In fact, almost everything about funerals seems odd to me. I am struck by the vocabulary of funerals. When a person is changed into the "deceased," his or her family and friends become "loved ones." Funeral directors still occasionally are called "morticians," but no longer ever called "undertakers." I try to say "earth," not "dirt," for the material we place on top of the casket (not "coffin"). The cloth we place over the casket is called a "pall." The body is "the remains." Judaism's contribution to the strange nomenclature of death is a Hebrew euphemism for cemeteries: beit hachayim, "the house of life." Odd.

On funeral days, I come to the synagogue in the morning wearing a suit. That does not happen too often, otherwise. A few weeks ago, on one of those days, a member of the staff greeted me at the door and said, "Rabbi, you look well dressed today." I accepted the compliment and said, with a bit of gallows humor, "I guess somebody must have died." I regretted my flip comment as soon as I saw the expression on my friend's face—an expression that showed sorrow for the death and, perhaps, also for the job I had to do.

No, there is nothing funny about death. Yet, I do not want people to think that officiating at funerals is a sad or unpleasant part of my job. Strange as it sounds, officiating at funerals is a deeply fulfilling experience. Funerals are perhaps the best opportunity I have as a rabbi to enter deeply into people's lives and truly to be of help to them. All it requires is the ability to listen. 

I arrive at the home of the mourners and just allow them to tell me the story of a person's life. More often than not, it is a story that is filled with drama, conflict, redemption, beauty and meaning. I think of this experience as a gift, a blessing, to be privileged to hear such stories. I ask a few questions. I take a few notes to help me remember details for the eulogy. I do very little talking, apart from going over the schedule of the service. For the most part, I do not try to offer what many people might consider "words of comfort."

I do not say, "He's in a better place now." I do not say, "Her memory will live on within you."  In general, I have found that such comments usually backfire before the funeral. People do not find comfort in Hallmark card sentiments. Besides, Jewish tradition teaches that one should not try to offer comfort to the bereaved "while their dead are still in front of them" (M. Avot 4:18). I think that is good advice. 

Instead, I just listen. Much more than explanations and soothing words, mourners just need a chance to tell the story. 

My friends and congregants sometimes ask me if it is difficult to officiate at a funeral for a person I did not know. I tell them that it is just the opposite. The hardest funerals are for the people I did know; and the better I knew them, the harder it is. I officiated at my grandmothers' funerals and at funerals for a few dear friends. I found those experiences to be excruciating. I wanted to be a mourner, not an officiant. 

I am glad that I have had those experiences, though. Often, when I officiate at a funeral, I remember those times, the feelings I felt, and it helps me to empathize with the bereaved family and their pain. Those memories, I think, make me a better rabbi.

For me, officiating at the funeral of a stranger is the truest act of chesed (lovingkindness). It is a gift that I can give to people in need with no expectation that my own difficult feelings of loss will get in the way. Officiating at the funeral of a stranger feels like an act of redemption. It brings me into the lives of strangers in a moment of loss, and makes us all feel that even death is no barrier to truly and deeply caring for one another.


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Steve Jobs and Yom Kippur

"Was parting the Red Sea so difficult for God?" asks the Zohar. "Is it not true that as soon as God is resolved to do something all obstacles are as nothing? How was it that the dividing of the Red Sea was difficult for God?" (Zohar II 170a). Good question. 

The Zohar's answer is that it was not the physical challenge of parting the sea that was difficult. The difficulty was in choosing the lives of the Israelites over the lives of the Egyptians. The Zohar says that the angel of the Egyptians spoke to God about this before Pharaoh's army plunged into the sea. 

The angel asked God, "Master of the universe, why would you want to punish Egypt and divide the Red Sea for Israel? Have they not all sinned against You? Don't You rule with justice and truth? Yes, the Egyptians are idolaters, but so are the Israelites. Yes, the Egyptians are murderers, but so are the Israelites. How can you choose between them?"

What could God say? 

