The snow started to fall on
Saturday afternoon. The talk prior to
the weekend was of ‘a few inches, maybe’ but we ended up with snowfall that lasted
through the night, covering everything with a thick powdery layer -- and leading
to cancellations for Sunday activities.
While the kids
played outside yesterday, and the sun was going down, I had a choice to
make. Wait for the plough service to
come and clear the driveway or clean it up myself. With snow like this, we like to know that, if
necessary, we can scoot over to CVS or the market for something in an emergency. There are other reasons I thought about clearing
the driveway by myself in that moment.
We’d been cooped up inside for many hours, my wife wanted to stay
inside, and the kids wanted to play outside, and I needed some exercise.
Reflecting back on
the decision of ‘to shovel or to wait’, I think there is a lesson here about
redemption. When we speak of redemption
and Messiah/Moshi’ach (the redeem-er) or about a ‘Messianic Era’, we are
thinking faith-forward. How will the
future unfold and what will be my role in that future? In my snow-dilemma, either way I knew that
the driveway would, at some point, be clear.
But…If I had a very long driveway, read ‘if my future seemed laden with
trouble and travail or dim with uncertainty’, I might have felt overwhelmed at
the thought of trying to push so much snow with my one shovel, read ‘bring
about redemption with my own action’. On
the other hand, I might have decided to tilt at the driveway-windmill as much as I could until I collapsed knowing
that I had put in a full effort despite the odds.
The conclusion is
that we tend to evaluate our faith-future in relative terms, and the way we think
about these terms determines how likely we are to participate in creating that
future or in waiting for, a la Coelho, the universe to conspire to create that
future for us. Either way, the
assumption in Jewish thinking is that the redemption is coming. Much like Christians believe in a ‘2nd
Coming’, and the way others hope for an ABBA reunion tour, we feel, at
different levels of intensity, a need to ‘see’ the future. Jewish tradition asks us to believe that the
ancient covenants between God and people are immutable, and that the Exodus
from Egypt is something that is an archetype for a future liberation.
In ‘snowfall
surprise moments’ like this past weekend’s blizzard, we tend to think about
redemption much more than an average day.
When we ask questions like ‘How soon until it melts?’ ‘Are the roads open?’ ‘Are the movie theaters going to be open?’ we
are asking low-level redemption questions.
We’re contemplating liberation from the natural order of things even as
the snow itself ‘liberates us’ by changing the environment, keeping us closer
to home, and quieting down the general rush into more of a walk.
Redemption-thinking
is as much about these moments, when we are inspired to question as we
contemplate the future, as it is about the destiny of the world.
