Live Proactively
Each
generation faces its unique challenges and insecurities. Of course, many in this room knew firsthand
the insecurity caused by the Second World War.
You may have been rendered homeless and stateless by the war and its
aftermath. For you, I’m guessing that
the words of US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt resonated very
strongly. The only thing we have to
fear, is fear itself. In a world
that was ‘falling apart,’ the key to survival is to fight, and conquer, fear.
That’s the lesson I drew also from the lovely little book I Was Young
and I Wanted to Live, written by Holocaust survivor David Huban who now
lives in Australia. David is a cousin of
our member Marika Maselli, and his book is available for sale from our temple
office. I recommend you read it. David survived many of the same tests that
fell his contemporaries. It was not
through superior intellect, strength or cunning that he survived. Rather, his will to live enabled him to
conquer his fears and act in brazen ways when others were paralysed by fear.
The truth is that all of us have lived
in worlds where there was enough to fear and we often succumbed to living by
our fears. That’s why we find in the
Shabbat morning service of our prayer book, Mishkan T’filah the
benediction: We pray that we may live
not by our fears but by our hopes.
In this week’s Torah reading, Moses
continues his series of valedictory sermons.
He is recounting the incident of the Molten Calf. The People Israel descended into blatant
idolatry when he, Moses was on the Mountain receiving the Law. My colleague, Fred Morgan of Temple Beth
Israel in Melbourne noted, in his excellent drash on this week’s Torah reading,
the major difference between this and the original account of the incident in
the book of Exodus.
As Rabbi Morgan points out, the Exodus
account gives the reason for the sin. The
people saw the Moses was so long in coming back down from the mountain, and they
were afraid.
In this week’s recounting of the episode
there is no mention of this fear motivating the people to commit idolatry. Perhaps Moses, having been the one whose
absence stoked those fears, remains unaware of them? Or perhaps Moses wants to focus the
Israelites’ attention not on what caused their sin but on its result. As
Rabbi Morgan put it so well: ‘fears come
and go, but actions last forever.’
Perhaps to Moses, recounting and teaching some 40 years after the event,
it was only the result that mattered.
The fear that motivated the event was mere water under the bridge, but
the consequences were ever-living.
You’ve heard me mention a number of
times the book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Dr
Steven Covey. It ranks among the most
popular and influential self-help books of all time. A ‘proof’ of that is that a number of the
words that Covey coined to convey his message, words that he copyrighted, have
worked their way into our everyday language.
One of those words is Proactive, as in the first of the Seven
Habits, Be Proactive.
Many people assume that being
proactive means to anticipate things and act on them in advance rather than
waiting for them to happen and acting in ‘damage control’ mode. But really, it means something deeper than
that. According to Covey, it means acting
according to your values rather than your emotions. When we respond to situations, we have an
unfortunate tendency to give an entirely emotional response to a
situation. And that’s why we often spin
our wheels and get nowhere, or even worse let conflict stoke more and deeper conflict
rather than solutions.
As I’ve said before, we shouldn’t try to
shut down emotions. Our emotions are
what make us human, after all. When we
encounter someone who is ‘flat’ emotionally, we know that we’ve met someone who
oppressed his emotions, and therefore his humanity. If we are cold and calculating about every
response, then what are we? So
emotions are not bad. But
emotions don’t solve conflicts and dilemmas.
Fear is a very powerful emotion. In so many of the situations of life, our
deep-seated fears rule the way we respond and act. But if we managed to respond rationally and
according to our values instead, we would conquer our fears. That was FDR’s message. That was David Huban’s message. And that was the message of Moses, our Sage
and Teacher when he delivered the sermon that forms our Torah reading this
morning.
From the perspective of time having
passed, Moses is telling the People Israel that what mattered were their actions. It was their actions – their descent into
idolatry – and the consequences of those actions that determined their
destiny. That is, that fed the constant
carping of the people which ultimately led to the vanquishing of a generation
to the wilderness. The fear that
motivated them to act was fleeting. Had
they succeeded in overcoming that fear, and acting according to their values,
the result may very well have been a different destiny.
So Be Proactive. Work to overcome the tendency to respond
emotionally. It’s not that emotions are
bad. It’s just that they do not solve
problems. Learn to keep your emotions in
check, to the extent that you can respond rationally, according to your
values. Because emotions are fleeting,
but values are enduring. And if the
results of our actions endure – and they do! – then it would follow that we
would want something enduring to be the motivator for our actions. Wishing you a peaceful and proactive Shabbat…
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