Law of Averages

I have made it no great secret that I am a strong proponent of Chabad. At the very same time, I also realize that many Jews have no intention of switching their lives into a great upheaval and instantly purchasing all of their meal items from Eretz Yisrael, or living a strict life in accordance to halachah.

In my mind, every individual is different. I'll grant that there is a single yardstick with which to measure, and we know this as Torah Law. I try my best to fulfill what I can. But, at the same time, you can't compare a 50 yard dash in the Special Olympics to a decathlon in Athens.

People are different, with different upbringings and histories. The Rebbe was quite correct and inspiring when we went with the more realistic approach of "planting the seed", or in essence, one mitzvah should surely beget another.

In our house, for instance, we began with nothing. Then it led to ceasing work, without ceremony, from Friday evening at candle-lighting time until the proper Havdalah period. That included, for me, no email, no turning on the TV, nothing but reading and enjoying the time with my wife.

Last week, we included a movie Friday night. The family was off running around, but after a bad challah fiasco (I forgot to let the dough rise an additional hour and had a nice yeasty brick), I still performed the blessing for the wine and proceeded as best I could. I also treated the kids to a breakfast of various fruits, while canned, required no cooking on my part, thus fulfilling another adherence to the prohibition on work. Except for the fact that I had to use the can opener.

This week, hopefully a good challah, grape juice (my wife has baby inside, thus we're holding on the wine for her, and the kids...) and a nice cholent of my own design for Shabbat lunch. It sits in the crockpot there, and I don't have to do anything to it. I have this neat can opener that cuts the top cleanly, creating a lid. So I'll cut the cans prior to Shabbat and put them in the fridge this time. No work whatsoever.

Normally, we would do our grocery shopping on Saturday, but I am trying to slowly shift that over to Sunday (prohibition on handling money on Shabbat).

The point is, once we perform one mitzvah, it is like smoking or Lay's potato chips, just in a more positive direction. You can't have just one. You also no longer want to have just one.

And to have 24 hours where there is nothing but family interaction, where you can go into the cocoon for a while, is wonderful. It has us truly looking forward to Shabbat each week, like finding an oasis in the desert.

Now we can fill in the gaps, like the candles, a challah tray and cover, the kiddush cup. We only have three valid doorjambs on which to affix mezuzot, but it's the little things.

Today I'm emailing for an account with Aleph, the program I mentioned yesterday. Everything that I've seen on their site has been on par with my thought process.

Much of my thinking has been about the Orthodoxy "letter of the law" versus the "spirit of the law". Fundamental Christians love to confuse and bend this for their own purposes, but what it really means is not performing a mitzvah or following a law strictly for the sake of being obedient. There is a thought process inherent in the very design, one that sometimes requires into delving through Talmud and Gemara just to ascertain the meaning.

Judaism is the faith of "Why?" We always, like a child, have to know why we are doing something.

Perhaps it's better to know why you are doing something, even if the answer is "it's the right thing to do" than to just do it blindly, never having the pleasure of truly understanding it. In my opinion, I'd rather have someone perform a few good acts of mitzvah with a full understanding of why they are doing them, than someone who does it blindly because they were told to, and never had a clue to the meaning.

That's just me. I could be wrong. But then again, where is the line between fact and perception?