TEACHINGS

Psalm 92 says “l’haggid baboker chasdecha – to tell of your kindness in the morning; v’emunatcha ba’lailot – and Your faithfulness at night.” It’s easy to see God’s kindness in the morning of our lives when everything is bright and sunny. It’s during the long night that we must have faith.

While this is a lovely thought, the psalm is not saying that we should have faith in God in the darkness of our lives, but that God has faith in us -- that even in the longest night of depression and despair, we should know that God has faith in us, God believes that we can survive. And so we will.

KING SOLOMON’S SERVANT came breathlessly into the court, “Please! Let me borrow your fastest horse!” he said to the King. “I must be in a town ten miles south of here by nightfall!”

“Why?” asked King Solomon.

“Because,” said his shuddering servant, “I just met Death in the garden! Death looked me in the face! I know for certain I’m to be taken and I don’t want to be around when Death comes to claim me!”

“Very well,” said King Solomon. “My fastest horse has hoofs like wings. TAKE HIM.” Then Solomon walked into the garden. He saw Death sitting there with a perplexed look on its face. “What’s wrong?” asked King Solomon.

Death replied, “Tonight I’m supposed to claim the life of your servant whom I just now saw in your garden. But I’m supposed to claim him in a town ten miles south of here! Unless he had a horse with hooves like wings, I don’t see how he could get there by nightfall . . .”

Obviously this calls to mind the old yiddish line about how we make plans and God laughs. As if our plans really determine anything. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner would point to this story as another example of how there are hidden things at work always. We act upon the reality that we perceive, but each action sets off ripples that we only sometimes get to understand later.

So, we go about our lives and act as if our actions have meaning, while it’s clear that we don’t really know what those meanings necessarily are. We only find out later. Maybe. What this means is that every decision we make is, by it’s very nature, an act of faith. Not faith in God per se, or in the Bible or in ritual law, but simple, basic faith that everything is interconnected, whether we see how or not -- that everything has meaning, whether we understand it or not, and that, as my teacher Rabbi Kushner might say, that all of this free will is ultimately being used in the service of what’s meant to be anyway.

How do we make this day different? How do we enter into the holiness of Shabbat?

THERE IS A STORY TOLD of Reb Elimelech of Lizensk. It was said that he had gone beyond his ego to the extent that he was no longer conscious of himself as a discrete entity. And because of this, he perpetually merged with the Divine Presence.

People would follow his carriage, but Elimelech could never understand why.

He would ask his coachman, “Why are all the people trailing behind?”

And the coachman would explain about how people wanted to follow after wisdom and holiness. Well, Elimelech would decide that that was a good idea -- the people were doing the right thing. So he would get out and join the people following the empty carriage.

Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotsk taught that “One who is too filled with himself has no room for God.” Which is another way of saying that God only inhabits empty carriages. And that the truly righteous know this and that is why they get out of the carriage.

In the Japanese version of this story, the Zen master pours water into a cup that soon overflows to illustrate to a would-be student that you can’t take in anything new until you empty out a little of what’s already there and create some space.

What does it mean to enter into the holy space of Shabbat?

It means we have to get out of the carriage, we have to empty the cup of all the stuff we’ve filled ourselves up with for the entire week and give the Divine Presence a place to enter.

BE HERE NOW!

So, after killing the priests of Baal with his own hands, Elijah runs to a cave at the mountain of God to somehow figure out why everything he tries to do goes wrong and what he’s supposed to do with his life now that the king and queen want him dead and the people aren't listening to him. This is in First Kings, Chapter 19.