Torah For Our Times: A New Day?

“Personality is molded by experience. How we live our lives and the events that we confront serve to shape our very beings. We respond to each new situation by referring to earlier ones-always seeking to avoid past mistakes, always looking to improve on earlier interactions. In this light, our response almost always comes one event too late. We become trapped by our most recent experience.”

  –Rabbi Bradley Artson

Unable to have children, Abraham’s wife Sarah gives her handmaid to Abraham for the purpose of creating offspring. Abraham and Hagar give birth to Ishmael-Abraham’s first son. Subsequently, Sarah does become pregnant giving birth to Isaac. In a fit of jealously, Sarah compels Abraham to expel Hagar and Ishmael from their common home. Hagar takes her son into the desert. Having run out of water, Hagar becomes depressed, resigning herself to the fact she and her young son will die, alone, in the wilderness. God hears the voice of the crying child, and “opens[Hagar’s] eyes and she saw a well of water.” (Gen. 21:19)

Is it possible that God miraculously provided a source of water, or was it always there? Could it be Hagar was so overwhelmed by her current situation, and the events of the recent past, that she did not see the body of water? The appearance of God in her life opened Hagar’s eyes to new hopes and dreams.

Professor Ernest May, in his book Uses of The Past, suggests that America’s string of military failures are the result of relying upon errors committed in past experiences to determine present action. In Korea, we were determined to improve upon the military mistakes of WWII. In Vietnam, we fought a conflict based on lessons learned in Korea. Vietnam was not Korea, and Korea was not WWII.   The same may be true for America’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. The environment, cultures, and rules of engagement were entirely different in each instance. America closed her eyes to the realities on the ground and looked to improving upon models from the past.

Sigmund Freud calls it “repetition compulsion”-repeating past encounters in an effort to overcome the pain and frustrations experienced in the past. An action is repeated over and over again, with the results only getting worse. As Rabbi Artson noted above, “We become trapped by our most recent experience.”

If synagogue communities and educational endeavors are to succeed and grow, Jewish leaders and educators must, like Hagar, allow God to open our eyes to new constructs, new possibilities and new visions.

Rabbi Artson concludes, “To escape our enslavement to past experience requires a radical openness to the present, a willingness to see the world afresh each moment that we live.”

Rabbi Howard Siegel