By Rabbi Abraham Unger, Ph.D.
Executive Director
This Week’s Torah Portion
To Be in the World
Religion is often viewed as a restrictive approach to life. It implies limitations on our involvement in the physical world around us to direct us towards a spiritual path. However, that kind of monasticism is not the Jewish way.
In this week’s Torah portion, we are told the laws of the Nazir, a person who voluntarily withdraws from much of the physical world. One might at first think that lifestyle is the most favored in the eyes of G-d. Judaism differs.
While the Rabbis of the Talmud do allow for those who take a vow of refraining from the world around us, they do so with a grain of salt. The noted Israeli yeshiva Kerem B’Yavneh has published that “as a way of serving Hashem [G-d], nezirut [withdrawal] is something negative, because the ideal is that a person should sanctify the mundane, and not live in a manner of abstention and separation from the material world.”
Rabbi Dr. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the foremost theologian of American Modern Orthodoxy, wrote that the Adam of Genesis is one who conquers nature by furthering the technological and developmental progress of humankind.
I repeatedly tell my sons, “Go out into the world, and take your Torah with you.”
Weekly Parenting Message from the Parsha
Counting to Five
It’s easy to get angry. It just takes a little loosening of self-control and a discarding of clearheaded focus in the heat of the moment. It’s even easier for a child to behave that way. Children haven’t yet developed the self-regulatory mechanisms we know about as adults.
The Torah understands this all-too-human tendency and offers a practical method to distance ourselves from the anger we may sometimes feel. In this week’s Shabbat Torah reading, we learn of the priestly blessings. These are the blessings the Cohanim, the officiants in the ancient temple, bestowed upon the Children of Israel. The theme of these blessings is that we nurture the talent to take a step back, and, as a first reaction to a difficult situation, seek out peace and conciliation rather than conflict.
If human beings were naturally peaceful, there would be no need for the Torah to gently remind us, through the mechanism of a blessing, that the higher aim of our lives is to practice calming, peaceful behaviors, no matter the circumstance. But we are people of flesh and blood, so the Torah created a whole ritual – a practice – to remind us of our better natures. We have earned that blessing as peace seekers because it is within our capability to live up to that standard. Being able to reflect, and take a step back, is also what makes us human. We are not merely defined by raw emotion.
As parents, it is our task to offer these kinds of blessings to our children. Let’s talk about what it means to be more self-aware, what it means to be a seeker of peace between people when disagreement emerges, as it inevitably will in life. If we talk about it – if we practice thoughtful, peaceful behavior – then our children will too.