Works in Progress; Acharei Mot/Kedoshim

I asked a member of the congregation once, “So, how are you doing?” What I was expecting to hear, of course, was “I’m fine, how are you?” But this person said something I hadn’t heard before. He said, "How am I doing? Well, I’m a work in progress.”
A work in progress. When I was younger, I had a sense that we learn through our college years and then we go to work and the learning stops. We might take some management courses or something related to our work, but the bulk of what we know, we learned before age 21 and then we simply go out and live our lives. Perhaps that was why I was surprised when I first learned about “elder hostels.” These are programs that provide adult education classes for seniors on virtually any subject including Jewish studies. I wondered what seniors still wanted to learn that they hadn’t already learned through simply living their lives?

I shouldn’t have been surprised: there is a lot to learn at any age --as long as the mind and soul are active, it changes and develops and grows. Just like anything else that is alive, as soon as we stop growing, we start dying.

We are all works in progress: it doesn’t matter one’s age, our place in life, married, single, parents or grandparents. We are not yet what we need to be and that is true up until the time that we take our very last breath.

Last week’s Torah portion focuses on disease. If an Israelite were found to be leprous, the priest would declare him impure and the leper would be forced outside the camp. The Rabbis understood leprosy as a punishment for the sin of lashon harah; they compared the word: metzorah which means leprosy, to the phrase, motzi shem rah; which means slander. When you demean someone else in speech to a third party, you create a kind of disease in the community that can spread out of control. Lashon harah attacks the very fabric of the community like leprosy attacks the body. Speech can be used in beautiful and constructive ways: poetry, kindness, expressions of love and appreciation. Or it can be used to destroy reputations, sow the seeds of discord, envy, pettiness. Last week’s parasha focuses on what can go wrong in the hearts of people in the community, how Israelites can push God away and give in to their baser instincts.

But then we come to this week’s parasha: Acharei Mot/Kedoshim. Here we see just the opposite. We read of the Yom Kippur service in the Tabernacle. This service represents the human spirit reaching out to God, renouncing sin and using our power of speech for prayer seeking atonement. We read also about our obligation to care for the poor, respect one’s parents, observe the Sabbath, be honest in weights and measure, love one’s neighbor. Here again we see the human spirit aspiring to the good, to the Godly, to what the Torah calls, “kedusha,” holiness.

The question then is raised for each and every Jew, in fact, for every member of the human family: will we stay mired in the diseases of the spirit, to what in us is lowly and petty and driven by our baser instincts? Or will we reach out to God, to all that is the best in us, to what makes us distinctively human, and to what makes us good?

Jewish tradition understands this question to apply, essentially, to every decision we make, every day of our lives. Here is the question in other words: will I move towards God or away from God with what I am about to do right now? Works in progress.

From the second night of Passover to the first night of Shavuot, we count the Omer, 49 days in all. We are today counting the 25th day of the Omer. The Omer is a measure of grain, harvested from the new barley crop and brought to the Temple on the second day of Pesach. The Israelites would then counts 49 days at the end of which, they would bring another measure of grain for sacrifice, but this time from the newly harvested wheat crop. Why 49 days and why barley at the beginning of the period and wheat at the end?

The Rabbis understood Pesach as the time the Israelites left the degradation of Egypt. After 49 days of purification in the desert, they came to Mt Sinai and on the festival of Shavuot, they received the Torah. According to tradition, there were 49 levels of Egyptian impurity that the people had to shake off, one level each day, until they were sufficiently pure to receive the Torah.

Now the first omer offering was of barley which is a coarse grain that was used to feed animals. At the end of the seven weeks, they offered up wheat which is a smoother, softer and a more easily refined grain that was used to make bread eaten by human beings.

Can we not say then that at the beginning of the 49 days, just after the people left Egyptian slavery, they were a courser lot, robbed of their humanity, treated like animals and perhaps, even acting more like animals, baser, more instinctual, more violent and cruel? And that the seven week period was really a period of spiritual and emotional refinement: a gradual control of their baser instincts, a turning towards their better selves; from violence to compassion, from hatred to love, from treating each other like objects to respect, from cowardice to courage, from pettiness and jealousy to loyalty?

That, by the way, is why the Kabbalists attached their notion of the 7 lower sefirot to the 49 days of sefirat ha omer. Each of the seven sefirot represents human qualities to which we aspire: love, respect, compassion, courage, loyalty and so on. Contemplating these sefirot each day encourages us to refine the self. Each day we count, each day we get better. In our tradition, the number 7 represents wholeness: 7x7 or 49, complete wholeness. We don’t just refine ourselves between Pesach and Shavuot, we refine ourselves, throughout our entire life, our whole life long.

So you see, we are all works in progress. There is not a person among us who can’t improve him or herself in some meaningful way every day. It takes the simplest act of self-reflection to see where one needs the most work. God doesn’t expect of us, perfection. But He does expect of us a slow, thoughtful, life-long process of developing our better selves. So what will you work on today? Shavuot is fast approaching; we have no time to waste.