Good Morning 1-31-19

Are you trapped? That’s the question Elisha Greenbaum asked recently in an article he wrote for Chabad.org. Some people flounder for years in loveless marriages for the sake of the kids. Others work at dead-end jobs because they have to make ends meet. Some are hopelessly addicted to alcohol or pills or drugs. Still others are trapped by extreme feelings of inadequacy and depression. Hopefully, dear reader, you don’t find yourself in any straits so dire as these, but you might be in a rut, a slump, drowning in belongings or just feeling ever so slightly unhappy with your life.

As Greenbaum says, “Admit it, you’re a slave.”

Bad choices and unfortunate circumstances can easily catch up to us until we are enslaved by our situation. Maybe you aren’t where you thought you’d be at this stage in your life. You thought you’d be more of a success, or be ready for a comfortable retirement. Perhaps you just can’t stop comparing your life to those glossy photos on Facebook and Instagram, the shiny people with their perfect lives. And then you perpetuate the myth for them, whose lives are actually as tarnished as your own. You post your happy, smiling face, your positive memes, the recipes you never make, and the cycle perpetuates itself. Slaves all.

Mishpatim is a difficult parashah. It packs more laws into a few chapters than almost any other portion. We come from the miraculous grandeur of Sinai to a litany of commandments. The first chapter talks about how to treat slaves and the next chapter opens to talk about a thief. The placement seems a bit backward. The thief is described as someone who can’t make restitution for his theft and has to sell himself into slavery to pay it. Keep in mind that the master may very well be the one the thief stole from. The master is supposed to treat this sticky-fingered guy well. Furthermore, he has to give the slave the choice to leave. Whether the debt has been worked off or not, in the seventh year the slave must be given the option to go free.

What’s up with that? How do we read this into a modern tale? Consider this: you have spent your entire life dithering and dawdling. Someone gave you the great gift of life, enormous talents and resources, but you used them all for your own purposes. You frittered them away. You were a thief as much as the one who pulls money from a drawer only the one you stole from was God. You stole the time and resources he gave and used them solely for your own pleasure. Small wonder you ended up a slave.

Here’s the amazing part, the laws governing the thief turned slave say he is to be treated well. It says he is promised freedom, freedom he can choose. So why do we remain slaves? Who in the world is this magnanimous one who tells us we can choose to make it different?

Suddenly we realize we are the thief. We stole the wonderful things God gave us and misused them, turned them into dust. We ended up selling ourselves into slavery to masters we didn’t want to serve. And God comes along and says, “You can choose to be free.” How many of us choose to remain the slave? Ear to doorpost, we allow the master to whom we sold ourselves to pierce us with his awl when God said we have a choice.

I receive in my inbox each day the “Daily Dose,” a few brief and inspirational words from Tzvi Freeman. Yesterday and today were particularly relevant to the portion for this week. Yesterday’s said:

If you did good, celebrate that you have a God who is there with you in your good work.

And if you fell on your face, celebrate that you have a God who does not abandon you when you fall.

The story of the thief and the slave is exactly that. God most certainly rejoices with us when our hard work puts us and him in a place of honor. On the flip side, when we totally mess up, when we play the thief and sell ourselves to pay the debt, God is still there, unwilling to abandon one of his own.

Today’s Daily Dose talks about the stories we write with our lives:

Life does not tell stories. People do.

Life provides raw materials. Raw enough for us to look back and construct at least two versions of our autobiographies—one a dungeon, the other a palace.

This is the greatest kindness the Master of Life has given us: He has placed His own pen in our hands, so that we may enjoy the dignity of a palace constructed by our own design.

Have you fallen? Are you laying in the dustheap of a life you constructed, a thief who has sold him or herself into slavery? God will not abandon you. In fact, he tells not just the master, but you, the slave, that you can choose something else. You can choose freedom. In fact, you can choose to build a palace with your life. You don’t have to remain in the dungeon, you can construct exactly the life you want if you will only recognize that it was the Master of the Universe, Creator of the world who gave you the raw materials in the first place.

May you choose freedom not slavery. May you wake up and realize it is your choice to make. May you start today constructing a palace fit for you, the child of a king.