There is Big T Truth and little t truth.
How confused in the world do you feel right now?
If you were raised with the ethos of Tikkun Olam, you have shaped global progress by using your Jewish voice to ally with Social Justice causes. You are healing the world by speaking up for and campaigning for marginalized groups, racial and gender equality, non-discrimination policies, animal rights, and raising mental health and environmental awareness.
If you were raised, like I was, with the ethos of Moshiach Now, you have shaped global progress by using your Jewish voice to influence the world through the lens of one mitzvah that can tip the scale and bring about redemptive consciousness. You are healing the world through the unconditional love of a fellow Jew, sharing Torah and doing practical mundane mitzvot, advocating for Jewish education, and spreading Godly awareness and Jewish education.
These are not mutually exclusive modern-day American Jewish experiences; there is overlap. You get the picture.
Wherever you find yourself, leading up to 2023, you and I thought the world was getting better, healed, and whole. A rising tide lifts all ships, and we were riding it.
And then came October 7th, when we were pulled by our shirt collar, choking and gasping for air, back into the dark ages. Barbarity, Horror, and sadism have replaced our kitty cat memes and the latest (Hollywood) gossip.
Did we truly go backward in time? Blood libels(Jews are colonizers!), Forced conversions (claim anti-Zionism and your Jewish soul is saved!) and Nazi Rally and Kristallnacht (Pro-Hamas ‘demonstrations’ where a Jew is murdered) all over again?
Have all of the decades of progress since we were last here been futile? What is this that we are experiencing? (Poltergeist comes to mind!)
I think about Sara’s death, which is called Sara’s life, in this week’s Parsha.
The Midrash says that she heard how her husband, Avraham, had taken her only child and bound and sacrificed him on an altar. The pain, the grief, the diversion was too great.
She and her family were on a path toward progress, toward birthing a “great nation,” “as many as the stars and sand,” a “blessed people that would bless the whole world,” and in one instant, she imagined it disappeared.
Avraham, on the other hand, was told to sacrifice his son and saw no contrariety with the promise God made to him. Avraham went headfirst into the diversion.
“He awoke EARLY in the morning”...
Can you imagine how much faith and trust it took for Avraham to make this trek with his son? To do so went against every fiber of his love-filled being (Avraham was the archetype of unconditional love), never mind the apparent end to his legacy.
This faith and trust (and love!) is alive in every one of us as his descendants.
Maybe we feel bound up on the altar right now. We experience this as a great diversion. Death, tragedy, chaos, and evil has arrived in a way our generation has not experienced, it’s not in tales of the Holocaust, it’s at our doorstep.
Chayei Sara, the life of Sara. This is the name of the Parsha in which she dies.
There is Life.
Did one of them do it better? Avraham in his steadfastness, Sara in her shock and crumble.
Not at all.
Avraham, connected to his soul’s purpose, stays focused on faith, trust, and love.
Sara, connected to her soul’s purpose, created the very life that we live.
In Sara’s death (in the sacrifice of Isaac), there was no diversion. There was life:
A land was purchased (Eretz Yisrael)
A match was made
Children were born
Inheritance was granted
Faith
Trust
(and love!)
Lives in each of us
This, my Tikkun Olam, Moshiach-minded friends, is big T Truth and our mission right now. (Hella hard!)
Stay focused!