This post original began with the words “Last week”. However, two weeks ago we lost our son, Yehoshua Asher, generally known as Shuby. A 27 year old man with a difficult life — Down Syndrome, diabetes, a major emotional setback at 21… None of which took his life. He simply went to sleep happy and couldn’t be woken in the morning. Fittingly, this post is about why tragedy exists, and fittingly for a man named Yehushua, the role of Hashem’s yeshu’os..Yehi Zikhro Barukh!

Last time we started discussing this portion from the day-specific berachah in Amidah for Shabbos and Yom Tov:

קַדְּ֒שֵֽׁנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתֶֽיךָ   וְתֵן חֶלְקֵֽנוּ בְּתוֹרָתֶֽךָ …
שַׂבְּ֒עֵֽנוּ מִטּוּבֶֽךָ     וְשַׂמְּחֵנוּ בִּישׁוּעָתֶֽךָ
 … וְטַהֵר לִבֵּֽנוּ   לְעָבְדְּ֒ךָ בֶּאֱמֶת

… sanctify us with Your mitzvos   and give us our share in Your Torah;
satisfy us from Your goodness      and gladden us with Your deliverance,
and purify our hearts      to serve You in truth.

Last time I emphasized tov vs. yeshu’os:

Everything is Good. Some can be recognized now, and some is tragic that we won’t realize is good until the time of yehu’ah, Divine Rescue from a painful experience.

Years after having that thought, I started wondering if there is some reason why both exist. Not that we can understand why this particular bad thing happened to these particular righteous people, but why tragic events exist altogether.

And I thought that the key is in the previous line, which is also set as a pair — getting sanctity with Hashem’s mitzvos and having a share in His Torah.

Torah learning connects us to the Divine Will. Teaches us how to emulate it, how to implement His Plan for creation, and how to even think in the manner He wants us to. Someone who wants to understand Torah needs to look at the world with a focus on Hashem’s Good.

Mitzvah observance, actually implementing that Torah, requires two things (among others): attention to gaps in how the Divine Plan is reaching us so far, so that we can close them. And free will to choose not to follow it, for following it to have meaning. Rocks follow the Law of Gravity, but that’s not an emulation of anything. You need intent to do a certain way, and thus the opportunity not to.

But when engaged in performing mitzvos, we are standing in a place where we more readily see how Hashem takes people out of hard places, His part in this partnership to perfect the world through the course of history and of our life stories, as we are looking ways to participatee it.

I cannot explain, though, why the order switches. If performing mitzvos is when we need to see the world with all the things that are broken and need perfecting (tikkun), and Torah study a window into a world where we can see that someone everything is as it should, shouldn’t Tov and Yeshu’ah go in the same order as Mitzvah and Torah?

The pair after the two we are looking at are “vetaheir libeinu le’avdekha be’emes — and purify our hearts to serve You in truth.” Really, truly, serving Hashem requires having a heart that is free to make our own decisions, rather it being than adulterated with the influences of having mammalian bodies — things like instinct and habit.

Someone working on vetahei libeinu is the person who seeks to be satisfied with His Good.

Someone who is in the midst of truly serving Hashem, avodah be’emes, is looking at what yeshu’os are still needed.

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But someone in aveilus, is in a place of “aval“, “but”. As in, “I know, but…” All this talk might fit intellectually, but it’s a time when emotionally figuring things out. The equilibria described in the post have yet to be restored.

May we share besuros tovos!