That was the moment, says the Zohar, that God faced the most difficult choice possible. How could the God of justice brush aside justice to save one people at the expense of another? That is the difficulty of the parting of the Red Sea. 

The Zohar finds a message about God's agonizing choice hidden in a strange silence in the story. In this week's Torah portion (Beshalach), Moses exhorts the Israelites not to fear the advancing Egyptians. He says, "Adonai will battle for you. Hold your peace!" (Exodus 14:14). And then, in the very next verse, God says to Moses, “Why do you cry out to Me? Tell the Israelites to go forward!" (Exodus 14:15). What happened between those two verses? When did Moses cry out to God? How are the Israelites to "go forward" before the waters have been parted? What's missing from the story?

The Zohar says that the missing moment is the moment of God pondering the horrible dilemma. When God asked Moses the question, "Why do you cry out to Me?" the Zohar reads it as a moral challenge. It is as if God asked Moses, "Did you really think that I would save you at the expense of the Egyptians because of your pleas? Don’t cry to Me. Rather, cry out to the  Israelites and beg them to behave in a manner that will make them worthy of being saved! Tell them to ‘go advance’ … in their behavior!” 

That is what is missing from the story—the way that God struggles over the fate of one imperfect people over another. None is without faults, yet some must flourish while others perish. God makes choices where there are no good choices, and God agonizes over it. Who will live and who will die? How can God make choices if human beings will not "go advance" in their choices?

And what does this have to do with arranging marriages? The Zohar wants to tell us that these tough choices are not just about nations and the broad scope of human history. They happen every day on a personal scale. Every wedding sets into motion events that will lead to "weeping for some and singing for others," says the Zohar. It is hard, even for God, to discern how to allocate good and bad fortune in a world so clouded by uncertainty, human frailty and moral shades of gray. 

Your marriage and all of your sacred relationships are miracles as wondrous as the parting of the Red Sea. It is up to you to recognize this and to make yourself worthy of the miracle. If your relationships bring you suffering, recognize that God also suffers agony over it. If your relationship bring you joy, may that joy be something that you earn through your behavior every day. 

Go advance.


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God of the Natural or the Supernatural?
"Not One of Them Was Left"

This is the sermon I am giving tonight at Temple Beit HaYam.

It’s a strange business, this praying that we do together on Friday nights. We gather in this sacred space and we speak words that are written in our prayerbooks that Jews all over the world have been saying together for a very long time. Some of the prayers in our siddur are more than two thousand years old.

But, why? What are we doing when we pray? What is the point?

People speak and recite words for many reasons. We speak to communicate with each other about subjects that are significant and trivial as a matter of our daily lives. We sometimes speak or sing words as a form of creative expression, as in theater, music or poetry. We use words, on occasion, just to help us to understand ourselves. When people talk to themselves, for example, they may find that saying the words in their heads out loud can help them to focus their thoughts, make sense of their situation, and decide what they believe. 

The reasons why we pray can include all of these purposes. The words of the siddur are an odd mixture of poetry, philosophy, meditation and exclamation. We pray to communicate the foundations of our beliefs: One God who is the Source of our being, the One who gives us a set of instructions for living life meaningfully, and who represents our highest aspirations for building the world of our dreams. 

We also pray as a form of creative expression. Prayer is more akin to art and poetry than argument and persuasion. We speak the words of the prayerbook, not because they are factually correct, but because they convey the feeling of being alive and of being in relationship with God and our highest selves. When the psalm says, “How great are Your works, Adonai,” we might logically respond by pointing out that there are many things in our world that are not so great. Does this verse accurately describe the way we think of malaria and poverty? Of course, not. But the point of prayer is not to describe what is. It is, like poetry, to describe what we yearn for, and who we wish to become when we consider the best within us.

Prayer is also a way of grappling to understand ourselves and our life’s meaning. When we are going through hardship or a time of loss and pain, prayer helps us to put our life in perspective, to remind us to live with hope, and to find comfort in the miracles that surround us. Prayer gives us strength to rise above our hardships and to see ourselves as part of something larger than ourselves.

