Voices of WRJ: Parashat Tzar

by Connie Golden I remember my first treasure hunt. I was four years old, spending my summer at Camp Tapawingo. All I knew was that another camper and I were going to play a game looking for a hidden treasure.  After being handed a slip of paper with words on it at the Lodge, we were off, running down the big grassy hill to Bunk One. I saw a piece of paper under the front steps and grabbed it, yelling “we won!” Trying to calm me down my partner said "no, Connie, that's only the next clue! We have to keep going. Come on, or we'll never win!" I ran after her, thinking in frustration “what kind of game is this?!” We ran down the sandy path to the lake, tree roots grabbing at our feet, only to be sent by the clue we found there back up the sandy path and the grassy hill to the tennis courts. Just at the end of the path my foot caught in a twisted root, and that was it—I fell flat, scraping my knees and banging my head. So our next stop was the infirmary and by the time I was patched up, someone else had found the Treasure. I cried when I knew we’d lost, but summer camp life is very busy and I didn’t think about it again until the evening at my first campfire. After an hour of songs and stories, everyone was quiet. I just stared into the fire, which seemed alive somehow. I felt a beautiful sense of inner peace, of—whatever a four-year-old can grasp of the presence of God. It was as if I had found that treasure after all. As we get older, that sense of God’s presence and the inner peace accompanying it becomes harder to find. I found it at the tender age of four, but it was many years before I could make it last between campfires. In the Torah portion Tzav we read, “A perpetual fire shall be kept burning on the altar, not to go out.”

Today’s electric ner tamid is an eternal light only because we refrain from turning it off. It’s difficult to connect with God by simply not doing something. The ancient priests kept the fire burning, tending it constantly, and they felt infused with God’s presence. In a Judaism where there are no priests, is there any way we can connect with God? Many of us sisterhood women feel that connection just by being with each other, perhaps at services, perhaps at a retreat, perhaps at a WRJ Assembly. That connection opportunity is one of the reasons I myself am active in sisterhood. But Judaism offers us so much more that it would behoove us to know what riches our tradition has. There’s study—whether it’s discussing the weekly Torah portion in a Temple group or digging into Talmud in classes with a rabbi, we can come closer to God as we envelop ourselves in learning. It’s an easy first step, down the grassy hill from the Lodge to Bunk One. There are mitzvot—whether it’s involvement in our sisterhood soup kitchen or helping at a community rummage sale—we can be drawn to God’s presence as we reach out to help others. My route to the second clue at camp was downhill from Bunk One to the lake. That's how we should view mitzvot: easy to do, and able bring us closer to God as we realize that we’re actively tending the ner tamid with every action we take. There’s prayer—surprisingly, hard to do. My walk from the lake to the tennis courts was up two hills, and I tripped and fell along the first one. We too may trip. We just have to open a siddur and read, but to do so from the heart, meaning it, is harder. Perhaps we need some practice, even in our own words, at home. Many of our sisterhoods' beginning meetings with prayer, often a reading from one of the wonderful "Covenant" books. What if we were to hand out copies of those opening prayers? Each woman could decide whether to read along silently or not as the meeting begins, but everyone could take with her that special sisterhood prayer to read again and again at home.