Using Your Toolbox

Rabbi Lazer Brody’s lecture, “Path to Success” presents an original option for those of us who are assessing our lives. He suggests that each of us is given a tool box and it is up to us to discover those tools that we can use most efficiently, correctly, and elegantly. I found great solace in this idea because I often feel moved to do some charity work or volunteer work that will advance the cause of uniting the Jewish peoples and bringing them back to the place where they recognize Who They Are. In this time that assimilation is doing as much damage as the Holocaust did to destroy the pride and unity of the Jewish people, I long to go to Israel, even go from home to home reaching out to those who might be interested.

Those tasks are more than my physical body can handle. Multiple sclerosis has involved itself in my body’s abilities to the point where I have a little control of my right arm, less with my left, and none over my legs. What I have in my toolbox is the ability to write words that inspire and the ability to put together sentences that make sense for anyone looking for answers to questions about life that really don’t have any answers. How can it be that my desire is so great that I find uncommon tools to be able to speak into microphones and have the words to come out on the computer screen? How is it that I live a lifetime during this wondrous time of global connection to the universe and although I am confined by my body, I am able to spread what I know about emuna?

What I know about emuna is that trusting Hashem makes perfect joy possible under the most contrary situations. What I know is that I don’t have to be limited by disability. Is it a coincidence that I wrote a blog called “In My Toolbox” last week and then open my e-mail to find Rabbi Brody talking about the path to success being a matter of using the tools that Hashem gives each of us in the most utilitarian way?

My trusting Hashem allows me to consider that Rabbi Brody gave this lecture for me. Hashem is everywhere, in everything, His being everywhere connects us all. So it makes sense that this lecture is my answer to a question not yet asked. Am I using my tools in the way that I Hashem wants me to? I have to answer yes.

Answering yes allows me to recognize a Oneness that seems in a reality without total Faith ridiculous. I am willing to risk being ridiculous, if it means that as a woman with severe physical limitations I can reach a Rabbi halfway around the world.

If I trust that my words can go that far, then it’s an easy stretch to imagine that I really do not need to go any farther than my computer screen to achieve my goal of doing everything that I can do to reunite Jews everywhere. Hashem has placed me on this Earth at exactly the right time with exactly the right tools to accomplish A Perfect Goal.

If each of us is put here simply to correct ourselves and to dissolve the vessel (our body, our ego) so that we can become more of what we are — a spark of the Creator — I suppose I have an advantage. Perhaps disability is one of the tools in my toolbox.

Because in order to recognize the greatness of Hashem without physical desires (not that I have none, it’s just that they are not as great as the pleasures of my spiritual connection) or without ego (I had to give that up a long time ago in order to keep functioning in this world), disability makes it easier. It’s sort of a forced asceticism.

And so, I am left to rejoice in my disability. I rejoice because it allows me to be present with the Truth. The distractions that haunt most human beings leave me alone. In the place of distraction, I am gifted with the ability to focus on the one thing that enables pure joy — Emuna.