Understanding Abraham’s Decisions, Understanding Our Own

When we read the stories of Genesis it is often difficult to relate to the circumstances that our ancestors encountered. As a rabbi I tell people to try and relate to the characters, but this is really just another way of posing the same difficulty. The stories are not relevant to the kind of life we live.  Last week’s Torah portion, Lech Lecha, is a great example. In it Avraham faces numerous challenges, crises really, and not one of them is something any of us are likely to face today.

The first crisis, caused by a famine that sweeps him down to Egypt, sees Avraham faced with a terrible choice. He tells Sarah, his wife, to pretend to be his sister so that he will not be killed when Pharaoh sees how beautiful she is and desires her for his own. I don’t know about you, but this sort of thing never happens to me. I have never had to decide between pawning off my wife to a foreign ruler and the equally distasteful choice of the gun to the head. As moderns, we may be quick to criticize Avraham for such a callous act. It strikes us as horrible that he actually benefits from the encounter and becomes wealthy after subjecting Sarah to what must have been a forcible degradation at Pharaoh’s hand. How could he do such a thing? And how can I ever really relate?

Though never in such a position, most of us will, in time, find ourselves in a crisis that is defined by two equally terrible choices – lose/lose. Lie and give up your wife to another, brutal man, or die and have her taken anyway. What kind of choice is that? Seen this way, as a choice between the proverbial rock and hard place, perhaps we can relate to such a crisis even thought the particular details of our own dilemma will be more historically real for us. Have you ever faced a crisis where you had to choose between two terrible options? Would you not be compelled by such circumstances to choose the lesser of two evils?

Avraham’s second crisis is similarly distant from my experience, but also reveals a paradigm for decision making. When Avraham and Sarah emerge from the lose/lose of Egypt, they return to Canaan with renewed and new-found wealth. There, Avraham is confronted by another crisis when his herdsmen and the herdsmen of his nephew Lot get into a dispute over grazing rights. As a rabbi, I have a flock, but not THAT kind of flock, and I must admit that very few congregants I counsel are struggling with such a conflict. But, just as we will likely face a lose/lose moment, we will also likely face a conflict that can be resolved with a win/win choice. Avraham does not get into a fight with Lot, instead he recognizes that the best choice here is to give the choice to Lot, and to be happy when everyone prospers. He tells Lot there is enough for everyone and “if you go left, I will go right, and if you go right, I will go left.” Problem solved. Everyone is  happy.

Crisis number three comes when, again compelled by circumstances beyond his control, Avraham joins an alliance in a battle between Canaanite kings. As a tribal leader and clan chieftain, Avraham can’t easily sit on the sidelines and not take a side. But as a result of his alliance, his nephew Lot is taken captive and held prisoner far to the north. (That Lot sure does cause a lot of problems.) Again Avraham must make a choice, and this one is different from each of the previous two. Now the choice is not lose/lose, or even win/win, but rather whether or not. There is really only one choice, will Avraham rescue his nephew or not. It is the choice between action and inaction, and Avraham rightly chooses action. He forms a private militia of men, journeys rapidly into the conflict, and decisively acts to rescue Lot. Even at great risk to himself and his people, Avraham knows that he really has no choice. Lot is his family and must be rescued.

I’ve never been threatened by Pharaoh, or challenged to grazing rights, or had my nephew kidnapped, but like you, I have faced all three of these kinds of choices. There have been times when I had to choose between the lesser of two losing positions, times when I could humbly accept winning positions for everyone involved, and times when all that was really required was swift and decisive action. Avraham’s example helps us to understand our own choices and hopefully, whatever the situation, to make the right ones.

Marathons, Marksmanship, and Speed Davening

One measure of mastery in almost every creative human discipline is speed. Speed measures our progress in athletics, in music and performing arts, in martial arts, and in most traditional and contemporary spiritual practices. One of the areas we work to improve, whether we are athletes or rabbis, is how fast we can do something. Consider athletics. Nearly anyone who possesses even the most rudimentary basketball technique can dribble the ball a few paces, look at the basket, and shoot a lay-up. As you learn to play basketball at a higher and more advanced level, the pace at which you practice and regularly play increases accordingly. In practice, when you are running drills to pass, shoot, or dribble, one measure of your progress is how much faster you can successfully run the drill. The same is true in marksmanship. Consider the archer in an Olympic target contest. The contest is not untimed. Nearly anyone with the basic equipment and sufficient eyesight can deliver one arrow to a nearby target given enough time. The training undergone by most marksmen is designed to increase the speed at which the athlete can deliver the ballistic package to the target.

