"Springtime" in Bat Ayin is always synonymous with "wedding time." Next week we'll be cutting the rug at the wedding of Nachman Naftali and Michal. This week at a sheva bracha for Eliyahu and Devora Gila, Rav Daniel spoke about what it means to be commited. Oddly enough, it was on the Gemara Gittin (the tractate of the Talmud dealing primarily with divorce) that he based his words about the incredible power of commitment.
The issue at hand in the Beit Midrash (study hall) that day was: how much of a woman does a man have to marry in order for the wedding to be valid? It was clear to Rava son of Rav Huna that just as you couldn't use half a ring (half the minimum alloted value for the ring) to get married, so too you couldn't marry a woman that was half free and half indentured as a worker. Then came Rav Chisda: "Not so fast Rava; you can certainly marry such a woman, as long as your intention is to marry her completely." Rava was dumbstruck. Here the Gemara records how he then publicly admitted his error. "You know, we'll never really understand the Torah we're learning until we make a mistake in it." When Rav Chisda corrected Rava's reasoning, Rava suddenly saw a new perspective. Rav Daniel's bracha to the groom and bride was that they too should make mistakes, and make them BIG! Rebbe Nachman is constantly reminding us that the only reason we make mistakes is to pave the way to reaching higher levels of understanding and connecting to God.
So this is all well and good if I'm getting married, but if I'm not? Come on Rava, tell ME something about commitment. "Allright," says Rava, accepting the challenge, "Pesach." Pesach? Pesach is about freedom - what does that have to do with commitment? According to the way Rav Matis Weinberg sees our Exodus from Egypt, God was committed to our freedom from the beginning of time. In the Gemara Megilla (13b), we learn that God always puts the cure into the world before the affliction - the bacteria that produced penicillin existed long before anyone got a disease that required treatment with the drug. Thus our freedom was pre-ordained, and the entire Egyptian exile was invented by God, not responded to. What does that mean? All of a sudden, Egypt was not some kind of problem, but rather a way to bring about our potential for realizing God's existence. The night we left was "a night of anticipation for God? awaited by all the Children of Israel for their generations."(Ex 12:42) We were half slave, half free, and we had been waiting for hundreds of years for someone or something to come along and commit to us. Little did we know that God had committed to us long beforehand. But it took all those years in slavery to get to the depths of suffering that forced us to cry out. That was the cry that announced to the world: "I have made a mistake." That was the beginning of redemption; now the cure could be revealed.
So why is all this talk about commitment in the Gemara on divorce? Perhaps Ravina and Rav Ashi (the editors of the Gemara) were pointing us towards the secret of marriage. On the one hand, it seems like being absorbed in myself is no way to be in a committed relationship. But on the other hand, the Gemara Sanhedrin (37a) talks about us looking at the world as if it were created entirely for me. Whose idea was that? Talk about a recipe for disaster! That's the secret, though, to being a "free human being. One who sees not problems, but challenges and potential brought into existence for him alone. The truly free man sees his every choice as a seed containing the significance of all creation." (Weingberg, Frameworks, Exodus: p. 92) Each move I make is a move that the world makes. May we relish the responsibility our freedom brings, and may we chase after it? tripping and falling all over ourselves.