Some years ago, a friend of mine asked me if I could spend some time preparing his son for his Bar Mitzvah. Now quite frankly, teaching thirteen-year-olds is not my forte; I love them but I am a teacher of adults. Still, my friend asked, so I agreed.
I sat down with his son, Donnie, and started sharing some ideas about the Torah portion he’d be reading for his Bar Mitzvah celebration in the synagogue, but I saw that he was not at all receptive.
“Maybe I’m just not cut out for this,” I thought. So I decided to take another approach and started sharing some deeper stuff to see how he’d respond. He seemed to be listening more attentively and grasping what I was saying. I proceeded to some Kabbalistic ideas and he seemed to be following me enthusiastically. I was very pleased with myself that I found the right way to communicate with him.
Finally, I said, “Donnie, do you have any questions?”
“I really only have one,” he responded. “Why do I have to have a Bar Mitzvah? Why do I have to keep all these rules?”
I realized that I had thrown him into the deep end of the pool, when the kid didn’t even know how to doggie paddle.
So I said to him, “Donnie, do you like basketball?”
“I love it!”
“Great. Have you ever played basketball without the rules?”
Immediately, he set me straight: “Rabbi, without the rules there is no game!”
“Exactly!” I said. “Without the rules to life, there is no game. You can’t lose. And if you can’t lose, you also can’t win.”
Donnie got the point, thank God.
That experience led me to remember a popular song that was always playing on the radio – Teach Your Children by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. It began: “You, who are on the road, must have code that you can live by.” This was one of my favorite songs, and I recall thinking, “I don’t have a code to live by. I need a code to live by.”
We all need a code to live by. We need rules; we need laws.
The Torah word for law is mishpat. This word also means sentence – like a sentence made up of words with which we communicate. What does law and sentence have to do with each other?
It’s no coincidence that when you go to court, the judge imposes a sentence. And that’s because you’ve acted out of line and the court’s sentence is a corrective measure to get you back in line. You’ve acted out of context and betrayed the true meaning of the story of life. And that’s the gift of mishpat – to keep us on track. The Torah’s laws are the game rules of life. And when you play by the rules you win the win the game.
In fact, there is so much love in the laws of the Torah, because its laws are about creating context for life, so that you can figure out where you are going. For a life without direction, without a code, without rules is a life that you can’t lose and you can’t win.
I once met a devoted Christian who claimed, “The difference between us and the Jews is that you believe in a God of law but we believe in a God of love.
I explained to him that we actually believe in a God of love. And it precisely because of God’s great love He gives us laws. There is so much love in law and so much law in love.A life without rules is unruly. The many rules of the Torah are not meant to be burdens but blessings.