Lishmah

Every time we ask, “So, can this piece of Torah make us better people?” or say, “Let’s distill the meaning of Yom Kippur” - we attend to something important, and without intending to or even noticing, deprive ourselves of one of Judaism’s most vital gifts.

During my years of playing bassoon we never asked, “How will Beethoven 7 make me, and the other members of the orchestra, better people”; understanding the “meaning” of Mahler 1 (which I don’t) wouldn’t compare to my transcendent, triumphant exhaustion as its last notes faded from the concert hall twenty-six years ago and which remains one of my most distinctive and cherished memories. Nowadays in the fading light of a late-summer evening, when I play catch with my sons or watch them watch the Red Sox attempt another impossibly scrappy comeback in Fenway, enveloped by the smells of cut grass and the lowbrow liturgy of “Yankees suck,” I would never insult those islands of eternity by asking, “What are they for?”

That would be, as Bernard Williams put it, one too many questions. An activity being “for” something else reveals a hierarchy: the something-else is the ground of value, and the activity takes on significance by virtue of its connection to the something-else. But no idea or goal exhausts or even expands the value of Mahler's heartbreak, Beethoven’s triumphs, or the satisfaction of a baseball caught or a victory tenaciously snatched from the jaws of defeat - they are of transcendent, independent, significance.

The living Torah that our Rabbis of blessed memory gave us isn’t particularly good at creating consensus around the choices the Jewish community faces in navigating history - and if we look to Judaism primarily for politics, we’ll come away disappointed, with little to offer our children. Our tradition, more than anything, is an incredible medium - above even symphonies and baseball - for creating shared experiences of intrinsic, transcendent value.

Lishmah, “sufficient unto itself,” is the Rabbis’ watchword for the how and why of Torah, for whispering in the ear of the One (if real, good; if imagined, perhaps better) who raises the fallen, frees the captive, and resurrects the dead; and of inhabiting an order of time oriented around the sufficiency of a moment. Life will be, and should be, beset by unending uncertainty and struggle - the question is whether it will be punctuated by portholes that reveal glimpses of the heavens, moments like the ones Maimonides described in the Guide, “like a flash of lightning that for a moment illuminates the landscape, which remains slightly different in a person’s mind even after the darkness returns.”

In the most poignant image of what it means to be Jewish, our Rabbis imagine a couple beset by infertility; rather than separate in hopes of future children, the wife says to the husband, “There is nothing in this world I love more than you.” The future is uncertain and our efforts to secure it are divided and divisive (and always have been, and always will be). We are the recipients of a differently-shaped gift, of practices and seasons and gatherings that are sufficient to themselves, lishmah. We can and should aim to build Jewish spaces and practices that we love more than anything else in this world. Everything else is at best commentary; at worst a distraction.