Jewish worship is highly liturgical, as a sociologist would say. That means that there is a richly developed tradition of the “right” words that we are “supposed” to say. The sages of the Talmud recognized a problem with such a tradition. If a person becomes so used to reciting the same dense liturgy week in and week out, day in and day out, there is a danger that it will become a mechanical activity, devoid of meaning. 

For this reason, the Shulchan Aruch, one of the most authoritative codes of Jewish law, says: “It is better to offer a little bit of prayer to God with intention than to offer much without intention” (Orech Chayim 1:4). Prayer is not supposed to be offered just with the lips. For it to be meaningful, the heart and mind must be engaged as well.

However, there also are advantages to praying with a set form of prayer. When we pray the words of the T’filah, the central prayer of every service, we are reciting—more or less—the same words that are used in synagogues across the world, and words that were recited by the early rabbis of the Talmud. A set liturgy connects us to the Jewish people in time and space.

Also, the words of the siddur give us a way of eloquently expressing ourselves that would be difficult if every prayer were a spontaneous prayer. Creativity in prayer is not always frowned upon or discouraged in Jewish tradition. There are times and places when the best words are the words of your own heart. But there are few of us who can spontaneously compose words that will express the deepest feelings and thoughts within us. The siddur gives us words tested by time to express our awe and our apprehensions, our joy and our yearning for a better world.

Finding the right balance between a set liturgy and the heartfelt expression of our hearts is an ideal that the rabbis of antiquity struggled with, just as we struggle with it today. In the Talmud, there is an exchange between Rabban Gamaliel, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Eliezer—three of the giants among the early rabbis. Rabban Gamaliel, as usual, took the most formal and the most austere position. He said, “You should say the full set form of the T’filah prayer every day, just as the rabbis composed it.” Rabbi Eliezer, the most iconoclastic of the three, disagreed. He said, “If you make your prayer a fixed form, saying it by rote, then you have not really prayed at all.”  

It was Rabbi Akiva, the sage who always strived to reconcile and integrate the tradition, who offered a middle way. He said, “If you know and understand the prayer as composed by the rabbis, and if you can recite it fluently, you should say the set version of the prayer. However, if not, you should be encouraged to offer the abbreviated words that you understand and can recite meaningfully” (M. Berachot 4:3-4).

Jewish prayer is a balancing act between the experience of coming together as a community, united in a shared tradition, and the experience of expressing our own individual yearnings, hopes and heartache before God. There is a tradition of reciting these words at the end of the T’filah: “יהיו לרצון אמרי פי והגיון לבי לפניך ה’ צורי וגואלי,” “May the words of my mouth and the stirrings of my heart be acceptable to You, Adonai my Rock and my Redeemer” (Psalm 19:15). We ask God for the ability to make both the set words and the feelings that lie beneath them true and meaningful.

So, what have been your most meaningful prayer experiences? When has prayer helped you to define and refine your beliefs? When has prayer had the power of poetry to elevate your soul and give you a sense of purpose and meaning? When has prayer come to you in a moment of pain or uncertainty to give you the strength to persevere? When has your prayer been a moment that joins the blessings of being a part of a community with the blessing of being at peace deep within your own heart of hearts? 

Prayer can be and do all of those things when it rises from deep within us and calls out to that which is high above us and all around us.

Shabbat shalom!


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Why Pray?
Learning about Jewish Prayer from Yoga
How to Pray?

There is, at the heart of faith, a paradox.

People of faith rightly recognize that not all truths emanate from material reality. We are certain, without proof or the need of it, that our lives mean more than what we can experience with our five senses. We know that we are part of a great unity that connects us to each other and that gives the universe a purpose that we can only wonder upon; we cannot know it with certainty.

We are certain, yet uncertain. We give ourselves over to the fundamental truth that we are made for something greater than ourselves. At the same time, we confess that we do not, cannot, know with finality what that something is.