There is a steady and relentless effort to break speed records. There is always social pressure in religious communities among the regulars, to speed up the service. Ironically, these same people, who check their watches during prayer, to try and shave some time off the record, would be among the strongest resisters to any significant change that reduced the regularly practiced liturgy in favor of a shorter liturgy that was prayed more slowly and methodically. These people would not be distance runners or distance target shooters. Instead they are always running sprints and shooting contact distance targets.

All of this being true, speed is not always the best measure of mastery. This is because though speed can measure accomplishment and demonstrate ability, speed also blurs and hides the imperfections of our technique.

Speed works best for short-term goals. A sprinter has to be fast throughout the entire race, but a marathoner, whose goal is further away, must consciously slow down and set a more disciplined pace in order to succeed.

When the target is close, it is significantly easier to draw, aim, and deliver the arrow to the target. Here is the perfect example of how speed blurs a flawed technique and forgives our more fundamental errors in training. To deliver five shots to the target at five yards does indeed require a lot of practice, but it is relative easy compared to delivering those same shots at a great distance. Even the most accomplished marksman needs to go much slower when the target is far away. When the goal is close, or easy, or short term, our mistakes matter less. For the marksman this is a matter of simple physics and geometry. At 5 yards a small error in aiming or intention, a small change of heart rate or breathing, a rush of nerves or adrenaline, none of these translate to a significant difference in where the arrow hits. If you are just a little off, the distance of the target is more forgiving when the goal is close and short term.

At 25 yards, or at 100 yards, such a fractional miscalculation grows as the distance between the two lines of the angle gets wider and wider apart. Now, when targeting a distant goal, a small error of technique becomes a significant miss.

So too in any spiritual exercise. If our goal is short term, then our practice can be more forgiving of fundamental errors. In tefillah, a fundamental error is one that affects the level of meaning and self-discovery which are the vital goals beyond the level of simple recitation. If your goal is a short one, to master the recitation of the Hebrew, it certainly takes a lot of practice, repetition, focus and attention to accomplish this goal. But it can be done relatively quickly, and within 6 months the average person could, if they came to a traditional minyan everyday for shacharit services, become a capable short distance davener. They would become able to lead a morning service – to hit the target – at a speed that the regular daily daveners would consider slow, but which would, with time, continue to develop up to the standard pace for that community. Within a year such a person could become a capable tefillah “marksman” at 5 yds. I do not mean to say that this, all by itself, is not a worthy goal. Developing techniques in nearly any creative endeavor is incredibly valuable, and in a very real way contributes to the development and deepening of every endeavor we have.

But this cannot remain our only, or long-term goal. To become great daveners, we must see our practice as a marathon more than a sprint, as a life-long journey of self-discovery, not as a one-off obligation for today. We must take aim at a longer-range target – meaning and significance beyond our words – and we must work through our flaws and rudimentary techniques to refine and center our focus on deeper aspirations.

All Prayer is Inadequate

If the purpose of prayer is to accurately and adequately praise God, or even describe God, then we must admit that it will always fail. There is a paradox to all spiritual practice and to all prayer practice. we try to describe God - infinite and pervasive - in words made for our own finite and limited human experience. Just as an artist must paint an image from the three dimensional world in a two dimensional frame, so too the spiritual seeker must try to describe something profoundly true in an artificial frame. Even sculpture, though it has the benefit of three dimensions, can only capture a moment, frozen in isolation amidst the ever-unfolding reality that we inhabit.

Perhaps then, the goal of prayer is not to describe God, but to discover ourselves. What we explore is not the vastness of God Out There, but the intimacy of God Inside. As we become more adept, we are able to more convincingly approach and realize what is truly real in our life.

Every word of prayer is inadequate to describe the experience of God. Every painting and sculpture is inadequate to describe and communicate the reality around us. "Praised are You...", "Merciful One....", "God is good...". None of these are True with a capital T. But ironically they can, with practice allow us to begin to understand the nature of mercy, praise, and goodness.

The more we know, the more we realize that each word, meant to symbolize an aspect of our experiences, and each ritual act and each quiet meditation pales in comparison with the emotions and imaginations that they seek to reveal, provoke or describe.

Our recitations, repetitions, and exercises all reveal our limits even as they invite us deeper. The process of refinement and investment in these brush strokes liberates them from the shortcomings of habit and routine. We can invest each move and each word with meaning so that these inadequate words trigger the neurological jump to Davenology/Prayercraft, and in that they become powerful ways to enhance and expand our capacity for creativity.

It is in that creativity that we truly experience and encounter what we call . . . God.