The Pleasure is in the Struggle

This past weekend we celebrated Menny's Bar Mitzvah. Our last Bar Mitzvah was our first celebration with a drive-through and few guests, the albatross of this pandemic. 

We were fortunate that my mother's 70th birthday was on Sunday, so all of my siblings celebrated both occasions. A few of Eliyahu's siblings and his parents came as well. We are truly blessed! 

A constant refrain at the intimate BM meals in the speeches (we do lots of speechings) was that Menny would not remember anything spoken at his BM, but 'if you remember one thing, let it be this.’ 

The theme that emerged from the weekend was about the inherent struggle of a life lived. Eliyahu spoke about struggling with getting locked in his office on Shabbos morning when he was 'supposed' to have been upstairs in the sanctuary giving his Chasidus class (with visions of impressing his father, no less). The back story is that he was putting away milk and coffee for me because the Shabbos hot water urn tripped the socket at home on Friday night, and he wanted to make sure I would have a coffee at least when I came to shul. He walked into his office, and the electronic security system locked him in.  He was stuck while knowing it would disable at 9:00 am, so he had 30 minutes of quiet and contemplation. In this time, he came up with a message for Menny: 

"The answer to Why is What." 

When life sends you challenges (which it inevitably will because being human means having stuff to deal with), and you want to ask 'Why?' or 'Why me?’ it is acceptable to ask why but we are limited in getting satisfactory answers---

Instead, ask yourself, ‘What is my purpose here?’ ‘What am I supposed to do as a result of this experience?’ ‘What is the lesson being showed to me?’ 

My father spoke about the struggles of life not as a means to an end but in some ways, the end itself. We are not here to achieve perfection; we are here to achieve greatness through finding our purpose in this world. The pleasure for Hashem is precisely in our struggle while doing so. (Only God can arrange for perfection, and that will happen when Moshiach is revealed in totality. Not yet--- we are almost there, I hope.)

My Dad told Menny to embrace the struggle as I sat in with tears misty in my eyes, thinking about how difficult it is to cross the bridge from innocent adolescence to teenagehood and into functional adulthood. Who comes out unscathed in this process? And adulthood is only the beginning, or perhaps for some, the culmination of childhood struggle and trauma? I digress. 

In this week's double Portion Vayak'hel-Pekudei, we RE-read about the tabernacle’s construction, God's physical dwelling place in this world. The predecessor to the Beit Hamikdash. 

The most basic question asked about these verses is why they are there at all?

 Previously in the Torah, we read about God's instructions to Moshe about what to make and how to make it; all of the beams, curtains, vessels, every detail is itemized in weeks past. If the Torah is so concerned with being specific and concise, why not just take one line to say, "And Moses and the Jewish people built the Mishkan as per the instructions of God to Moses" or something like that? 

Why the need to tell us the instructions and then how it was constructed, almost word for word, it is written the same? 

The lesson is the same as the theme of Menny's Bar Mitzvah--- the Mishkan as God wanted it, as He would have built it, would be perfection. It will one day be perfection. Perfection is something God can arrange. 

In reality, though, things look pretty different. And that difference is worth recording in the Torah because that difference is the space in which we all live, and it is the very thing that God appreciates--- our hard work in getting it right. 

If the Torah did not record both the idealized building of the tabernacle and the actual bricks and mortar--- gold and copper construction, how would we know this essential truth? 

That the ideal stays in heaven, the actual living is on earth below, and there is virtue, not shame in that living.  

Leave perfection to God; he wants for nothing but your struggles.