Walk the Walk

Walking The Walk

According to the Jewish calendar we are in the midst of the sefirah, which means “counting,” specifically the days between Passover and Shavuot. If you are unfamiliar with the observance, also called “counting the omer,” the mitzvah involves nothing more and nothing less than counting each day between our liberation from Egypt and the receiving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. I have a personal mnemonic to keep track. Today is day thirty-two (Magic Johnson), tomorrow thirty-three (Kareem Abdul Jabbar), then thirty-four (Shaquille O’Neal), and so on and so forth. If there is a childhood sports team near and dear to your heart as the Los Angeles Lakers are to me, it is actually a pretty easy mitzvah to fulfill and, as with all mitzvot, I encourage you to do so.

That said, depending on whom you ask, there are at least two understandings of the significance of these days of the year. First, and probably most simply, we count these days because the very act serves to link our freedom from Egypt to the receiving of God’s law – a reminder that our emancipation from Pharoah was a freedom that gained purpose only in serving a higher authority, namely God. As the text states: “Let my people go, that they may serve me.” By this definition, these days are intended to function as spiritual preparation for the receiving of the Law.

The second and slightly less known explanation has to do with a Talmudic account regarding the generation of Rabbi Akiva (Yevamot 62b). Our tradition records that it was precisely during this season that twelve thousand pairs of Akiva’s students, twenty-four thousand total, died of a plague. To this day, in many Jewish communities, this is a somber period of time. Weddings are not performed during these weeks and aspects of mourning are observed. Tonight, day thirty-three (Lag BaOmer) is the day of respite when the plague ended. The most important part of the story is the reason given for the plague: it was a Divine punishment delivered because Akiva’s students did not treat each other with proper respect.

While both explanations independently deserve further inquiry, the really perplexing part of the whole thing for me is, why both? What, if anything, do the two explanations have to do with each other? What does the run-up to the festival of Shavuot have to do with the disproportionate punishment exacted on Akiva’s generation? It is an odd and unsettling juxtaposition – two distinct rationales, one festive, one mournful – underlying a single time of year.

This past week I came across a moving explanation told in the name of Rabbi Aharon Kutler, one of the leading lights of Orthodoxy in America in the past century. He writes that at first glance it does seem altogether excessive that so many should be punished so harshly for the infraction of showing disrespect one to another. That said, Kutler explains, one must remember that in Akiva’s context, it was his students who, more than anyone else, were expected to be living exemplars of Torah. They were the teachers, they were the guardians of tradition, they were responsible for modeling the high ideals of our people and ensuring that they would be passed down from generation to generation. The students’ sin was compounded because their behavior not only reflected their own personal failings, but also diminished the very ideals that they were called to represent. It was the dissonance between what they said and what they did – between the talk and the walk – that resulted in their catastrophic punishment. Thus, while the two explanations for this calendrical period are distinct, the receiving of Torah and the punishment of Akiva’s students are interrelated, if not interdependent. On these days leading up to Shavuot, before we celebrate the receiving of the Torah, we are asked to reflect on the gap between what we profess and what we do. To what degree do our inner qualities reflect our stated ideals? Before we claim to be the heirs to Torah – standing at Sinai – the season calls on us to consider whether we are, in fact, living a life exemplifying that very claim.

There are, to be sure, many ways to define a holy life – acts of kindness, carrying oneself with great humility, observing God’s commandments, to name but a few. I think probably one of simplest and overlooked is this correspondence between our inner and outer lives. The message of the season is that religious integrity is found in an individual’s ability to avoid living a bifurcated or dual existence, the sin of Akiva’s students, of saying one thing and doing another. The mystical sage Nachmanides identified this notion of religious integrity as the working definition of a holy life. The opposite is called a naval birshut ha-torah, a despicable person within the boundaries of Torah. In the Talmud, we are taught that there are three types of people whom the Lord despises; the first is the one who is ehad b’peh v’ehad b’lev, a person whose heart does not match their spoken word or deed, in other words, a person who does not practice what they preach.

