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April 22, 2016
A Passover note from Rabbi Schuck

Dear Friends,

Earlier in the week I received a voicemail message in my office from a colleague. He asked me to return his call and left me his cell phone number. I called him back and got his voicemail, so I left him a message with my cellphone number. The next day when I arrived in my study, I had a voicemail message from him saying, "Thank you so much for inviting me to call your cell. The only problem is that the number you gave me for your cell phone is actually my cell phone number."

*Sigh*

These days we are so busy. Life is endlessly frantic as we run from appointment to appointment and errand to errand, all the while texting, emailing, and checking our social media whenever a free moment arises. Some people call this multi-tasking; others call it continual partial attention. I prefer the latter because in the midst of doing multiple things, by definition, we can only give part of our attention to each one. Eventually, some of us become so distracted that we ask people to call us by giving them their own cell phone numbers.

Sometimes I fantasize about a slower life, and somehow, the desert always comes to mind. I imagine the first few days after the Israelites crossed the sea into the wilderness. With their tormentors drowned and the vastness of the desert ahead of them, I wonder what those nights felt like. A stanza from Robert Frost's poem "Desert Places" comes to mind:

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars-on stars where no human race is.

Frost's desert points to the empty spaces between the stars, spaces without humans, spaces in which a Pharaoh cannot arise and harass the innocent. The emptiness and enormity of that endless desert sky had to be a source of comfort to those ragged slaves. The desert was a place of freedom, a space between that stars that gave birth to a reassuring silence that only free people can enjoy. In that freedom, there was no taskmaster to scream into our ears and beat us into submission.

But the second half of the stanza is a warning. Frost writes:

I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

In that silence of the desert we discovered another one, the desert places within our minds and hearts in which we suddenly realized how profoundly we had neglected our souls. The discovery of those deserts is alarming and lonely because doubts and questions emerge; we feel lonely and anxious, scared of all of life's unknowns. In such moments, our instinct is to fill that empty space with whatever possible, but golden calves and cell phones will always be an inadequate quick fix. These deserts cannot be filled on the cheap.

Passover is an opportunity to step away from the continual partial attention that we use to fill those spaces and lean into the desert places in our hearts. For the 21st Century Jew, one of the questions of Passover is whether or not we are squandering the hard earned freedom that our ancestors bequeathed us because we are too scared to slow down and fill our souls with the nourishment that they received, developed, and passed on to each one of us. From the prophets to the sages, the mystics to the rationalists, the intellectuals to the revivalists, Judaism has just about everything that a spiritual seeker needs. But to cultivate that desert and nurture an inner life requires work and effort, not to mention the courage to acknowledge the hollow spaces in our hearts. Isn't it easier to look down and send off an email? It certainly feels more productive, but it may be just another manifestation of enslavement.

This year, may we each look into our own desert places and resolve to fill them with something eternal. One can't multitask a spiritual life; let's give our souls our full attention. We deserve no less, and I can't think of a better expression of true freedom.

I wish each and everyone in our community a sweet and meaningful Pesach.

David A. Schuck
Rabbi