chronic afflictions.

Dear Rabbi,

I suffer greatly from many chronic afflictions.   Often, while lying in agony I wonder if I am not being punished for my wickedness, being a person who regularly desecrates the Sabbath and transgresses all the other laws of the Law.

Why? Do you ask that?  And why am I writing this (on a Sunday)?

Enclosed is a copy of a poem I wrote some time ago when I was pondering the issue.

How Religion accommodates Modernity is a major concern.  While purists can live in contact with the Modern World may satisfy a core or true believers, there are many people in the community who are bound up, for any number of reasons, in the Modern World that makes total observance impossible.

The “all or nothing” approach of Orthodox Judaism has twice in recent decades put me off what had become regular attendance and home compliance, that was almost complete, lacking only a final, personal commitment and for some reason that I did not know how to do and having reached the edge of the precipice and then not jumping, I slowly backed away and retreated till what was almost “all” became “nothing”.

This poem expresses the idea that if one feels one must transgress and desecrate the Sabbath, then one should do it mindfully.  The double commandment to both remember and keep the Sabbath means that people should not live within such a “fence” that they keep the Sabbath in every detail without any awareness of.  This does permit the experience of pure delight but while it is unblemished in keeping the Sabbath, it is easy to lose mental awareness that what one is doing is actually keeping the Sabbath, thereby not remembering.   Is keeping but not remembering, any better than remembering but not keeping?

Many things in the Torah have two versions, from Creation on.  It is a poetic work, where different versions of the same story make a balanced pair of views that contain the truth between them, as if a photograph were taken from two sides of something, so it looked a bit different in each.   So the two versions of the fourth commandment may be an example of this, in what to the writer(s) must have been the crucial, quotable part of the whole.  Perhaps one day the Stone Tablets will be found, still in the Arc that was hidden away before the destruction of the First Temple and never found and restored for the Second.   New ground-piercing vision technology that can find hidden rooms in rock tombs will eventually find hidden caves in mountains.   

The people who claim the Torah is compiled from various sources use the different versions as supposed evidence that different versions of the stories were concatenated.  However, if one of the most important commandments can exist in different forms, from the same hand, then surely so can all the rest.  It is amazing that someone could tell the story in this poetic way, rather than assume it is just the consequence of multiple versions.