Shabbat Terumah: Just a Bit

וְהַכְּלָל, כִּי אָסוּר לְיָאֵשׁ

The rule is: it is forbidden to despair – Likkutei Mohoran II.78.7.1

We are in the month of Adar, the month of which our tradition says משנכנס אדר מרבים שמחה  – “when the month of Adar enters, joy increases” (Ta’anit 29a.18) Note here that, despite what we often say, the obligation here is not to be joyful, but to increase joy. That differentiation exists in the Hebrew, and it’s worth considering.

Joy and despair are human emotions, found at opposite ends of a spectrum of feeling. During our Pesakh Seder, for example, we’ll drink from a cup of joy that isn’t quite full, since we will have spilled drops in memory of the plagues and those who suffered. The question of our day is: can we learn to do the same with despair? to add in some appropriate drops of joy? To increase joy incrementally, just a bit?

We are living through difficult days. It is easy to become overwhelmed and to flirt with the idea of giving up. But on this day as well as every other day of our lives, Jewish spiritual tradition encourages us to do the best we can with our lives, to turn them, as my teacher Dr Byron Sherwin ז״ל wrote, into a work of art. 

The idea of the small, incremental adjustment is useful here. We don’t do the work of becoming who we are meant to be by becoming overwhelmed by the big picture, but by paying attention to the small individual acts and steps that make up our lives. Although the story of Superman swooping in and saving the world is attractive, it is because it is impossible that it is called escapist literature. None of us is called to be Super, just to fulfill our obligations to life day to day, moment to moment. To add a drop of joy.

It is sometimes true, according to Jewish ethical teachings, that despair is nothing but self-indulgence. Giving in to hopelessness is too often a way to excuse oneself from acting. Taking refuge in “I can’t fix it, therefore I refuse to face it” is childish, and doesn’t absolve us of the next moment that will call to us. As the ancients already knew, “it is not up to you to complete the work. Neither are you free to absolve yourself of doing your part.” (Pirke Avot 2.16)

None of us can stop the terror of our days; but all of us can remain focused upon what we can do to alleviate it, to push back against it, to light a candle that will burn defiantly bright in the encroaching darkness. Just a drop, just a small act. This week’s parashah carries a clue that can help us keep on keepin’ on, in the word that names the parashah: Terumah.

Terumah is usually translated “offering”. But to delve more deeply into the meaning of the word is to open a vista onto what a true “offering” is. The word תרומה terumah comes from a root that means to separate by lifting up and away. So a terumah is not something other than, but part of. 

Consider: we usually think that the way to meet a special moment is to bring out the best, that the ordinary won’t do. Yet our ancestors understood the command to bring terumah as the invitation to set apart a part of what was everyday, the usual, the regular, and to dedicate it to a higher purpose. 

Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, known as the Mohoran (the acronym for morenu harav Nakhman, “our teacher Rabbi Nahman”), lived in the late 1700s in eastern Europe, and died at the age of 38 from tuberculosis. Despite ample reason to sink into despair from the general conditions of Jewish life, not to mention his own, Rabbi Nahman taught that despair is contrary to Judaism. No matter the darkness in which one finds oneself, he said, it is always possible to take a step toward light. Not by becoming someone different, but, perhaps, by recognizing that at every moment a terumah is possible – that it is always possible to lift up a single, small moment in one’s life and offer it as a gift to HaShem.

We do that by noticing the life in which we take part, even when sunk in our own problems; by paying attention to the reality of both pain and delight in the lives of those about us, and responding to those moments; and by not turning away from small signs of hope – the first crocuses pushing up from the cold dirt still seek to bloom, no matter what.

What could be more a source of at least a small moment of joy than that? Let that be your terumah, your separation of one small moment from the rest of your day, lifted up. Thus life is made sacred, moment by small moment.