Are certain moments objectively meaningful, or are we responsible for assigning all meaning? There are plenty of events we call “life changing,” the ones that rock you to your core. Moments like the birth a child, the loss of a loved one, a great success in life – these are typically the ones that leave us forever changed in some way. Moments like changing the sheets on your bed, picking a place to eat lunch, finishing a particularly good book – these moments aren’t typically thought of as meaningful, nor do they usually add depth or beauty to our lives. But are moments really meaningful or not meaningful? Black and white? Or do we place meaning ourselves? Consider moments that seem ordinary, ones you engage in every day, but still contain a moment of magic like tucking in your child at night, a quiet conversation with a loved one, or a beautiful walk on a gorgeous day. These are moments that can take you by surprise; suddenly their ordinary nature isn’t so ordinary at all.
As we come to the end of the Torah, we find ourselves reading about massive miracles and life changing experiences of the Israelites at the same time that we’re reading about the mundane experience of simply plodding through life. For the Israelites, seeing God’s miracles, which happened so often for them along their journey, became a bit meaningless. Miracles, as strange as it sounds, became mundane and something they expected to happen. For us reading about it now, without grand acts of God taking place regularly in our lives, “miracles” are anything but mundane.
This past week we read the penultimate Torah portion, Parshat Ha’azinu. It’s the last section of Torah read on Shabbat morning, and it’s actually structured as a poem explaining the pitfalls of negative behavior and the blessings of good behavior. The text ends with Moshe ascending the mountain and into the clouds as he takes his leave of the Israelite nation. This parshah serves as a link between generations, between new and old leadership, and between living on earth (in the land of Israel), and living with God (on top of the mountain in the heavens).
In one of the final lines of the text we read that the Torah is “not an empty thing from you.” In other words if the Torah appears to be meaningless, empty, or unclear, it is not the Torah’s fault, but your own inability to make meaning out of the text (or out of a moment). The final lines of the Torah remind us that it is our task to add meaning to our lives, and that is the purpose of Torah in a nutshell: adding meaning and purpose to what otherwise might be mundane.
-Rabbi Eve Posen
Source: Meaning to the Mundane – Parshat Ha’azinu 5778 – Rabbi Eve Posen
