Seven days with the Chernobyler Maggid

Somewhere in your life there is a person who did a thing you now do without thinking. Your grandfather's way of saying a bracha (blessing) a little too loudly. Your mother's habit of setting one extra place on Friday. You never decided to pick these up. You just noticed one day, in your own kitchen, that they were yours.

The Me'or Einayim says there is a deeper inheritance. Love, awe and knowledge of Hashem are not things you have to produce from nothing. They came down to you from Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov. In our words: on the morning when davening (prayer) feels dry, or when the day asks for more than you think you have, you are drawing on an account that was opened long before you got there.

But notice the last two words of his sentence. Yaakov left us the power to know Him, he says, "if we want." An inheritance sits there whether you use it or not, and nobody can make the withdrawal for you. That part is still open.

Every project has the moment. Someone pulls up the original plan from a year ago, and the room goes quiet, because what got built looks nothing like it. Nobody decided that. It was a hundred small decisions, each one reasonable, each one made on a busy afternoon. A life can drift the same way.

The Me'or Einayim says you have an original plan too. Every craftsman pictures the vessel before he makes it, and the plan for a person is the Torah. A person, he says, must not let his actions contradict it. In our words, that is a builder's question: does what I am doing match the drawing? That is a different feeling from guilt. You are checking the work against the drawing.

He names one condition, and it is a hard one: not aiming at your own benefit, in anything. Aiming at it, he says, cuts a person off from his root. In our words, most of us will not meet that today. The drawing is still there, though, and we can still pull it up.

It is the new hire's second day, and you are being wonderful. You have cleared an hour. You are walking him through the whole system, the history, the exceptions, the reason the old approach failed. He is nodding and writing things down. By four o'clock you have told him everything you know, and he remembers almost none of it. You meant it as a gift.

The Me'or Einayim says the world itself needed a limit: kindness has to be held to what the receiver can take in, and so even the limit is kindness. He says it about someone teaching Torah. He has to give people what they need, at their own measure, so that it leads to action, and the teacher's own awe of Hashem is the house that makes this possible. In our words, it holds for anyone teaching anything. The question is not how much you have to give. It is how much he can carry.

This is hard for generous people to hear. For him the wall of the house is awe of Hashem. Taking it to a new hire's second day is our step: sometimes the kindest thing you will do today is stop talking after the second point.

Think about your father doing the taxes at the dining room table every April, muttering, because he promised to take care of the family. Or the nurse who straightens a stranger's blanket on her way past the bed, when nobody is watching. None of it looks like much. You would not call it holy, and neither would they.

The Me'or Einayim says Yaakov was whole for exactly this reason. Every ordinary thing is a covering, a tent, with something of its Maker inside, and Yaakov looked through the covering. He does not mention jobs. Taking it there is our step: that is what the spreadsheet and the client call are asking of you. Not to pretend they are something else, but to do them as service of Hashem.

Esav, he says, is excess. He is not against more: the more of Yaakov, he says, is loved. But there is a more that is only more. It is worth noticing how often that shows up in a career. The bigger title you do not actually want. The extra hour that is only there to be seen. Nobody can tell you exactly where enough is. Most people know, when they are honest, which tent they are sitting in.

There is a bracha (blessing) your grandfather said with his eyes closed. A shul (synagogue) in the city he came from that still has the building, and forty people on a good Shabbat. Every family has something the last generation did without effort, and this one does not quite know how to do.

The Me'or Einayim tells it plainly. Avraham dug, and after he died the bad in people grew strong and the springs closed. Yitzchak took hold of his father's way and taught his own generation to dig again. And the digging, he says, is into yourself. Yirmiyahu's warning is about the other option, the broken cistern, which has no source and cannot hold water.

In our words: you cannot run forever on your parents' Torah, your high school's energy, or the year in Israel you still talk about. Those were wells someone else dug. They are also why you know what the water tastes like. His first shovel is emunah. It takes a long time to reach water.

You had a plan for this morning: twenty minutes of learning before work. Then the baby was up at five, the train was late, and your boss moved the meeting to eight. By nine you were angry, mostly at yourself. You know how the rest of that day goes. Most weeks have one of these, and most of us count them as a day lost.

He is speaking about the bad in a person and about hardship. In our words, it is also a way to read a morning like this one. Even in the thing blocking you, he says, something of Hashem is hidden. Ask what it grows from, and take that same force and turn it, in a thought, a word or an act, toward serving Him. "In truth there is no obstacle," he writes. That is a hard sentence on a bad morning.

We should say what we are not doing here. In this passage he does speak of hardship that comes through a person's own sins, and of how that person should respond. We read that as a person's work on himself. We do not offer it as an explanation of anyone's suffering, and it is not something to say to a person in pain. Yitzchak's first two wells ended in fights. Then he dug another, and it had room.

Somebody at most Shabbat tables has a story they do not tell. The years they stopped keeping things. The stretch when they were not someone their parents would have recognized. They sit there now, passing the salad, and part of them still feels like a guest.

The Me'or Einayim is speaking about teshuvah on Rosh Hashanah. When what was far from Hashem comes close, His delight is double what He has in the deeds of the righteous. He supports this with a saying of the Sages. In the Gemara (the Talmud, Berachot 34b), Rabbi Abahu says: "In the place where those who return stand, the completely righteous do not stand." Rabbi Yochanan disagrees there. The Me'or Einayim takes Rabbi Abahu's side here.

In our words, this is no reason to wander off. The Mishnah (Yoma 8:9) says that someone who says "I will sin and then return" is not given the chance to return. It is an answer to the person at this table who has come back and still feels the distance counts against them. Nobody has to say who that is.