There is a spectrum among people of faith that runs from, at one extreme, those religious liberals who emphasize the uncertainty and revel in the ambiguity of our existance. At the other extreme are the so-called fundamentalists, those who build their faith on bedrock certainty about the divine plan and purpose of our existance, right down to the details of how the world reaches its end.

In truth, no one is so far to one of these two extremes that he or she does not admit even a small amount of the other. The liberal must rely on some unquestionable assumptions. One must believe in something to be a person of faith, so we are all "fundamentalists." We all have fundamental assumptions about the nature of the universe.

The self-proclaimed fundamentalists, too, must be open to some realms of uncertainty. If every one of God's thoughts were accessible to us, then God would be reduced to a spreadsheet in which all the boxes are filled with known quantities. We are all liberals in our acceptance of some uncertainties and the need for creative, flexible interpretation to fill the gaps of our understanding.

Personally, I fall fairly strongly on the liberal side of the religious spectrum; the side that is attracted to ambiguity and allergic to certainty. Before moving to Florida six months ago, my personal exposure to folks on the other side was limited to caricatures. Here, though, people who call themselves fundamentalists are the majority. I still cannot say that I know them well, but I have made some observations.

The people of faith who expect religion to give them definite answers to their questions, about how to live and why, are often people who are shocked by an amoral, anything-goes culture. They want their faith to set clear, identifiable boundaries to separate right from wrong. I can sympathise with that. I think that most people of faith are troubled by a culture that floods us with encouragement to pursue our basest desires.

I think this is why so-called fundamentalism is so attractive, even to people who do not follow its demands. Not every Protestant who attends services at an evangelical megachurch believes that every word of the Bible is God's unfailing truth. Not every Jew who donates to Chabad-Lubavitch even aspires to accept the duties of traditional dietary laws and Shabbat observance. Yet, many find comfort in a absolutist worldview in which there is unambiguous certainty. It's a nice place to visit, even for people who don't want to live there.

Fundamentalists often are portrayed as prudish, humorless and intolerant. However, the stereotype is not often true. They are just as likely, sometime more likely, to be people who who live exuberant, passionate and open-hearted lives.

The problem with fundamentalism is not that it is cold, mean or dry. The problem is that it relies on only itself for confirmation. (When you are convinced that you know God's plan, what other confirmation do you need? What other voice will you even listen to?) The problem with over-reaching fundamentalism is the unconcious arrogance of dismissing everything but itself in the search for truth.

When such a faith encounters thoughts, ideas, or even facts that contradict itself, all it can do is to dismiss, deny and ignore them. That's not good for a faith tradition. Bad things happen to religions when they start arguing with science, for example, about the physical properties of the universe. (Anyone care to defend the Catholic Church's treatment of Galileo?). And worse things happen to individuals who are taught by fundamentalism that the truths of their lives are, somehow, wrong—whether those truths are their thoughts, abilities, desires, creativity, sexual orientation, history of abuse, or even their gender.

As attractive as a strictly fundamentalist worldview can be, it is difficult for me to accept these consequences. For me, I cannot be so certain of my assumptions that I never question or doubt them. I cannot claim that I seek truth while shutting out experiences and traditions different from my own. For me, the dismissal of human beings who think, behave or who are created differently is a denial of Judaism's central teaching of universalism—the unity of God and the belief that we are all created in the image of God.

I am a Jewish religious liberal because I believe in uncertainty. I believe in a universe that is more vast, more mysterious and more sacred than my mind can encompass. I delight in the ongoing journey of discovering its truths hidden within all.


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Ki Tisa: The Golden Calf Is Within Us

This is the sermon I am giving tonight at Temple Beit HaYam in Stuart, Florida.
I was born with a name. My parents named me Jeffrey Wayne Goldwasser. That’s what it says on my birth certificate. Today, I have a different name. I am Rabbi Jeffrey Wolfson Goldwasser. The title “Rabbi” I acquired eleven years ago when I was ordained, and the middle name “Wolfson” I adopted sixteen years ago when I married my wife. I have also had other names over the course of my life.

