When we were children, my brother had a distorted old pair of running shoes which he refused to throw away because they were so comfortable. My mother, to no avail, kept telling him that distorted shoes affect your walk and can misshape a growing foot. She also had her own theory for me too. She’d say, if you walk around in very baggy clothing all the time, you’ll grow into them and won’t feel yourself getting fat. Now, this is no blog on orthopedics or weight, but the running shoe and sweatpants admonishments have become symbolic life lessons for me. Where she was a pragmatist, I was a philosopher.
How often in life do we fall into what is comfortable for us instead of what is good for us? Too often! But, the comfort zone, dear readers, is not your friend. It’s a place where we lull ourselves with excuses, cower in fear, and stop seeing who we are and what we are becoming. In the “bagginess,” the details get lost, and there is no valuable reference frame to measure our lives, our growth, and, G-d forbid, our failures. But we can't fear failure. It is a teacher after all, not a death sentence.
It's sad—no, it’s tragic—how many of us get too comfortable in jobs that are beneath us or “love” relationships that diminish us, or body sizes that inhibit us, or habits that kill us. We even grow comfortable in our misery and toxicities that we can no longer notice due to familiarity.
In this week's parashah, we read about the traits that make an animal or species kosher or not. Doing so involves scrutiny and isolating traits that qualify a potential food source. We have to review our own lives and our own traits with the same scrutiny and start cutting out the things, friends, habits, etc., that are inhibiting our reach for excellence, including spiritually.
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Yes, it’s intimidating to dip one’s toe in the big wide world because even as we get inspired, we really think everyone else is better than us, smarter than us, more capable than us. Basically, we are afraid of life. But as the book Outliers portrays via data, “geniuses” are made, not born. Few are greater than us naturally. The proof is that the self-help market is a multibillion-dollar industry. Without ever opening a self-help book, merely acknowledging the size of that industry should be an instant cure for all our insecurities. It’s telling us, rather shouting at us, that everyone is in the same boat. Everyone is afraid or insecure on some level.
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In a few weeks, we will be entering the month of Elul on the Hebrew calendar, which is a month of introspection wherein people try to improve themselves prior to the upcoming high holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. But change can never really come if we don’t hone in on what needs to be changed. This week’s Parasha Re’eh opens with the words, “Behold, I set before you today a blessing and a curse.” We think the choice should be clear and easy. But the evil inclination starts blurring the lines between choices, and we very often grab for the curse because it’s comfortable.
We are told that G-d doesn't recognize the Jewish people from one Yom Kippur to the next. The pure souls that left the synagogue a year earlier have returned in a blemished state one year later. My prayer for all of us is that next year G-d won’t recognize us once again, but only because we are better, brighter, happier, healthier, and holier than ever before.
And as my mother taught, stop falling into things that mask your faults or accommodate them, and choose the blessings--choose life.
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