Moving Target

Sometimes, it feels like the world is moving so fast, a week lasts a year. I had a week  like that last week. By Wednesday, I could barely remember what I’d done just a couple of days’ before, and Sunday felt like it had happened in 2009. It was all quite strange. But I know a lot of other people were feeling the same. We were all feeling as though things were happening so quickly, our reality had changed and changed again before we’d even registered what was going on.
 
Hashem fixed it that last week I did a load of unusual mitzvahs. I took people to the Kotel who hadn’t been there for more than a year; I bought someone a Garden of Emuna who I’ve only met twice, and just happened to bump into on the street and get talking to; I went to visit someone in hospital that I haven’t spoken to in years…
 
And each time, I felt as though something fundamental was shifting. I’ve been wanting to take people to the Kotel, and buy people emuna books, and discuss life-and-death issues with people for years already – but most people weren’t interested. Now, apparently, they are.
 
What’s changed? Is it all the mounting economic uncertainty, as one oil-producing country after another stops being a ‘friendly Arab nation’ and turns into an openly hostile one? Is it all the tests and hardships we are all being sent, one after another, with no respite? Is it just the fact that more and more of us are picking up on the fact that something ginormous is about to happen, something big, something that will change everything, probably overnight?
 
I don’t know. But I can tell you that the pace of change, both around me and inside me, and other people, is starting to be a bit scary. By the end of the last week, Hashem had sent me quite a few insights that clearly underlined the message: you, Rivka, have no idea how things really work.
 
And I couldn’t argue, because I agreed 100%. All the certainty I have about things working out, all the theories about what’s going on and why, all the educated guesses about who is going to ‘make it through’ and who won’t – it all went out the window.
 
Hashem showed me, repeatedly, that I simply can’t work it all out. I don’t know what’s going to happen.
 
And once I realised that, I got very nervous. There are no certainties! Even my certainties are subject to change – so where does that leave me? If I had more of a philosophical bent, I’d be in big trouble right now. For the first time, I started to realise how people can be ‘big kabbalists’ and stop keeping mitzvoth. Or how they can ascend to the highest spiritual spheres – like Elisha Ben Abuya, one of Rabbi Akiva’s contemporaries, who tried to work out ‘how it all works’ – and end up becoming heretics.
 
Because you can reach a point where everything you thought you knew, you realise was not the case. And if you don’t have simple emuna, simple faith, to fall back on, that tidal wave of uncertainty can rip you away from G-d in an instant.
 
Rabbi Nachman himself writes repeatedly about these points where he realised he knew nothing; in many of the Breslev writings, you’ll find stories where the Rebbe openly told his followers that he didn’t know anything.
 
I used to find these stories quite strange, especially at the beginning, because it seemed to me that knowledge is built up over time, and one conclusion leads to another, in a linear, easy-to-follow fashion.
 
Ok, now you know that spiritual x doesn’t lead to spiritual y, but you can still explain how you got to your conclusion. Can’t you?
 
This week, I started to get an inkling that it’s not like that after all. It’s not a steady progression of knowledge, or a slow accumulation of data: it’s a stark flash of inspiration or insight, and in an instant, everything else is gone.
 
Everything, that is, except for simple emuna. The simple emuna that G-d made the world; that He (at least) knows what He’s doing; that my job is still just to do my best to keep mitzvoth and follow G-d’s Torah and to keep asking Him ‘what else do you want from me?’
 
Serving G-d is like trying to hit a perpetually moving target. Not only is the target moving away from you, you have no idea where it’s going to pop up next: it’s literally impossible to score a bulls’ eye.
 
So a lot of people, when they realise that, stop trying. Instead of continuing to chase after G-d’s moving target, they shoot their arrow into something solid, stationary and unmoving, and paint their target around that instead.
 
But the point is not to score the bulls’ eye. The point is to chase after G-d. And fail miserably. Time and time and time again.
 
I’m reading a new book in English by the Breslev writer Rabbi Erez Moshe Doron, called ‘Beyond Time’, where he discusses what happened with the generation of the flood. How did they get so evil that Hashem decided to wipe them all out, with the exception of Noah?
 
Reb Doron explains that the main problem of the generation of the flood was that they were perfectionists. Once they realised they could never serve G-d perfectly – there would always be a flaw, a mistake, an error a sin – they decided to stop trying. They reasoned that if it was impossible for them to get The Next World, because hard as they tried, they always did something wrong, then they should at least enjoy this world to the max, guilt-free. They had an all-or-nothing mentality, which meant that once they realised they couldn’t achieve the ‘all’, they decided to opt for the nothing: no mitzvoth, no good deeds, not even the minimal effort to want to be better, even if they couldn’t manage it in actuality.
 
Clearly, they were wrong. Clearly, Hashem has put us in this world to try, and fail, to hit His moving target. But the point is to try. The point is to keep trying, even when you know in the depths of your soul that it’s impossible to achieve the goal.
 
Why? Because that’s the way G-d wants is.
 
You yelled at your kids yesterday, despite working on keeping your temper for six months solid? That’s the way G-d wants it. And He wants you to keep trying to get your anger under wraps.
 
After two years of learning a page of ‘Guard your tongue’ every day, you still find it all too easy to pass on a juicy piece of gossip? That’s the way G-d wants it. Your yetzer will tell you to give up, to feel bad, to paint your target on the nearest wall and make your peace with spiritual stagnation – but he’s a liar.
 
G-d wants you to keep going.
 
It’s a thankless task. You can never hit the moving target and then pat yourself on the back for a job well done. But that’s the way G-d wants it. And I’m starting to think that it’s really only at the end of 120 years, when we no longer have to deal with being in our physical bodies, that G-d will take us by the hand and show us that all the times we screwed up and missed the target by a hundred miles or more, in Heaven, we scored a direct hit after all.
 
But only if we just keep believing, and keep trying to do the impossible.