When I was still very young, I was aware that I also had a Hebrew name, Yosef Aryeh, which was given to me on the day of my bris. I knew that I was named after my grandfather’s father. I saw his portrait hanging in my grandparent’s apartment whenever I visited them. Each time I saw it, I thought, “I’m named after that old man with the gray beard. We’re both Yosef Aryeh.”

When I was a kid, for reasons that are still unknown to me, my father called me “Bean.” Was he thinking about the time that I was the size of a kidney bean in my mother’s womb? Was it a reference to my energy level as a six-year-old boy who was “full of beans”? I don’t know. But I was Bean. That’s what my father called me.

When my little sister was old enough to give me a nickname, she called me “Jay,” which makes sense as an abbreviation for “Jeffrey.” Eventually, when I was in high school, the two nicknames were combined and I was known at home as “Jay Bean.”

Each of those names stir a lot of memories in me. Those names have the power to take me back to specific, cherished moments.

When I was a rabbinic student, I once led High Holiday services at Duke University in North Carolina. The non-Jewish cellist, whom the school chaplain had hired to play Kol Nidre, spoke to me in the deferential tones he probably used when talking to his minister. He kept calling me “Reverend.” I got a chuckle out of that. I never thought of myself as “Reverend,” but for one weekend, it became part of my name.

Today, I am “Jeff” to some. I am “Rabbi” to others. I am “Abba” to two people. And, I am “Mr. Goldwasser” to the hotel clerk who asks for my credit card, or the TSA agent who checks my driver’s licence at the airport.

Each of us is made up of many different identities and, sometimes, those identities each carry different names. Our names tell others, and they tell ourselves, who we are.

This week’s Torah portion is called, “Sh’mot.” Literally, Sh’mot means “Names.” The portion opens the book of Exodus and it begins by telling us the names of the children of Jacob who came down to live in Egypt: Reuben, Simeon, Levi and Judah; Issachar, Zebulun and Benjamin; Dan and Naphtali; Gad and Asher. Their descendants grew up in Egypt and stayed there. Over time, they earned a new name for themselves in the mouth of Pharaoh. Pharaoh called Jacob’s children, “Am B’nei Yisrael,” “The Israelite People.” By uttering that name, Pharaoh changed us from being a family into being a nation (Ex 1:9).

According to a teaching of the rabbis, the Israelites soon forgot the name of the God who had made a covenant with their ancestors, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But God did not forget them. Why not? According to the rabbis, it was on account of three things: they did not forget their native language, they did not stop circumcising their sons, and they did not change their names.” (Midrash Shocher Tov 114). Names are sacred in Jewish tradition. Names connect us to each other—like the way that different people know us by different names. And names also connect us to God.

When we wish to remember someone who has died, we mention his or her name and recite the Mourner’s Kaddish. Tonight, we are remembering Debbie Friedman on the occasion of her first yahrzeit by singing her songs and by repeating her name to keep her and her memory alive within us. Names have that power.

This week was also the yahrtzeit of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the greatest Jewish thinker of the Twentieth Century. There is a collection of poems that Heschel wrote when he was a young man living as a Polish foreigner in Berlin. The title of the collection is, The Ineffable Name of God: Man. In this title, Heschel suggests that God’s deepest identity, his unspeakable name, is to be found in humanity, in each of us. 

This weekend we also sanctify the name of Dr. Martin Luther King, jr., whose birthday is celebrated this Monday. By naming this day, “Martin Luther King Day,” our society has decided to make his memory a lasting part of our identity as a nation. By invoking his name on our calendars, on a special day off, and in our hearts, we recommit ourselves to the ideals that he stood for: freedom, equality, fellowship, peace, the beloved community and the pursuit of our highest dreams. 

Heschel and King knew each other. They marched through the streets of Selma, Alabama, together. By naming these two great men together, we affirm the universalism of our values. The things held dear by a chasidic rabbi from Poland are also dear to an African-American Baptist minister and minister’s son from Atlanta, Georgia.

