resilience – Growing with the Parshah

Imagine that you are one of the most influential people in the world, the spokesman for G-D in This World. And you’ve been teaching a pagan world that practices like giving up your children are wrong. You yourself have a child, whom you love more than anything else. G-D has promised that through this child you will become the founder of His Chosen Nation.

And then G-D asks you to sacrifice your only son.

It’s not a challenge that anyone can relate to. Certainly not in 2017. But we know that the Torah is eternal. if the Torah goes into such detail about the story of the Akeidah, how Avrohom Ovinu (our father Abraham) was tested in this way, and was stopped by Hashem just as he was about to plunge the knife- it must be relevant to us in some way.

G-D worded his request in a very detailed fashion. ‘take your son, your only son, whom you love, Yitzchok’

Why was that necessary?

The Sfas Emess explains that Avrohom had to go through three stages of processing the request.

‘Sacrifice your only son’. It would have been easier if Avrohom had other sons. But that was not the case
‘Whom you love’- Avrohom might have fallen out with Yitchok. But the Torah speaks about the tremendous love he had for him.

‘Yitzchok’. The child whom Hashem promised would be the guarantor of the Jewish People, is now to be sacrificed by his father.

But surely Avrohom would have jumped to do G-D’s will in a heartbeat. Why did he need to go through these stages?

The Gerrer Rebbe explains that Avrohom certainly didn’t need to go through this process. Not for his own sake. But he did it for us. By accepting the challenge the way he did, Avrohom planted the seeds of inner strength in our DNA, giving us the power to overcome our own struggles even thousands of years later.

The next time we are faced with a test, be it praying with more concentration or not shouting at the guy who blocked your driveway, lets remember that we do have the wherewithal to succeed. It’s in our blood.

As heard from Rabbi Dovid Goldwasser. (click here to view a video of the original lecture)

Sometimes we come up against the opinions of others about ourselves. “you’re a lazy so and so”, “You won’t accomplish anything”. We take the words to heart, and they become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The first people on record to address that mistake where the spies. In their damning report of their expedition to Israel they recounted:
וַנְּהִי בְעֵינֵינוּ כַּחֲגָבִים וְכֵן הָיִינוּ בְּעֵינֵיהֶם (במדבר פרק י”ג פס’ ל”ג):
“And we were, in our eyes, like grasshoppers. And so we were in their eyes [like grasshoppers] (Bamidbar 13:33)

Rashi tells us that the spies had heard the giants talking among themselves about grasshoppers who looked like men, which they understood to be a reference to them.
Noted educator Rabbi Zechariah Wallerstien observes (in a shiur that can be accessed at https://www.torahanytime.com/#/lectures?v=19099) that the spies said ‘we felt like grasshoppers in our eyes, and therefore we were grasshoppers in their eyes’. In other words, they were admitting that it was their perception of themselves that affected the way the giants viewed them, and not the other way around.
As I’ve heard from one veteran teacher, the best way for a parent to help a child being bullied (in addition to telling him/her to tell his teacher and ensuring that the bully is dealt with appropriately) is to empower the child to choose what he/she thinks of himself/herself, rather than relying on the views of the bully. This equips him/her with a reservoir of resilience that he/she can draw on later in life.
We could extend the lesson taught by the spies to the way we view our life circumstances in general. Victor Frankl was a Jewish Psychiatrist who spent much of World War 2 as a prisoner of Auschwitz. He observed that those who survived the longest were the ones who lived for others, the ones who gave up their bread, the ones who supported the sick people on the death marches. Frankl summed up his conclusions in his famous book, Man’s search for Meaning:
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
We are not affected by our circumstances and other’s views of us. We affect our circumstances and other’s views of us.

Tag: resilience

Parshat Vayeira: He did it for us!

Parshas Shelach: Great man or great grasshopper- YOU choose!