The Honey and the Sting

When I was in elementary school in Maryland, I remember that I was out on the deck in our woodsy backyard one summer.  A bee stung me on the arm and after tears and treatment, my parents told me that after the sting, through the shock, I said, “I was stung by a tree!” 

When we experience moments of pain, fear, anxiety, stress, and other unpleasant emotions, it can be difficult to find words to say that make sense in the moment or to any words to say at all.  When stress and worry from life work their way into the mind and heart, both speech and action can become paralyzed just as any animal (including humans) freezes first when danger approaches.  Complicated moments and painful conversations can spin around in our heads and make it difficult to sleep.  Our minds go over those moments again and again as we think about what we could have said or done differently at that moment. 

My relationship and thoughts about bees have thankfully changed since that sting.  For several years we have been planting flowers and a fruit-vegetable garden at our house and I realize that we need the bees who visit us everyday to make our garden grow.  I take a deep breath as I walk through the flowers and as I look into the garden to see what is ripe for picking.  I even say ‘thank you’ to the bees and ‘excuse me’ if I brush against the flowers they are visiting as I walk toward the front door.  This approach of appreciation to our faithful pollinators does not prevent the possible shock of a future sting, but for the most part I am not thinking about the possible negative as much as the color of the flowers or my daughter’s pride that her pink flowers have grown to be taller than she is this season. 

As Rosh Hashanah approaches, I hope the attitude of appreciation, thankfulness, and recognition of blessings will help to soften the inevitable growing pains and other potential unpleasant moments in the New Year.  If all these things come from God, and they are all connected then into what is eternal, then I will do my best to run toward the honey instead of always running away from the sting.  After all, the wise Ba’al Shem Tov once said that we can try to run away from our problems, but we will turn our heads and see that our problems are chasing after us.

The Light that stays on even after the power is switched off

In our house, in the great room where we have our dinner table, sit down and study table, the ‘everything’ or ‘all purpose’ space, there is a light fixture with three lights and a ceiling fan attached.  To turn on the lights, or the fan, you first have to make sure that the ‘power’ switch is on, then you can turn on the lights, turn on and adjust the fan.  By some quirk of wiring, if I turn off the lights and leave the ‘power’ switch on, the lights will usually flicker.  It seems that some current still flows in the electrical veins, almost as though the lights do not want to go out.

My quirky light fixture makes me think about tefillah/prayer and Talmud Torah/Torah study and what happens when we are done with these activities.  When we close the Siddur, when we close the book we are reading, do we stop thinking about what we explored?  Do we push it aside and move back into our day, or does something from the prayer or the study still flicker inside of us and give color and texture to the way we live out our day?

Ideally, I believe that something will stick with us, will give us a way of seeing that is sharper than before we opened the books, and opened our souls, even if we cannot point to one specific idea.  It may simply be that we feel ‘opened up’ by the possibility that there is something to learn, that there is something out there that can challenge us to grow, to be a more sensitive and thoughtful person today than we were yesterday.

Nighttime is only a shadow on the earth; the light of creation still shines even though we cannot see it, it is ‘or zarua’, hidden light that cannot be squelched by the shadow, a light that is shining all the time from the sparks of holiness that are all around us, and inside of us.  The prayers we say and the words we study are like charcoal and wood for the fire that keep it burning, and the ‘oxygen’ of God’s breath fans the flame.