Loving Shabbos

The test to know whether you love Shabbos, says R' Boruch Leff in his third Shabbos book, A New Shabbos Soul, is how do we feel when Shabbos leaves.  Do we wait with bated breath for Shabbos to be over? If we do, we don't really love Shabbos.  Do we feel like we want Shabbos to be finished so we can get back to a project we were working on? Then we don't really love Shabbos, he says.

I disagree.  If you look forward to seeing your family and after spending many happy hours with them, you are ready to go, does that mean you don't love your family?

There is loving spending time with people, there is loving doing an activity, and then there is having enough and wanting to do something else.  I don't see how that demonstrates lack of love.  According to his reasoning, if I don't want to spend all my time, always, with my family, then I don't love them and of course, that is not true.

I think the same is true for Shabbos.  I look forward to Shabbos.  I am happy when it begins.  I like Shabbos morning.  I like Shabbos afternoon.  And then, when it is time for Shabbos to be over, I am not pining for more and more.  Now that's a chisaron, I know, based on many sources, for example, Shabbos being a taste of Olam Haba which is for eternity.  If I appreciated Shabbos even more than I do, I would want to extend it.  But to say that it means I don't love it? No.

Love-Timing-Details

Leiby Burnham was a guest lecturer for a retreat in Yosemite.  There were three photographers on the trip who were eagerly after the best shots at all hours of the day and night.

He learned three major life lessons from them:
 

1) When you truly love something, nothing is too difficult.

There was no task too hard for them because they LOVE photography and were willing to work 200% harder for a shot that would be only 2% better.

Lesson: Instilling love for Hashem and mitzvos is the goal.  Many of our frum society's "issues" would melt away if we were successful at this.

2) They sat down each night to strategize the next day's photo shoots.  They had only a limited amount of time and they wanted to make sure they got all the shots they needed.
 

Lesson: We only have a limited time here on Earth and need to maximize the time.

3) Many of us take pictures but these professionals were obsessed with the details.

Lesson: As Burnham put it, people often wonder, does Hashem really care about my kavana, about how I remove pits from cantaloupe on Shabbos? Isn't Yiddishkeit mainly about connecting to Hashem? Are we losing the feeling and passion in the details?
 

The truth is, Hashem does care about the details, because He wants each of us to create a masterpiece.  (And here's a point that Burnham makes so well:) Leonardo da Vinci didn't paint the Mona Lisa by just focusing on the "spirit" of the painting.  Motzart did not create masterful music by just thinking about the feeling behind the music; he meticulously worked on every single note.  L'havdil, Hashem gave us clear instructions for so many of the details because passion and love are great but mastery is in the details.

Getting the Loving Message Across

Rabbi Noach Orlowek writes, "R' Yechiel Yakobson, one of Israel's revered educators, once met with a group of 'off the track' teenagers.  He asked them how he could prevent what happened in their families happening in his own.  They answered, 'You don't have to worry.  Your children know you love them.'"

R' Orlowek then writes, "At a wedding in Milwaukee, I sat at the same table as Rav Michel Twersky, who grew up in Milwaukee 80 years ago and attended public school, since there were no yeshivos there at the time.  I asked him how he and his brothers turned out to be such wonderful marbitzei Torah and paragons of Torah principles and Torah living.  When I asked the question, his entire demeanor changed.  Slowly and clearly, he said something that has never left me.  'We knew two things about our father, that he loved us very much and that he believed in us.'"

R' Orlowek goes on to point out that this is not to say that families where children have rebelled did not love their children.  "But sometimes, the message that they love their children does not come through clearly."

One approach to getting the message across is by seeing which "love language" means the most to a child.  Gary Chapman explained how he came to categorize five love languages, "Some of my encounters with couples through the years that brought me to realize that what makes one person feel loved does not necessarily make another person feel loved. For a number of years, I have been helping couples in the counseling office discover what their spouse desired in order to feel loved. Eventually, I began to see a pattern in their responses. Therefore, I decided to read the notes I had made over twelve years of counseling couples and ask myself the question, “When someone sat in my office and said, ‘I feel like my spouse doesn’t love me,’ what did they want?” Their answers fell into five categories. I later called them the five love languages."

