That is undeniably a powerful teaching. It shapes how we see all human beings. That all human beings possess infinite dignity. But according to this midrash it is not the most important teaching. A second answer: v’ahavta l’reiacha kmocha, love your neighbor as yourself. No less than the greatest sage in the Talmud, Rabbi Akiva, calls this the central principle of the Torah. On the basis of this verse, Hillel teaches that what is hateful to us, we should not do to our neighbor. Again, an undeniably powerful teaching. Yet the midrash does not think it is the winner of the most important verse competition. Rather, the winner, the single most important teaching in all the Torah, according to this midrash is Exodus 29:38: “This is what you shall offer upon the altar: two yearly lambs each day, every day, constantly.”
What is going on here? How could it possibly be that a verse about daily animal sacrifices could be seen as more important than the verse which teaches us that all human beings are made in the image of God; or that we should love our neighbor as ourself? What is this verse about daily sacrifices trying to teach us?
The Torah tells us that there is a ritual called the tamid sacrifice. Tamid means daily, regular, constant. A lamb is to be offered every morning and every evening, tamid, every day.
That sacrifice is offered by a priest. It takes work every time. He has to clean out the ashes from the previous sacrifice. He has to prepare the new animal for the new sacrifice. He has to offer it up in a solemn way.
Now what if, on a given day, that priest isn’t into it? What if that priest is tired, or distracted, or depressed, or worried about his children, or just had a disagreement with his spouse, or just had a concerning conversation with his aging parent, or is dealing with his own health challenges? It’s easy for the priest to offer the sacrifices when he’s feeling it. But if the sacrifice is going to be tamid, daily, he has to be able to offer it when he’s not feeling it. When he’s having a bad day. When he would rather be doing something else.
And why would he do it when he is tired or distracted or depressed? Because he finds great meaning in the project. It’s not about how he feels on a particular day. It’s about how every day’s labor contributes to a noble calling that he believes in: in his case, a form of worship that, in the harshness of the wilderness wandering, connected biblical Israel to God twice a day, every day.
This midrash teaches us that the most important teaching in the Torah is about having some noble calling, some noble project, to which we direct our daily efforts, even and especially when we are not feeling it, because we know that our moods come and go, our energy levels wax and wane, but this large noble project that we believe in is good and true and deserves and demands our constancy.
In short, how do we make peace with our daily grind? By finding deep meaning in our daily grind.
I recently watched a beautiful film, called Turn Every Page, about the partnership between Robert Caro, who has been writing about President Lyndon Johnson for 50 years, and his editor, Robert Gottlieb. Caro has authored four hefty tomes on LBJ that are both critical and commercial successes. Historians applaud them. He has won Two Pulitzer prizes and two National Book awards. Real people buy them. His books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
At the heart of LBJ’s presidency was a mystery. On the one hand, when it came to domestic policy, LBJ was one of the greatest presidents in American history. He persuaded Congress to enact his Great Society legislation. On the other hand, his policy in Viet Nam was a disaster. How could the same president be so masterful with senators and so timid with generals?
Studying LBJ wasn’t enough to get to the heart of this mystery. Caro decided he needed to try as best he could to live Johnson’s daily reality, to feel what it felt like to be a young LBJ. So he moved to Texas, where Johnson was from. Not just Texas, but rural, ramshackle, poor Texas. Caro is a New Yorker. He likes his New York Times. He likes his restaurants. He likes the big city. But Caro knew that the only way he could truly understand the poverty that scarred and shaped LBJ was to experience it every day, tamid, so to speak, so he and his wife Ina moved to the same Texas hill country for three years.
Like the priest who may not have loved doing his work every day, Caro did not necessarily love livening in a ramshackle hut and giving up the joys of city life, but he did it every day for three years in service of his large noble calling: to understand LBJ at a deeper level.
Caro is now 89 years old, and he is still hard at work on his fifth volume on LBJ. The film shows him, like the priest, doing his tamid, his daily sacrifice. His good friend and editor, Robert Gottlieb, has passed away. But Caro persists every day. He wears a suit and tie every day. He drafts his manuscript on white legal pads every day. He types on his manual typewriter, a Smith-Corona Electra 210, every day. No computers. No digital shortcuts. His goal is to write 1,000 words every day. To date he has written 951 pages of Volume 5, but he says he is not “nearly done.” People ask him: can you accelerate the process? Can you make it shorter or simpler? To which Caro answers: I don’t cut corners. I am committed to meticulous research and slow and careful writing. It is in God’s hands whether I finish this book. I may pass before it is completed, but I so deeply believe in it, I am going to continue to do this work as long as I still have strength and life. Caro elevates his daily grind into a sacred daily tamid sacrifice.
As we pivot back to September, back to school, back to our own reality, may we do the same thing. We are what we do every day. Let’s do it with joy and meaning. Shabbat shalom.