“RABBI’S MUSINGS (& AMUSINGS)”
Erev Shabbos Kodesh parshas Tzav
15 Adar II 5782/March 18, 2022
Shushan Purim
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לזכר נשמת חו”מ נטע
יצחק בן אלכסנדר
WHEELS OR DOORS
At first,
I couldn’t understand what my student was talking about. Why would he ask me if
I think there are more doors or wheels in the world? Of what importance is the
answer and how can anyone correctly assess it?
Then a
fellow student explained that the question came from social media. A few days ago,
someone in New Zealand posed the aforementioned question on his Twitter page.
Within a short time, he received well over 200,000 responses to his poll. 46%
claimed there are more doors, while 53% claimed there are more wheels.
This is
not the first time meaningless debates have erupted on social media. In 2015
thousands passionately debated whether a certain dress was blue and black or
white and gold. In 2018 there was another major debate about whether a voice on
an audio clip said Yanay or Laurel.
These
trivial disagreements have become an essential component of social media
culture. The fact that there can never be a definitive answer to the questions
doesn’t seem to make any difference to the debaters.
I leave
it to others to postulate why these types of imponderables garner such
excitement. But it got me thinking about the importance and value of wheels and
doors.
In order
to travel we need wheels. The faster wheels spin the quicker we move. But in
order to spin, something needs to fuel the wheels.
We are
currently undergoing a crisis which has resulted in a substantial rise in gas
prices. If we want to continue ‘spinning our wheels’ as much as we have been
used to, we must be willing to pay the increased prices or find alternative
means to fuel our wheels.
When a
person undergoes any challenge or crises, it becomes that much harder for him
to maintain his daily routines. His internal fuel is more quickly depleted and
becomes “more expensive”. Another r option is for him to find external fuel –
such as the support of friends and family to keep him going. But without any
fuel, the wheels of his growth and production will be very limited.
The
wheels of life are also used as a metaphor to convey the idea that the world is
always moving ahead. During the covid lockdown, while we were stuck at home,
the world continued its natural processes. The seasons changed, birds chirped,
and animals ran in the wild.
Part of
the cruelty of life is that even when we go through periods of challenge and
tragedy, the world apathetically continues to function as it always has. We may
feel like our world is coming apart, but the wheels of life continue to spin
unabatedly.
Doors
have a very different symbolism. At times we long for privacy behind closed
doors, where we can have rare moments of reflection. Because the wheels of life
never stop spinning, it becomes that much more important to be able to close
our doors on the outside world to focus inwards.
At
times, we also seek new doors and new vistas to broaden our horizons and
explore beyond what we have done and where we have been until then.
Alexander
Graham Bell famously noted that whenever one door closes, another door opens.
While that may be true, the hallways in between the closed and not-yet-opened
doors can be very daunting. Although there will indeed be new doors, we have to
be ready for them to appear not where and when we expected them. They may lead
to different corridors than we expected.
I have
no idea if there are more wheels or doors in the world, and, truthfully, it’s
irrelevant. In fact, by the time you read this, it’s likely that the whole
debate will have already become passé, and social media will move on to other
novel nonsenses.
What is
undoubtedly true however, is that we need both wheels and doors, literally and
metaphorically. We need to be able to navigate our rapidly moving world and to
balance the need to close doors, and sometimes find new ones.
Every
new period of life, warrants closing doors on the past and fueling our wheels
to move ahead.
The
night before our ancestors left the Egyptian exile, they smeared the blood of
the Korbon Pesach on the doorways of their homes. Perhaps part of the symbolism
was that by placing the symbolic slaughtering of the Egyptian god, upon their
doors, they were demonstrating that they were leaving that world behind. When
they passed through those doorways the following day on their march towards
freedom they left behind the lifestyle of Egypt as they revved their wheels while
forging ahead into the wilderness with faith.
I
conclude by saying that perhaps, at times, we should consider that while the
wheels of social media move, we can close our doors to it to use our time more
wisely. Just saying.
Shabbat
Shalom & Good Shabbos,
R’ Dani and Chani Staum