Parshas Yaera Sheva Brachos f Matt and Rina Scaikewtz 1/16/10

This morning we are celebrating the sheva brachos of Matt and Rena Schaikewitz. I assume that this precious young couple is flying high after the beautiful wedding many of us participated in. Life is surely good forthem as they enjoy the pleasure of being with each other. The other day I heard from a respected Rabbi that Jacob married Rachel and woke up the next morning to find it was Leah. In a way all of us wake up the next morning to find Leah. Of course Jacob came to love Leah and they made a beautiful family of which we are the descendants but nonetheless … Our young couple have certainly found the sterling husband and wife that they went to the chuppah with. They probably have not come across their first disagreement. When they do it will be cataclysmic. As time goes on their disagreements will become less cataclysmic and at some point just become part of life. In a way that is good because it will help them cope with life. However in a way it is bad .


Anyone who knows a little bit of modern Hebrew probably knows the phrase savlanut. Patience. This phrase is constantly being invoke in that very impatient country. Usually you don’t even get the word all you here is a tsss sound and squeezed fingertips cast in your direction. Anyone who has experiences it knows exactly what I’m talking about. Savlanut, patience is generally considered to be a desirable trait. Yet in the parsha we see that Hashem promises to take the children of Israel out from under the sivlos burdens of Egypt. In a homiletic twist many commentators have offered that Hashem is going to take them out from the patience of Egypt. They say that in that time many Jews had made peace with or accepted their lot. They were focused on survival. They had developed patience foir what the Egyptians were doing to them. In order to liberate them from Egypt Hahshem had to first create in them a sense of dissatisfaction with their lot. They had to view the Egyptian enslavement as intolerable. Then Hashem could save them. Sometimes savlanut is bad.

We all have developed savlanut for many things some of them are healthy but some of them are inhibiting our growth. A list of inappropriate savalanut includes the way we treat our spouses and I ant to get full credit fo saying this dvar Torah wit my own wife present. Another area f innapropriate savlanut is in what we expect from our teenagers. Another would be bein inappropriately satisfied with our level of Jewish knowledge. And perhaps most important our lack of inspiration. If we eel uinspired abou our Jewishness that is unaceptableand we can't tolerate it. We need to be more impatient, more dissatisfied, less tolerant. Perhaps we need to be more like newlyweds and view the next disagreement as cataclysmic. Then maybe we wouldn’t get used to some things that shouldn’t really be gotten used to.





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