The stories we tell ourselves

It’s a box that I moved into long before I had basic self-awareness. The box is the lenses through which I look at the world.  It’s how I show up for good or for ugly.  It’s how I perceive others and judge (sometimes even being judgmental – shocker) what I experience. 

A lot of it is good and healthy, some of it downright ugly and that middle batch that takes a lifetime to work through.

I was recently asked how I deal with Jews who are antagonistic towards Judaism. My much less self-aware 20+ year old would have had a less friendly answer.  Today, I know that most external antagonism and hostility is a reflection of the questioners own trauma and journey, not what they are commenting on.

As I grow, the box I live inside challenges me to look outside, to break out and to try to see the world for how it is; to focus on the data points.

From inside the box, I’m now aware that my behavior across the board and also my behaviors around Judaism are very likely a very immature manifestation of an earlier phase of life.

In this journey, we need to break (out of) the old, and then reembrace it anew in a much healthier manner.

(Kind of like teen and young adult children, who challenge their relationship with their parents and then hopefully in adulthood come to reembrace their parents in a much healthier manner.)

The dangers and blessings of the box are reflected in the name of this week’s Torah portion and the story of the Haftorah.

The name of the Torah portion is Chukas – Decree.  It reflects G-d’s commandments that are observed because He said so.  There are commandments that we observe because they make sense to us or because they are enjoyable.  And then there are those that we do obediently.

That is good for us as long as the foundation of the doing obediently is our love for G-d and an appreciation of our finitude.

That didn’t work out so well for Yiftach in our Haftorah.  He was a warrior who led the Jewish People to victory over their enemies.  His promise before battle to G-d was that if successful he’d bring the first thing that came out of his house as an offering. 

He was victorious and his daughter was first out of the house to greet him upon his return.  And although the commentator’s debate whether he had her actually offered or placed in spiritual seclusion for the rest of her life, by all accounts this was not a good thing to do.

Yiftach couldn’t break out of his story.  His narrative was that vows must be kept at all costs even at the cost of the life of his very own daughter – oy, the extremes we’ll go to stay stuck.

My takeaway is the constantly evaluate set patterns and behaviors and to question whether I’m living in a box or if I’m liberating myself from within.

Good Shabbos!

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