It's simple and straightforward and worth looking up.

Loving This World

In a lecture given by R' Yossi Bensoussan, he quotes a speech that a rosh yeshiva of a yeshiva in Israel says to the boys:

"Do you know why I'm religious? I'm an olam ha'zeh'nik. I love this world; I love the pleasures of this world. Because I'm so into physical pleasure, I am a religious Jew. Because if you do this, i.e. Torah and mitzvos, and do it right, you will never feel so high or elated in your entire life. Anyone who tells you they are religious because of the next world is fooling themselves and fooling you.

“I am religious because of the pleasure I get out of it in this world. Of all the materialistic pleasures of this world (and I wasn't always religious), religious life is most pleasurable. As it says “ashrecha v'tov lach” - ashrecha in this world and tov lach in Olam Haba. We don't know anything about the next world, but we know this world."

Interesting, isn't it? I'm old school.  Olam Haba does mean a lot to me.  I have heard numerous lectures by Rabbi Avigdor Miller z'l who spoke so much about preparing for the next world, though he too urged people to be happy in this world by seeing what a wonderful world G-d created.  So I don't accept that rabbi's statement that Olam Haba is not a real reason that motivates us to be religious.  It is not the only reason, but it's a reason!

to be continued

What Makes Us Human

In the 1950's and 1960's, linguist Dr. Noam Chomsky said that language is just too complicated for children to learn as fast as they do just by listening to and seeing others talk.  He concluded that infants are born with a sense, a "deep structure," an aptitude for syntax and grammar.

In more recent decades, however, researchers have analyzed every step of language and have discovered what the steps of language acquisition are, thus making it far less mysterious.

I read this and thought, they don't get it! Hashem created the world with four strata: domen, tzomeiach, chai, medaber - the inanimate (water, minerals), plant life, animal life, human beings.  The level of human beings is refered to as "medaber" - one who speaks, as intelligent thought expressed in speech is what sets humans apart from animals.  So Chomsky got it right.  There is a "deep structure" that is built into humans which enables us to master speech.  The fact that researchers can break down the steps of language acquisition doesn't alter the fact that humans are medabrim by definition!

I wondered how I could convey this point clearly and came up with this analogy.  The scientific approach would have us think that because there are chemical changes that occur when a person loves (seretonin, oxytocin, dopamine etc.), which can be measured, that love is merely a biochemical chain of events, not a state of mind and heart.  And yet, this science cannot explain situations such as the love of a couple like the Scharanskys who were apart for years and the love of parents for children who are grown.  As someone wisely put it:
 
"Love is a feeling, certainly, and chemicals may contribute to that feeling, but like all emotions, that aspect of love comes and goes. Love that becomes a constant is a state-of-mind and heart. It survives because we nurture it, and plant the seeds of the relationship in our soul.

Choosing to love someone is what keeps us in love, even though we know that at various times we may become angry, sad and frustrated towards our loved one. Choosing to love is remembering the good times in the middle of the bad times.

Chemicals cannot make our choices. We choose to open our hearts or not everyday, and this freedom of choice is what makes us human, and fully capable of rising above chemical reactions in order to make spiritual decisions of the heart."

That we are now able to see which part of the brain "fires" when different emotions are felt, doesn't reduce these emotions to nothing but chemical reactions.  The chemical reactions are just that, reactions to and visible manifestations of, human emotions. 

If someone would venture to articulate this more clearly for us, I'd welcome that! 

Talk About Miscommunication!

In the excellent book "Nine out of Ten" (Israel Bookshop) p. 116 the author says he grew up with the misconception that his mother did not love him.  She would look at him and repeat a little Hungarian saying to herself which said, "You are as good as you look" or "Your goodness is reflected in your face."  Since he, a child, did not think he was good looking, he assumed others felt the same way and therefore, his mother's saying that his goodness reflected his appearance wasn't a compliment.  Each time she said it, it hurt him.