If our names connect us to God, it is also true in Jewish tradition that God’s name connects God to us. In this week’s Torah portion, Moses spoke to God through the Burning Bush and said, “When I go back to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is this god’s name?’ what shall I say to them?” God answered Moses by saying, “Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, I-am-that-I-am. You can tell the Israelites that 'Ehyeh' sent you” (Ex 3:13-14). 

One of God’s deepest and truest names is simply Ehyeh, “I am.” God’s name tells us that God not only exists, but that God is existence. The God whose name is “I am” is a God who presence can be experienced throughout all of being, throughout all of everything that is.

By what names are you known? What do each of your names say about who you are? What do your names say about your values and the ideals that are most important to you? What are your most important relationships and what do your names say about those relationships? What are the names in your heart right now? Which names, when you hear them, warm your soul? Which names connect you to the highest within you? Which names connect you to God?

Each of us is born with a name which identifies us throughout life. But the names we acquire in life, and the names we invoke to say who we are and what we believe in, tell a great deal more about us. On this Shabbat, Shabbat Sh'mot, the Sabbath of Names, we sanctify our lives with the remembrance of names.

Shabbat shalom.



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The Last Miracle
Ha'azinu: Forgetting

No more. With the advent of cable news channels and the internet, the election season runs around the clock and around the calendar. Here we are, nearly ten months before Election Day, and the media are saturated with news about presidential politics. No sooner than the Iowa Caucuses and New Hampshire Primary are done than we are off to South Carolina. Can you wait another two weeks before the next all-important primary? 

I sure know that I can. It's January, and the Silly Season is already here.

It is not that I dislike politics. Far from it, I worked in the world of political advocacy and elections for more than a decade before I started rabbinic school. As an advocate for the environment, consumer protection and worker safety, I knew that the outcomes of elections had very real effects on the lives of people. Elections are not just about who gets to sit in the Oval Office, Congress or the state legislatures. They decide issues that everyone should care about. Elections determine how power will distributed in our society and how we will enact our values.

Still, as a person who also cares about my spiritual health, I find the extra-extended election season a huge headache. Elections are contests that force people into black-and-white ways of thinking. It pushes us into the belief that, "For my favored party or candidate to be right, the other side must be wrong." In recent years, the tone and temperament of American politics has gone even further than that. Now we think, "For my side to be right, the other side must be stupid, corrupt, weak-willed and evil."

You have to know that this kind of thinking is not good for you. The moment we start branding people as fools and monsters for the crime of disagreeing with our policy preferences, we turn ourselves into the very sort of fools and monsters we fear. I find that I have to make a conscious choice to limit the amount of time I spend listening to political speeches or watching debates because I do not like the way that my mind and soul react to them. Deep down inside, I know that I look pretty silly yelling at a radio or threatening a television screen.

One thing I learned from my years in advocacy is that elections are not the only things that matter in politics. What people actually do after they have been sworn into office matters a great deal more than anything that is said on the campaign trail. Unfortunately, it doesn't make for as good a news story or an image for the television. There's the rub.

The media love the combat of elections and they make us invest our emotions into the ups and downs of the polls, the "winners" and "losers" of the debates, and the angry rhetoric of stump speeches. People who really care about politics, though, spend more of their energy paying attention to how well people engage in the less telegenic arts of governing and statecraft. They know that politics is not just about winning; it's about getting things done.

I would never say, as I hear others say, that politics is only a silly game. It matters. I would never say that politicians are all alike. The difference in the way they do their jobs once elected can make our society more noble and virtuous, or it can lower us to the worst within us. I do have strong political preferences and I think that everyone who cares about our society should.

But… I also know that there is something higher within us and between us than the power plays of politics. Before you, too, start yelling at your television like me, remember to distinguish the spectacle from the reality. Remember that it is possible to learn from people with whom you disagree. Remember to recognize that most people in politics are sincere in their desire to create a better society, they just don't all agree on how to do it. Honestly, that's a good thing.

