The opening verse of this week’s Torah portion asks the important question: “see, today I put before you both a blessing and a curse,” choose?
For our ancestors this was more of a threat than a choice – follow God and you live, choose otherwise and you die. For us modern readers, the choice is about our perspective – do we choose to see life as a blessing or do we choose to see it as a curse?
A few years back I wrote a song about this conundrum – it is not always what happens to us in life, but how we respond to it. In my song “every blessing has a curse/sometimes better can be worse.” While true, I also wrote about the opposite: “sometimes, hard times can be blessed/as long as you survive the test.”
Events themselves – whether winning the lottery or facing a pandemic – do not show us from the outset what their full impact on our life will be. It is only by allowing the experiences to unfold and keeping a level head to we learn whether they are in fact blessings or curses. Perhaps, we can be helped by the wise rabbinic practice of having two pieces of paper in our pockets at all times: one for hard times which reads “for you the world was created,” and, the other for when times are good that reads, “you are but dust and ashes.”
As we begin the month of Elul this Shabbat, let us take time to reflect and perhaps to re-evaluate our past year, gaining a better understanding of what has actually transpired in our lives. And, may we in the end find many more blessings than curses.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex