Generosity
Exercise: Practice generosity. Identify a cause / charity that you like and make a small daily donation for one week. Be generous with your time with a friend or loved one. Tip intentionally more than you would normally. With each act of generosity, take a breath and say: I offer this to do good and in the service of God.
Background: God, as it were, was generous with the Jewish people this past Shabbat. We had not one, not two, but three Torah scrolls for our service. (As an aside, we still ended on time…) Why three? The first was for the normal Shabbat reading, the second for the beginning of the month of Adar, and the third for Shabbat Shekalim, the first of five special Shabbatot leading up to Passover.
Shabbat Shekalim reminds Jews of the half shekel obligation, a tax imposed on every male over the age of 20 from the book of Exodus This tax was paid to the Temple and became the source of its enormous wealth and power. Even today, two thousand years after the destruction of the Temple, many Jews make a point of supporting Synagogues and other Jewish organizations during the Jewish month of Adar.
This biblical obligation is more than a tax. In addition to its (significant) financial implications for the Jewish people, it contains a spiritual secret as well. In Adar we are six weeks away from Passover. Passover is the time of our redemption, the moment in which God was felt most strongly in history. The Israelites saw God acting and were saved.
According to mystical interpretations, that moment of God being revealed in the world retains a potency for the individual. Passover, through its rituals and practices and the story that it tells, invites each person to rediscover their connection to God. Why do we celebrate Passover? For the Hagaddah one answer is because God brought us into God’s service.
To create that openness, to be ready to encounter God’s redemption at Passover, we need to prepare ourselves spiritually. The first step in that preparation is generosity. When we practice the needed humility to give of ourselves and our resources to others, we create space in the soul. When we let go of our grasping of material things, we create a space in the human spirit.
That space, that opening, then awaits the story and rituals of Passover. When we hear those words – let all who are hungry come and eat – we realize that we are hungry for meaning and connection. When we hear that God brought us forth with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm – we realize we are yearning for God. And because we have made ourselves ready, have contracted the self to make room for generosity, we have created space in our soul to know God.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi David Booth
