Description
Point of Acceptance – By Pinchas Winston
I LEARNED A valuable lesson recently. Actually, I RELEARNED it, because I had seen the idea and used it so many times before. It’s just easy to forget it, requiring a person to learn it over-and-over again. This is the story.
For many years now I have made a point of dovening at the “Kosel” once-a-week, usually at “Neitz.” It is such a nice time of day to be there, and some of the minyanim there go back many decades already. I have rarely missed a week, b”H.
Not having a car, I usually travel both ways by taxi. It is not cheap from where I live, but it is worth it. I can say my preliminary prayers in the car before I get there, and I do not have to worry about parking, which on some days can be a real issue. With a taxi, it is basically door-to-door service.
On occasion I have rented a car, which I can do quite easily locally, and driven there. This means I have to leave earlier since I can’t really pray in the car while driving, and I have to find a parking spot. Sometimes I have been fortunate to find a spot close by, and sometimes I have had to park further away. With a very small car, there are more options.
This time there was a close spot, the only one as far as I could see. After it, there was a least a mile of parked cars. The spot was quite tight, but I estimated that the car I was driving could just make it, as I quickly began lining my car up to slowly and carefully ease into it.
I thought I was doing a masterful job when I suddenly heard a grinding sound.
I immediately stopped and checked my rear view mirror and saw that it could not be from scraping the car behind me.
I looked forward and saw that I had not touched the car ahead of me either.
I assumed that there was something under the car making the noise, and continued parking.
More grinding.
I went forward.
More grinding.
I went backwards.
More grinding.
Deciding that I was in the spot enough, I got out of the car and went to see the passenger side. I found the source of grinding. It was a low concrete security pillar. A bunch of them lined the road, and I had not accounted for them. It was still dark out, so I don’t remember if I had seen them before parking. And, since the road itself curved, I had not turned into the spot soon enough, causing me to scrape the pillar and scratch the car.
Ouch.
I was now running a bit late, so I had to run as well. I left the car, but with a lousy feeling. I must have done a couple hundred dollars of damage while on my way to do a mitzvah! It’s not like I have all kinds of disposable cash hanging around to cover these kinds of things.
“Why did this happen to me?” I kept asking myself on the way to the Kosel. “Why hadn’t God protected me from such a SILLY waste of money since I was doing such a nice thing by coming to the place of HIS Temple to pray to HIM?”
I had no answer yet. So, I just turned my focus to prayer, but it was hard to get rid of that yucky feeling.
That made it doubly disturbing. I always try hard to pray sincerely, but especially at the Kosel. It is such an inspiring place to pray, even if it is also a very distracting one. In fact, if I had to deal with the same level of noise and movement in a regular shul, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I can at the Kosel because, I find, the holiness of the place lifts you above all that.
The last thing I wanted was something negative tugging at my emotions while praying there. One of the greatest senses of satisfaction I have all week is leaving the Kosel feeling that I had dovened “well.” Leaving the Kosel feeling as if I had squandered the opportunity to do so hurts more than the dent I put in my rental car.
But emotions often seem to have a mind of their own. My mind was saying, “Drop the whole thing for now. We need to forget about it so we can focus,” but my emotions kept answering, “Nothing doing. This hurts. I feel like moping about this one for a while.”
I was in a quandary and without a solution. One part of me wanted to push the whole car accident to the back burner for 60 minutes, and another part of me wanted to find a reasonable reason why it happened so I could accept it, and was not prepared to move on until I could. I was tense.
Sometimes hitting a wall like that can result in solutions that previously were not considered. I had moments to come up with a viable solution so I could make the best of my time at the Kosel, especially since it was going to end up costing me a lot more than the taxi would have. So, I just told myself, “I accept this suffering with love,” and everyone went quiet.
I don’t mean everyone at the Kosel. No one heard me but me. I mean all of my sides went silent. My intellect said, “Of course you accept this with love! Is there any other way?” My emotions said, “Well, I guess you can’t argue with that! Even if God did it to punish you, accepting the Divine Providence with love is the best response. If He did it for another reason, what a great way to show your spiritual maturity and loyalty to him than to accept whatever HE allowed you to experience with LOVE.”
Within a moment, there was peace, and I went on to have an even GREATER dovening.
It didn’t end there, obviously. For one, I was driving home in a dented car for which I was financially responsible. I would have to deal with that later.
But that wasn’t the part that was on my mind as I drove. It was how quickly my mood had changed once I had made the snap decision to accept my “yesurim” with “ahavah.” It didn’t take any time. “Miraculously,” as quick as I made the decision the inner peace resulted. It’s the first time I really noticed that and the lesson was not lost, at least this time, on me.
Of course, there is suffering, and there is SUFFERING. A little financial loss, as much as it hurts, is really no big deal in the end, not like a HUGE financial loss. It is certainly not like excruciating chronic physical pain, or barely treatable psychological agony.
I know this first hand. One year I herniated a disk and suffered incredibly for six straight weeks. Even the strongest painkillers barely numbed the pain. There was no position in which I could find any comfort.
That is when I understood, for the first time, how someone in such pain could take their life. That is when I saw for myself how life stops being life, in spite of all the good around you, when the pain becomes so bad that you can’t think of anything but it.
What about people who suffer from severe psychological disorders that may have more to do with their genes, or circumstance, than anything they did? It can feel as if the whole world is black, and hopeless, a very terrifying fear to have to confront each day. How does one accept THOSE with love?
Even great rabbis who suffered, the Talmud reports, rejected their suffering. If they were given the opportunity to be miraculously healed, they quickly took it. Suffering is debilitating, and it hampered their learning and teaching, so they saw no reason to unnecessarily prolong it.
But that does not mean that they did not ACCEPT it, at least while they had it and could not get rid of it, with LOVE. It does not mean that they did not use “acceptance with love” as a means to cope with their suffering. Because, it turns out, regardless of how intense a person’s suffering is, there is still a point of acceptance that can be reached. Once it is, some level of redemption occurs for the person in agony.
It may not be easy, and often seems impossible, but it is certainly something worth exploring by those in pain, and those who are not.
