When I was at summer camp as a kid, I had a love-hate relationship with the chore chart. Every cabin had a paper plate wheel that matched up your name with a task that was part of cleaning the cabin. The tasks included things like sweeping, laundry, garbage, and table server at mealtimes.
You can only look for blessings in curses for so long until you stop and think . . . is this the best use of my time? Should I be spinning my wheels trying to find some good in a bad situation or should I make my own good situation?
Do you know anyone who’s only happy when they’re miserable? It’s a bit of a paradox; happy and miserable are opposites. “Happy” in this sense really means emotionally fulfilled. I went to a therapist when I was a teenager, and apparently she saw this tendency in me. It’s true – I used to look for the bad so I would have something to be complain about.
As the older sister in my family, I was lucky to get the brand new kid clothes; the hand-me-downs went to my younger sister and younger cousin. This was the case pretty much up until I was in middle school. In fact, when my sister was a toddler, she actually thought that “going shopping” meant going into our basement to get the next size up box of clothes.
For me, all of my “Sinai moments” are tied in some way to family. If you’ve never considered your own Sinai moments before, the idea is fairly self-explanatory. These are events in your life which carry a certain power or splendor, akin to the feeling Moshe and the Israelites might have had upon receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai.
One of the hardest parts for me about spending time in Israel is the way my brain works with foreign languages. I am easily able to understand Hebrew in written or oral form, but when it comes to actually speaking the language, sometimes I’m at a loss.
Hannah Glass, one of Neveh Shalom’s seniors, once told me, “God is the explanation for those things we simply cannot understand.” Not only is it Jewish nature to wrestle with God, it is human nature. In a world that relies on physical evidence, a being that cannot be physically seen or touched is difficult to believe in at times.
