Friday, October 31, 2014

Life’s a Journey

I do not think that Aerosmith can truly be considered one of the more quotable groups in the music world. Their songs are not so deep on the surface.  But when we look further we find a great deal.  “Dream On” is a great example of this.  But I would like to quote their song “Amazing.”  One of the verses goes:

Life's a journey not a destination
And I just can't tell just what tomorrow brings

The entire song is all about not giving up on life and getting through the difficult times.  It happens to be a very meaningful song.  But I think the aforementioned words tell us so much about the week’s Torah Portion.  פרשת לך לך begins with a journey, the journey of אברם and שרי (Avram and Sarai).  God tells them to leave their land, the place of their birth and the house their father and go to some new place that He will show them.  The most interesting thing about these opening words are the words לך לך which literally translate and mean Go to yourself.  How does one Go to his or herself? 

Well lets begin with a Hasidic story.

We have a tradition that Reb Zusia taught the following: "When I will face the heavenly court after my demise, I am not afraid that they are going to ask me, Why were you not Moses, or the other great ancestors? I have no such fear for I am sure that they will not ask me these questions. However, I am afraid that I will be asked, Why weren't you Zusia, the Zusia that you could have been, the Zusia that we had planned for you to be through the talents, abilities, time and opportunities that were granted to you. That is what scares me.”

Reb Zusia is explaining to us that we spend so much time worrying about being as great as somebody else.  We spend so much time fearing that we will never measure up to our ancestors… The reality is that we do not need to because all we need to be is ourselves. This is no easy task.  We spend our lives trying to fit in with other groups.  We spend so much time trying to conform to the standards of our people.  And then we step back and ask ourselves what we ourselves would like to have and like to be.  Then we truly find our journey worth going on.

We should never spend our lives looking to find ourselves, we should spend our lives being ourselves.  We should never spend our days obsessing about what we are not… We should spend our days happy with who we are.  This all seems to sound so simple… Be yourself.  But if it were that simple then we would never have teenage drama and never have these feelings of emptiness inside of our cores.  It is not easy to be ourselves.  It is not easy to embrace the person in the mirror because we are our own worst critics.  What is easy is to take steps.  To start the journey to finding who we are and then begin being who we are.

When I was in High School I made a decision to wear a kippah all of the time.  Now in High School where everything is always being judged and where everyone is always caring more about what others think than what they themselves feel, this was a very difficult decision to make.  But I made it because I wanted to be me.  I wanted to shout out to the world who I am and be proud of it.  Over the years I have been more than aware of the kippah that sits on my head.  When I was in college and in a fraternity for a year it was odd for me to be at parties, but taking the Kippah off would have changed who I was to myself.  When I worked in a coffee shop and people would give me strange looks, it would have been easy to have said forget it.  But that was not going to be me being me. It would be me being something other.

The chorus of the Aerosmith song goes “It’s amazing with a blink of an eye you finally see the light.”  There are always going to be those aha moments when we see the world more clearly.  There are always going to be the transforming times where we finally get it.  Those moments are inside of each of us.  We need to be willing to be ourselves.  We need to resist the pull of the other and embrace the pull of self.  God is calling on Abram to be himself in his journey.  Because on this journey of life we do best when we resist trying to be someone else and instead we are our best selves.  

In verses after this command God explains that Abram will be blessed and be a blessing.  Blessing is too often thought of being wealth a physical objects that we amass.  Being blessed is actually better understood of being happy with what we have.  Being blessed is being able to see that we are good enough the way that we are.  Being blessed means traveling through our lives content and seeing that we have everything within ourselves.  Just remember: “Life’s a journey, not a destination.”