Today is Day Four of Week One of the
Omer. That is Day Four of the Omer. The theme of the Week is Slavery.
I live in the land where Cricket,
Aussie Rules Football and Rugby Football are king. But I come from the land where American
Football, which Aussies call ‘Gridiron,’ is king…and Baseball is the national
pastime. But I imagine that even those
with little knowledge of the game of Baseball, know what I’m talking about when
I invoke the word ‘Homerun.’
As the Baseball season of 1998 began
to wind down, a competition heated up between Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs,
and mark McGwire of the St Louis Cardinals.
Both had had outstanding seasons in terms of batting, and both were
poised to break the record for the number of Homeruns hit in a single
season. The record at the time, 61, had
been set by Roger Maris 37 years before.
In the end McGwire won, setting the new record of 70. But Sosa also bested Maris’ record with
66. And here’s the rub: McGwire’s record stood only three years,
until 2001, when Barry Bonds of the San Francisco 49ers hit 73 in one season. So what happened to cause the sudden
breaking, and then breaking again, of the record which had stood so long? Was some new bat and/or ball technology
brought online, that made players hit the ball farther? Did someone develop a new technique that only
had to be exploited, to turn Baseball players into Homerun machines? Was the season extended to more games, to
give players an easier shot at breaking the record?
None of the above. It was pure psychology. Someone had set the bar higher, and others
stepped up to match, and beat, it.
When someone succeeds beyond people’s
wildest imaginations, there is a tendency to attribute it to some unfair
advantage. Someone made a fortune
because he first inherited a fortune. Or
cheated. Or exploited others. Someone succeeded at Harvard because his family’s
connections ensured it. The pop idol
made it because her father was a pop star.
The eminent Rabbi came from a line of eminent rabbis. It is so easy for the rest of us who lurch
through life, having to be satisfied to make enough to pay the bills, or to be
a so-so student at a minor university, be satisfied entertaining patrons in
pubs, or ministering to only a handful of Jews, to cry ‘foul.’ And many do succumb to that pitfall. Those of us who manage to achieve only
marginal success – by popular measure – often use the canard that the system is
‘rigged,’ to justify to ourselves and others our lack of achievement.
Look, life is not fair at the
end of the day. Everybody does not have
the same chance at the Big Score. But in
reality, the biggest factor that limits us is our own lack of confidence. We wallow in the chains of the slavery of low
self-esteem.
Sosa and McGwire began racking up
the Homeruns in 1998, not because they suddenly found themselves to have
superior talents. Rather, the success of
each fed off the success of the other. Each
looked at the other and said to himself, I can do that, too! And off they went.
Most of us can never reach that I
can do that, too moment. Instead, we
look at others’ success – in whatever area – and say, I could do that, too…if. If I’d had an inheritance to get me
started. If I’d had successful
parents. If I’d had the family
connections to get into the ‘right’ schools.
And so on. So we make ourselves
slaves to what we don’t have, instead of stepping up to the plate with
what we do have, and using it to the best of our ability.
I promised you a week’s worth of
thoughts on slavery. I can hear some of
you, out there, thinking: He’s using ‘slavery’
as a very broad metaphor. If
that’s you thinking that, to you I plead guilty. But think about it; so much in life is about
what we believe possible. If we refuse
to believe, and therefore don’t give it a shot, we limit ourselves to our own
truncated self-expectation of ourselves.
Yeah, sure, others may had helped to plant that low expectation. Lots of low achievers relate being told,
repeatedly, by multiple parties, that they’d never amount to anything.
The Rabbis seem to endorse the use
of the Exodus narrative as a call to develop higher self-esteem. They point out that Mitzrayim, the
Hebrew name for Egypt, is linguistically related to tzar, meaning
narrow. Being in a ‘narrow place’ was an
impediment to the Israelites’ taking flight and achieving their true
potential. But it wasn’t only the
physical separation from the place that was needed in the end. Because they could not shake their slave
mentality and embrace freedom, only their children – born in the purer air of
the desert – would be given the go-ahead to constitute themselves as masters of
their land and destiny.
Of all the slaveries that beset us
in our day, the slavery of low self-esteem, and therefore low self-expectation,
is one of the most insidious. Isn’t it
time to shake it, to reach for our potential?
Let’s all make that a goal. And hit some Homeruns.
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