The Will to Want - Parshat Vaeira
I like to believe that I am open to new experiences and new learning. There are even times when upon hearing a new thought I find that it can have a profound effect on me and how I live my life. It doesn’t happen often but it does happen.
There is, in this week's Torah portion, Parshat Vaeira, a seemingly innocuous and superfluous comment by Rashi, the great medieval commentator. The Torah says that God appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.2 Rashi, who usually elucidates or expoiunds upon the text, comments at the mention of the forefathers names by simply saying: "the Fathers". This comment is very uncharacteristic for him. There seems to be no reason for him to add this. First of all, it is a known fact that they were the fathers; second - it doesn’t seem to elucidate the text nor answer a difficulty.
Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Rimanov, a Chassidic master, offers an explanation. The word in Hebrew that Rashi uses for the forefathers, Avot, is usually translated as 'fathers'. Yet there is a second meaning to the Hebrew word Avot: The 'wanters'. The forefathers were so great because they were 'wanters' - they were curious and desperately wanted to know God and live their lives according to His will. And so, God tells Moses, I appeared to them because of their will, their wanting, their needing to know of their own meaning in life, and how to live a life according to that meaning. He who has the will to want and is willing to become a messenger is the one to whom I will appear. What an empowering concept!
How badly do we want things in life? What are those things that we want? What value do they have for us? How do we choose what we want? Are we 'wanters'?
Viktor Frankl, author of Man's Search for Meaning, speaks of the healthy, necessary tension between what is and how we wish life to be. That is the 'want', the passion, the yearning that God saw in the forefathers and that is what attracted Him to them.
That is how we are to build our lives. They are role models for us. This is the attitude we are to take - whether we have discovered our meaning or even if we haven't. We are to search for that meaning, for it is there, and then we can incorporate it into our daily lives. We can then have and live with our own individual 'Want'.
It doesn’t always seem to make sense to want it. That will to want may be challenged as it was with Abraham. God had told him to go to the Promised Land and as soon as Abraham reached there he encountered a famine. He could have thrown the whole thing away right then. But he knew there was more to it. He still wanted to understand and know God's ways.
We, too, can reach our own individual level of meaning. But first, we need to yearn for it. We need to want it.
Image by FotoRieth on pixabay
Notes
- My thanks to Rabbi Baruch Simon whose shiur given in 2007 was the inspiration for this blog.
- Shemot 6:4
Have A Great Shabbat!
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