Parashat Re'eh 5768

This week’s Torah portion, Parashat Re’eh, opens with these words:

See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse: The blessing, if you listen to the mitzvot of Adonai your God that I am giving you today; and the curse, if you don't listen to the mitzvot of Adonai your God, but turn aside from the way I am ordering you today and follow other gods that you have not known.

Blessings, Torah teaches, are available to us, if we only choose them. And, the curses? Well, we can keep them at bay if we only choose rightly. The question is: What is a “blessing,” and what is a “curse”?

The Sefat Emet, a nineteenth Century Hasidic master, teaches that a “blessing” is a living point, hidden deep within each of us. To sense or uncover our hidden blessing, we must listen for it. We must attune ourselves to the divine substance that exists within us. When we find ways to recognize this bit of the divine in each of our acts, we live a life of blessing.

In this sense, then, a blessing is not something extrinsic that we receive. But, rather, intrinsic. A blessing is something within us, a true core that each one of us possesses. And, the Sefat Emet teaches, when we live our lives with an awareness of our divine blessing, we experience life differently.

What, then, keeps us from living our lives centered around a divine blessing? The answer, I believe, is in the Torah portion itself. There are many distractions that catch our eye and divert us from seeing the inner blessings of our lives. These distractions, which our ancestors called “idols” or “other gods,” take new forms today. These distractions pull us from our divine centers. Instead of living life in tune
with our divine core, we find ourselves living in tune with other rhythms: busy-ness, stress, success, responsibilities, etc. And, while none of these is, in and of itself, problematic, they have the potential to become problematic when we live only for them. In the same way that a piece of wood only becomes and idol when you pray to it, success only becomes a diversion to the divine when you live by it.

On this Shabbat, I wish us all the power to choose our own blessing. May we each realize that we hold within us a hidden divine core, ready to be discovered, ready to be unleashed, ready to be embodied.