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Our Rabbi's Message
August 22nd 2008
By Rabbi Aaron KriegelIn the Parasha, which we read this week, one lesson repeats itself over and over again. If you want to live a life, which is filled with meaning, do not forget your past. Remember the struggles, the difficult time, the trials and the mistakes that you made along the way.
We as a people and as individuals might age during our journey. We might not always have the strength and vision of youth, but as we age we do pick up lessons along the way that give us a better perspective of how life should be lived. No one is born with an understanding of the consequences of life. That is a human endeavor, which must be learned.
It is the purpose of history and of the ethics and morals found in religion to guide us to the purpose driven life. We find that purpose more in the way that we integrate our trials and failures into our being than in the successes that come along the way. It is no accident that we read so often how the newly rich and famous, usually hardly out of their teens, die from an overdose, from suicide or from risk taking. Their successes have not prepared them for the life that lies ahead of them. They have not sufficiently failed and corrected those failures to learn the real meaning of life.
We are imperfect beings, and consequently we make mistakes. We have free will and consequently we often choose badly. Yet we have the capacity to correct our mistakes and the bad choices that we make. We have the capacity to find real meaning and happiness because of the corrections to life's errors that we have made.
It is not by accident that our rabbis teach that, "the place where a penitent stands, the born righteous can never stand." You see one who learns from his mistakes will not repeat them. One who always does good is open to err. He does not comprehend the consequences of wrong choice.
The only way to become whole, to find true happiness, to put meaning into life is to remember our history, our mistakes and how we corrected them. Such is the lesson we learn this week.
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