Shabbat Shemesh
You can listen to Rabbi Miriam's sermon here or read it below
Shabbat Shemesh is a very quiet one in our house. While Jonni and I are left with our own memories of summers spent with RSY and the videos we can play in our memories, of life-long friends enjoying crazy, wholesome fun in boarding schools and run down activity centres around England and Wales, we can picture Ben and his friends taking our places in those scenes, knowing so much of the world has changed but the content of camp seems remarkably similar. Although I may not be able to enjoy what seemed to be my mum’s favourite part of camp: when I returned from 2 weeks away clutching the printed contact list of all the participants that I had met and telling her about all my “new” friends, she was able to scour the pages assuring me they weren’t “new” friends at all because this one must be that one’s child and the other must be the kid of people my parents had known for decades. Let’s face it, I probably mean many of you, it’s you and your children I was there with! The contact list was then popped on the fridge.
Oh how I wish I still had those lists when I was dropping off Ben, as it felt like so many of us were indeed delivering our own children to the coach on Tuesday, so that we could vicariously still enjoy those summers through our own children. GDPR prevents me from the joy of reading the participant list but my mum would have never have dreamt of having a phone in her pocket which beeps each day as the madrichimot upload new photos to Facebook to give us a flavour of what’s going on. The joy of the moments zooming in desperately trying to determine if the blurry figure is indeed my son and whether it looks like that is a smile on his face.
So as we read Torah this morning and the words,
י וְאָכַלְתָּ, וְשָׂבָעְתָּ--וּבֵרַכְתָּ אֶת-יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ, עַל-הָאָרֶץ הַטֹּבָה אֲשֶׁר נָתַן-לָךְ
“When you have eaten and been satisfied give thanks to Adonai your God for the good land which God has given you.”
I can hear the echoes of the dining-room of Shemesh past and present, the booming voices of hundreds of kids singing grace after meals with the passion and conviction usually reserved for the terraces of football stadiums. Words from a text thousands of years old, with layers of humorous additions from each generation of camp participants on top of the next. The “tiddelyompoms” with the “What do horses eat? Hay” making birkat longer and longer.
Yet, the irony of the whole scene is these kids, just like we had, have replaced the dining tables of our homes, ladened with delicious, nutritious home cooked meals, eaten and been satisfied and rushed away from in a bid to do some homework, watch TV or just to get away from the family and move into another space in the house on one’s own with not a murmur of blessing expressed. Here these kids are, with 2 weeks, of let’s face it, probably the worst food they have all year round, and the least consumed because it isn’t what they are used to, and it doesn’t taste like it does at home, singing their hearts out with words of gratitude for their full plates and full bellies.
וְאָכַלְתָּ, וְשָׂבָעְתָּ
We have eaten and been satisfied? Well maybe not, so why
וּבֵרַכְתָּ אֶת-יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ
Give thanks to Adonai your God?
When Moses directs the Israelites to express this gratitude, he does so with the same fear which runs throughout the book of Deuteronomy. The fear that with the promised ease of settling in the land will come a complacency. They need to be commanded to express their gratitude because when life is going well, we forget how lucky we are. Hope-filled prayer comes more easily that gratitude-filled prayer.
Grammatically וּבֵרַכְתָּ could either mean “you shall give thanks” as in you are commanded to, or “you will give thanks” as in, the land will be so bountiful that you will be moved to give thanks. On camp I’m suggesting it isn’t the quality of the food that moves the children to prayer, nor a halachic obligation to give thanks, as such fervour could never be so prescribed, but actually an understanding in this weirdsituation of how lucky they are. They aren’t there for the food, nor the accommodation; a good meal and a comfy bed are certainly not things they would leave home for, but a room full of their peers, the people their parents set as an example of those one day to be the parents of their children’s friends, and a space facilitated by young adults who are such fabulous role models they don’t need much of an imagination to see themselves in their shoes in the future. A place free of the trappings of the modern world, no mobile phones or fancy technology but so much wholesome fun. Water fights and basketball along with tie-dye tallitot and tefillah, crazy kef involving face paints and singing means that mealtimes are the embodiment of the words of Shlomo of Karlin “when you eat in the spirit of gratitude, whether there is much food or little, the meal is satisfying.”
At this point our children on camp are teaching us so much. Moses shouldn’t have worried that life would get so wonderful we would forget to be grateful but that the better life gets the more we expect, the fewer challenges we are prepared for. The more we have, the more we want is what modern society is based on. Yet we know so often there are periods in our lives that it is hard to feel gratitude. There are moments where life takes a difficult turn and our metaphorical dinner goes from a home- cooked something delicious to camp slop. What does Jewish tradition invite us to do at that time? Shlomo of Karlin invites us to “eat in the spirit of gratitude, whether there is much food or little, the meal is satisfying.” Fake it until we find ourselves singing with gratitude. Life is much more often the overtired, anxiously out of our comfort zone vibe of camp than it is the tranquil, happy and plentiful feel of home but sometimes the more we throw ourselves into seeing the best of a moment, the blessings around us and not just the pain, the more we are able to live life in a fuller and more meaningful way.
The Aleinu paints a vision of the future. We don’t stop reading about it because it hasn’t come about, we read it with more conviction, more hope, more of a sense of it being on the horizon. The more we live life with the gratitude of what life is and not what it would be, perhaps we start to sense that life as it is, is closer to what we are praying for than we thought.
May this week be one filled with gratitude and if it can’t be an easy genuine gratitude may we all find our way of living in the spirit of gratitude in which to get through the difficult days and may it not be too long before we have even convinced ourselves there is more to be genuinely grateful for than perhaps we could ever have hoped to see.
