The Blessings of our Difficulties

Elisheva Schlanger

Parshat Breishit 2015

Carlebach Minyan, Teaneck

We just began a new year- the world is new.

The world is created in Breishit- so much potential.

God sees what He created, and He says that it is good. לשנה טובה was what we’ve all been wishing each other.

On the other hand…

-         A minute after man and woman are created, they eat from the tree.

-         At the same time that we asked for mechila from the people close to us, we continued in many of our bad patterns of disharmony.

-         The natural world during this time of year is not full of life, as we see in the spring—it is getting colder, and leaves are falling off the trees.

Solution:

1.     Yom kippur was the second set of luchot- engrained in the fabric of the New Year is the fall that came before it.

2.     So too, we see in Midrash Breishit Rabba that Hashem created many worlds before this one, and destroyed all of them, until He finally settled on the world we know.

3.     Goodness does not equal perfection. God has left us with a model that allows for us to fail and for us to constantly improve and work on ourselves.

We need not feel debilitated in our shame that we are still having so much trouble with people who are close to us. That we are struggling ourselves to hold it together. God has created and destroyed so many times.

“Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?
Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied.
Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?
Hemingway: Getting the words right.
— Ernest Hemingway, The Paris Review Interview, 1956”

Inherent in the struggles is the invitation for growth. The sin of eating from the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil made us like God, that we know how to make moral decisions and live in this world like God- which is, essentially, our job.

Leaning into the discomfort helps us to grow: to quote from Chaya Lester: “Every Mess is Messianic.” The sin of the golden calf brings us the thirteen attributes of mercy and Torah Shebaal Peh!

Feeling Good Together by David Burns: Conflict in relationships opens the door for understanding, humility and growth. We can welcome them, stare the demons in the face and see them through.

This is such a little known secret about the blessing of conflict.

John Lennon’s 75^th birthday makes me think about The Beatles, and how I used to mourn the fact that they split up. But the truth is that their separation led to some wonderful new creations that they each went on to create independently of the other Beatles.

So let us start this new year with an understanding that it is good.