Ordinary People
Rabbi Ron Shulman
Shabbat Naso 5771
It’s graduation season. We rejoice with all of our students and their families. We are proud of the hundreds of students in our Chizuk Amuno community who are completing courses of study. We are excited for them to move forward to their next places of learning and life experience. These are wonderful milestones at every age, from preschool to PhD.
Celebrating this week with our Krieger Schechter Day School 8th graders, and with our Rosenbloom Religious School 7th graders, and with our Netivon High School Seniors at their graduations, I had a flash back to one of my 8th grade history teachers.
To be honest, I don’t remember his name. I do remember his daily complaint. People didn’t treat him with respect, he said. He felt that though he was an honest man doing an honest job, people looked down on him. He began many classes with the rant, “Don’t call me an ordinary man!” Back then, I didn’t understand what he meant. Today, I think I do.
Our daily burdens and experiences bear little similarity to the fantasy lives of those we read about or watch in the media. Our culture celebrates the crude and exaggerates the unusual. Ask yourself the next time you happen to be at the movies or watching television, how many of the characters portrayed actually reflect something of your own life? And of those who do, how many are there and how often does their fiction look like your reality?
There are no graduation or award ceremonies for living an honest and good life. No awards are given out for best effort as a parent, a friend, a healer, a teacher, a caregiver, a neighbor, or a good person. Constantly, I hear from individuals who tell me, “I’m not very creative.” “I’m not real outgoing.” “I’m not that talented.” I’m just average,” or what my old history teacher thought of as ordinary. Please understand. The problem is not being who you are. The problem is thinking that being who you are isn’t enough.
Jewish wisdom teaches us. “There is no person in the world who does not possess one trait and one moment in which they are elevated above all others.” To be uniquely who we each are is Judaism’s goal for every human being. As Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver wrote in his classic work, Where Judaism Differed, “The average Jew’s purpose, as all of Judaism, is to increase holiness in the world.”
Every year this is something I tell my graduating students. To be Jewish is to be given the symbols, insights, celebrations and ethics of a tradition whose goal is the refinement and goodness of every human being, created in the image of God. To live our lives guided by these measures of our own humanity gives expression to what is unique and sacred about each of us.
A parent who lovingly cares for her or his child’s needs, who does so much and worries even more, is deeply blessed by the strength of such love. A person who devotes so much time, talent and energy to struggling with other people’s problems is engaged in, not aloof from, life’s purpose. Each one of us who is concerned about events in our world, the well being of our country and neighbors, and of our people live gratefully protecting all we value as just and good.
This morning we read about the Levites, Israel’s priestly tribe, who were divided into three sub-groups. Each group or family was given a sacred task to help in transporting the Mishkan, the portable tabernacle, through the wilderness. Some took the hides and cloths. Others carried the planks and posts. The last group was responsible for the furnishings and ritual objects. The Torah records that a total of 8,580 men between the ages of thirty and fifty were assigned specific duties.
“At Moses hand, by the word of God, each one was given responsibility for his service and his burden, and each was recorded as the Eternal had commanded Moses.” The Hebrew word masa suggests, “carrying a burden.” The men being described by the text were to act as holy porters, carrying their assigned items and vessels from place to place.
The 15th Century Italian commentator S’forno reminds us that the men being described in the Torah were acting in response to God’s command. They didn’t perform their jobs in search of recognition or fame. They didn’t complain that theirs was unimportant work. They did what they had to, day by day and step by step, because they believed their specific act contributed to making a place for God in their world. When the whole of what they were carrying was assembled, they could see the meaning of their burden. It doesn’t have to be much different for any of us.
You and I, we don’t carry the Mishkan’s parts along our way, but we do carry our personal bundle of burdens and privileges each day. Learning from S’forno’s insight, acting on our responsibilities is not a choice life asks us to make, but an obligation we are required keep. We too can make a place for God in our world by looking to see the whole of what our efforts create.
Think about all that you do for someone else, and how much others try to do for you. The unique mission we each seek to accomplish builds our lives’ characters. It is the purpose of our lives.
In what I call a modern Midrash on this lesson of Torah, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote this week “…the tasks of a life are at the center. Fulfillment is a byproduct of how people engage their tasks, and can’t be pursued directly. Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.”
I long ago lost track of my eighth grade history teacher. But in those many years since I discovered these words of the English author G.K. Chesterton describing what I think my teacher meant. “All people are ordinary people. The extraordinary people are those who know it.”
© 2011 Rabbi Ronald J. Shulman