As this long and wearisome election season starts to rev up (in January!), we can all work to maintain within ourselves souls committed to compassion for people who disagree with us, generosity in our assumptions about other people's motives, modesty with regard to our own fallibility, and discernment in judging what is best for society as a whole.

Welcome to the Silly Season.


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Vayera: The Children of Sodom

At the beginning of the book of Exodus in this week's Torah portion (Shemot), we read that there were two midwives, Shifra and Puah, who refused to carry out Pharaoh's order to kill the newborn boys of Israel. Because of their act of civil disobedience, baby Moses was saved from being thrown into the Nile to drown. He was, instead, placed in a basket to ride on the surface of the Nile to live in the house of Pharaoh. Nice irony.

It is hard to imagine that the midwives would have done anything other than save the baby boys. Murder a newborn baby? Who would do such a thing, even under the orders of a powerful king? Such an act would haunt the soul of any normal person for the rest of her life. It is painful to consider how a person would overcome the quaking fear within that warns us against committing such a horror.

Indeed, the Torah tells us, in its own way, that Shifra and Puah did save the Israelite baby boys because of exactly this capacity to be horrified at the thought of committing murder. The Torah says that the midwives "feared God" (Exodus 1:21). 

The "Fear of God" is not, as some imagine, the cowering fear of a divine being who will come to smite the wicked with lightening bolts. Rather, when Jewish tradition talks about "fearing God," it is talking about the innate human response to the thought of committing an immoral act. This is the kind of fear (yirah in Hebrew) that we feel in our gut that sets a boundary against doing what we know is wrong.

The Torah says that because of their fear of God, Shifra and Puah were rewarded by God who "established households for them" (ibid). According to some commentators, this reward should not be understood only on a literal level. Those "households" may also have been the figurative four walls, floor and ceiling that define our moral universe and make us feel secure in who we are.

In his collection, Degel Machaneh Ephraim, the late-eighteenth-century chasidic master, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Ephraim of Sudilkov made this connection. He wrote that the fear of God can be called a "house" because it is the capacity within us that establishes our limits and boundaries. It creates a vessel into which we pour our lives. 

This capacity to tremble at immorality is something that almost everyone discovers in childhood. We recognize the suffering to others that results from our bad choices, and we are repulsed instinctively by the idea of being the cause of such suffering. This is a quality that we share with other animals. Monkeys and apes also show a innate discomfort in causing harm to their fellows, even when it is to their own immediate benefit.

As we grow older, the ability to respond to the discomfort of causing harm to others is something that we can develop into a mature moral sensibility, or it is something that we can learn to ignore. It is up to us to choose. 

People who choose, as Shifra and Puah did, to harness their actions according to that gut feeling, tend to feel more secure about themselves. They have a set of personal boundaries that help them to understand who they are and their own, personal expectations for themselves. Those boundaries help them to discover a sense of purpose and find happiness in life.

On the other hand, people who develop the habit of ignoring the feelings that tell them when they are stepping over the line, tend to feel ungrounded in life. WIthout a set of boundaries, life can seem purposeless and unrewarding. People who habitually act on their instincts to satisfy their desires without regard to the affect their actions have on others, over time, begin to feel that their unbounded desires can never be fully satisfied. They often grow unhappy with a world that never seems to give them what they want because they fail to recognize any limits on themselves or on their desires.

There is also an unhappiness that can result when people place too stringent limitations on the boundaries of their behavior. A person who convinces himself that everything he does is wrong is also likely to be unhappy, of course. We often think about people who are "wound too tight" when we imagine how people can make themselves unhappy, but we do not always recognize that having loose or missing boundaries can also lead to unhappiness.

God rewarded the Shifra and Puah's fear by establishing "households" for them. That may really mean that they found their own reward by living lives of moral order. By knowing themselves and setting boundaries for their actions, they found a sense of meaning and purpose in life. We can help ourselves to become more fulfilled by listening, as they did, to our own feelings. When we are aware of the trembling within that warns against harming others, we come closer to finding our own happiness.


Other posts on this topic:
Fearing God
Shelach Lecha: Getting Up Close and Personal