As all children yearn for their parents' approval, he worked on getting his mother to love him by buying her gifts and in other ways showing his devotion to  her but his feeling unappreciated stayed with him for decades.  About fifty years after the war, in which his mother was murdered, was over, he went over to his sister at a wedding to wish her mazal tov and she introduced him to a woman sitting next to her as "the best Katz in the family" and added, "My mother positively adored him."

The author was shocked at this statement and protested - but she always said that proverb about goodness being reflected in the face and you know that my face was never anything to write home about! The lady sitting next to his sister, who understood the Hungarian saying, insisted that those words were a tremendous compliment.  "They are the nicest words a child can hear," she said. 

This enabled him to think that perhaps his mother had really liked him and had really meant what she said.

Some time later he had occasion to meet the Hungarian ambassador to the United States.  He decided he would take the opportunity to clarify, once and for all, the meaning of the words his mother constantly said to him.  He wrote the proverb down in Hungarian and asked the ambassador to translate it for him.  The ambassador said, "This saying is the nicest, warmest thing a parent can say to a child."  He unburdened himself to the man and said how he always thought his mother didn't like him and how much he had suffered because of it.  The ambassador said, "You can rest assured that your mother loved you more than any of your brothers and sisters, and the proof is that she said this to you often."

Is this not extraordinary? A mother expresses her deep love for her child and the child, rather than basking in her love, feels hurt and unappreciated! How many times do we misunderstand what people are saying to us? What feelings do we have towards people that are based on a completely erroneous understanding of what they said to us? Let us pray that it does not take us decades to appreciate the truly warm feelings people have for us.

Saying "I Love You"

R' Binyamin Ginsberg said he has asked hundreds of children, ages 5-14, whether their parents love them.  He said 84% said "no" or "I don't know," and of the 16% who said "yes," when he asked how they knew, they didn't say -as he would have liked - "because they tell me they love me", but they said their parents buy them things etc. R' Ginsberg urges parents to tell their children, daily, that they love them.

I understand why he finds this so urgent but disagree on a few points.  First, numerous children, myself included, were not told "I love you" by their parents on a daily basis or any basis and yet we know, good and well, that our parents love us.  How do we know? I'll answer as follows.  There are some frum people who maintain that husband and wife should be physically demonstrative in front of their kids because otherwise, the reasoning goes, "how will they know that mommy and daddy love each other?" The response to that is (from those who oppose being physically demonstrative in front of the children), that children know from how their parents speak and look at one another, whether they love each other.  Some might go so far as to say that many a divorced couple hugged and kissed in front of their kids and so those demonstrations don't necessarily reveal the truth of a relationship.  It's the more subtle forms of interaction that are more revealing.

In America there are many people who have adopted the habit of saying "I love you" on a regular basis, when ending phone calls, when leaving the house, at bedtime.  They'll say it to family and friends too. That's okay, I'm not saying it's not, but sometimes it seems so frequent as to be cheap or meaningless like "have a nice day" when the phrase doesn't seem to come from the heart but from habit.  Perhaps the actions, the buying things and doing things for us, express the love far more than words do.

Second, I think the answer "because my parents buy me things" is a good answer from a young child who is probably not capable of articulating how he knows how his parents love him but is secure in the feeling that they do.

Third, we say in our davening that Hashem loves us.  Knowing that Hashem loves us is a basis, says the Chovos Ha'Levavos, for trusting in Him.  Now if you did a poll and asked people whether Hashem loves them and how do they know, what would the answers be? I suppose some learned people would say, "because it says so in the pasuk and Siddur."  Perhaps that is the equivalent of "because they tell me they love me." 

I think many people would respond, "I know Hashem loves me because of all the kindnesses He does for me."  Is this not the equivalent of the children who say they know their parents love them because their parents buy them things?

Which answer reflects a deeper awareness of Hashem's love?