I’ll give you a second to come up with your best
excuses—although we’ve outsourced most things to China, we are
still great at manufacturing excuses. We so often blame our mothers, our
circumstances, our height, our looks, our upbringing, our spouses,
our society etc., for what we’ve become and who we are. But my
question still stands: Why aren’t you everything you could be? Who really is to
blame for what we are not? Each one of us has a unique talent. Yet, so many of
us have an unrequited dream of what we could have been and what we yet can
be. It’s quite unfortunate that while our aspirations have taken us to ambitious
heights, our excuses keep us strapped to the TV-room couch or the therapist’s. Click to subscribe
“Well,” you might ask, “aren’t we entitled to have excuses and
reasons for why things just can’t be, after all, we are human?” For the moment, I’ll curb my tongue and let Adrianne
Haslet-Davis answer that question. No, she is not a famous psychologist or
philosopher on life, but she should be. She’s not pontificating from the
self-inflated towers of academia, but from a hospital bed. Adrianne Haslet-Davis, is the 32 year-old
dancer who lost her foot in the terrorist bombing at the Boston Marathon. She
told the Boston Herald, “I can’t let some (expletive) come along and
steal my whole life," she said. "So, I’ll dance again. And next year,
though I’ve never been a runner, yes, I plan to run the marathon." How can
anyone more boldly teach us that when life kicks your teeth in, we bravely must
keep on smiling?
An interesting detail stood
out for me while watching the news coverage of the bombing. Forensic experts
explained that even the impact of such a huge explosion would not erase the DNA
evidence of the perpetrators. It dawned on me that even the potency of such a
murderous device cannot destroy the fundamentals of who we are. A true dancer will still be a dancer even
without a foot.
It is precisely because we are humans that we are NOT entitled to
excuses. It is because we humans are made in G-d’s image that we have no right
to give up on our own potential no matter how hard things are or what we’ve
been through. Our soul attaches us to an infinite source where all things are
possible while we are still in the land of the living. And just as a bomb can't
blow up DNA, we can't let life's hardships blow us apart either. Yet, sadly, many
of us cut off our own potential and terrorize ourselves into not doing things
that we really can do and should do. The most important and impactful words in
history were passed along to humanity, not by a skilled orator, but
rather by a man who had a speech impediment: Moses. A true leader will lead even with a stuttering tongue.
Interestingly, the Torah calls
Israel the Land of Milk and Honey. Yet, I’m sure the pioneers who got malaria
and broke their backs tilling a parched desert had a few other names for
it. Still, 65 years later Israel has
become one of the most innovative countries in the world spreading its
technologies and medical advancements across the globe. A desert was turned into
verdant fields of opportunity. A true
land of milk and honey will flourish and bloom even where there is ruin, rock
and rubble.
Perfection my friends is not
the starting point, it is mankind’s ever evasive destination. Don’t be afraid to try and get started
because you’re not perfect. We are all broken one way or another.
Just recognize your G-dly partner in life and then the only thing you will not be
able to do is to manufacture more excuses. Click to subscribe
In
this week’s Torah reading we read about priests who are disqualified from
serving in the Temple because they had a blemish. But the Zohar teaches that
the disabled have greater merit than the rest of us; and for precisely this
reason they cannot work in the Temple.1
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