Description
Loose Ends: A Torah Approach to the Loose Ends of Life and History
NO ONE LIKES loose ends. They are so dissatisfying. You can work for months on a project and accomplish a great deal, but loose ends make you feel as if you didn’t really get where you wanted to in the end. It’s like running a marathon, coming within inches of the finish line, and falling before crossing it.
Ouch.
We humans like closure. When we want something to be over, we want it to be completely over. People pay a lot of money for therapy to get closure on dead situations that linger emotionally. It’s hard to move on until we do.
We also tend to compartmentalize life. An organized life is a more carefree life. It lets us know where things are so we can avoid them or find them when we need them. It just makes life more efficient, safer.
It’s like driving on the freeway during the day. We can clearly see the other cars and protect ourselves from them. At night, it is harder to see and trickier to judge distances and speed. It greatly increases the risk of a crash just as loose ends increase the possibility of error.
One of the biggest loose ends in history is God. On one hand, you can’t prove His existence, not like you can prove something physical. Even negative matter, which we can’t see, has a physical impact. God’s impact is far greater, but also far more subtle. The only laboratory capable of assessing it is our mind’s eye.
On the other hand, God’s existence is the most obvious conclusion to draw for how Creation came to be what it is, if a person can get past their fears and biases. Some people think that people turn religious as capitulation to the loose ends. In reality, it is the loose ends that point the intellect in that direction. That’s why Avraham Avinu, even without Torah came to this conclusion and went in search of God.
But we have Torah, and a tradition that three million people heard God speak at Mt. Sinai. That’s quite the head start, if you start with your head. But so many people don’t. They don’t do their homework, even though the most important decision a person can make in life is to believe in God.
After all, if God does exist, then He probably wants something from us. And if He expects something from us, then we’ll have to answer for where we fell short. There might be excuses for not living up to His expectations, but how many of them are valid, especially today when truth is so easy to access?
Besides, who ever said that the truth doesn’t include loose ends?