All of us know that actions speak louder than words. “We are,” wrote Aristotle, “what we repeatedly do.” And it is because our habits are the most accurate measure of who we are, that it is by those deeds, and not our words, that we rise and fall. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “What you are shouts so loudly in my ears, I cannot hear what you say.” We knew this to be the case long before the disgraces of this past week. We simply don’t gasp the same way if a person of whom we have no expectations suffers a fall from grace. A religious leader jailed for crimes is shocking. Charlie Sheen, however entertaining, doesn’t really bother us, because we weren’t expecting much to begin with. Play back the sports scandals of the past few years or the ones still emerging. I don’t think anybody is surprised at the thought that athletes may take performance-enhancing steroids; rather what is jarring is the persistent claim that so-and-so never took a shortcut. Nobody flinches when Syria violates human rights – what else would we expect? Israel is held to a double standard for a variety of reasons, some altogether nefarious and the subject for another day. But one reason is because Israel rightfully makes the claim to represent high values. It is only when a person – or institution or country – claims to represent a certain ideal, and then misses, or is perceived to miss, that mark, that we and the world really take interest and umbrage.

Ultimately, I think piety cannot be measured merely by how good or kind we are. Is the rich man any better than the poor man for having given more tzedakah? Are we really going to say that there is a correlation between the number of mitzvot you do or don’t observe and whether you receive the label of being a “good” Jew? It is not just a matter of more or less. In fact, while it may be altogether commendable to be kinder and more observant, in choosing my companions I would choose an integrated authenticity over anything else. The people in my life who have had the most impact on me are not necessarily the nicest, most righteous or most charitable. The people I admire most are the people who are honest about their struggles, who admit their failures, and who recognize the tensions embedded in their imperfect humanity. They are worthy of admiration not because they are perfect and certainly not because they make that claim. They are worthy of our affection and deserving of our trust because they are consistent in what they do and say.

And what we know to be true about others is all the more so when it comes to each of us. More than listening to our words, those who know us best – our children, our spouses, our colleagues – are attuned to what we do. Our worth has nothing to do with whether we do or don’t reach some unattainable notion of perfection. We are assessed by those around us based on whether there is a correspondence between our words and our deeds. Are you saying that health is a priority but not living healthily? Are you identifying Jewish life and learning as a value, but not actually taking it seriously yourself? Don’t fool yourself into thinking that your eight-year-old kid can’t figure out your values just because you didn’t state them explicitly. Next time you choose to chastise those around you – your children, your loved ones, your colleagues – for a perceived shortcoming, check your words of rebuke against your own behavior. I suspect you will find, as I often do, that the fault lies not in the object of my rebuke but within me. Our ideals are not diminished by our admitting that we struggle with them. God didn’t create us perfect. If we were perfect, we wouldn’t have been given the ability to blush, to feel regret or remorse. I have to believe that in God’s eye and in the eyes of those we care for most, it is preferable to be ordinary, imperfect and integrated than to pretend to the world that we are what we are not.

This week’s Torah reading is called B’hukkotai, from its first words: im b’hukkotai telekhu, “if you walk in my laws.” The word for “in my laws,” b’hukkotai, comes from the word hok – meaning "engrave." The founder of Habad Hasidism, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, once taught that it was of great significance that the law was not given on parchment with ink, because ink and parchment are by definition two separate substances, compatible but never fully integrated. The hukim, the laws of the Torah, however, were engraved into the stone itself – an enduring lesson that the words of our existence should be engraved, part and parcel, to the substance of who we are. In our homes, in our work, in our community, we must seek to build and live lives in which our words and actions, ideals and deeds, are one. We may not be perfect; I suspect we won’t be. But maybe, just maybe, in all our imperfections, integrity, authenticity and idealism can still be found – in the eyes of God, in the eyes of our fellow humanity and most of all, within ourselves.