By the Grace of G-d
Dear Friend,
When G-d gives you lemons….
You ought to make lemonade…
But when He gives you grapes, anything less than wine would be a lost opportunity.
Which is easier to make?
Lemonade or wine?
I can tell you.
Lemonade is easier.
How do I know you ask? Did I ever make wine?
Yep, back there in Melbourne Australia. My grandfather of blessed memory made wine and my father may he live and be well made wine.
They made VERY different styles of wine.
My Zaydeh (Grandfather) made wine that tasted like Manischewitz or King David wine. In Israel it is known as ‘yayn patishim’ literally ‘hammer wine’. Because it clobbers you over the head when you drink it. He got the grapes after his Feiglin brothers-in-law had squeezed them for their first round of juice to be used for their commercial wine production. My Zaydeh didn’t call the leftover grape mix something boring and unappealing like ‘grape pulp’, he called them ‘jibress’ (pronouncing the ‘i’ as in the word ‘give’). Zaydeh, the resourceful man that he was, threw the ‘jibress’ into a wooden vat. Added sugar. Waited a few months. Out came deliciously sweet and high-alcohol wine. We kids loved it. A few sips and you were joyous.
My father’s wine was a totally different story. My father made high-end dry sauterne wines. From the finest grapes. In modern casks. With various gauges to ensure that the yeasts were doing their job. No sugar was added to my fathers wines.
The result was a sophisticated wine. The kind of wine that kids make a face at. Not at all the generic ‘hammer wine’. Hints of various flavors based on the choice grapes were discussed by the wine connoisseurs who sometimes joined us for Shabbat meals.
But it is somewhat of a high-risk game with wine. Especially with my father’s kind of wine. Sometimes the ‘bad yeasts’ came and turned the whole vat into vinegar.
But when you got it right, and the ‘good yeasts’ did their job and turned the grape juice into wine, it was a high-class wine. A delight on the palate. Easy on the head. And a real pleasure to drink.
Much better than lemonade.
That may explain why lemonade is cheaper than wine.
It would also explain why lemonade stands can be made by little children.
Many have used the term ‘when G-d gives you lemons, make lemonade’ as being an apt description for 2020. I used that term in a former article.
In hindsight, and I think 2020 fares much better when viewed in hindsight… I don’t think this year we were given lemons at all.
We were given grapes.
Unfortunately, some people’s grapes turned to vinegar. Sickness. Death. Financial woes. Societal upheaval.
Unpleasant vinegar. (Or at least that’s the way it seems through our mortal eyes). May G-d give them the strength to soldier on.
Thankfully, many were blessed to have their grapes turn into wine not vinegar. May G-d open their eyes to appreciate the wine.
(Even if it’s a more sophisticated dry Bordeaux and not a ‘jibress’ based sugary wine. My wine tip is, try mixing the ‘hammer wine’ with the dry wine, you get a great blend . The wine connoisseurs will be horrified at the thought).
This week’s Parsha describes the beginning of our Egypt journey. Yaakov is depicted as having spent his absolutely best years of his life in Egypt.
Its rather incongruous. It would be like a saintly Jew coming from Jerusalem to Thailand and saying that he spent the most spiritually elevated Yom Kippur of his life in the shul in Thailand. Even better than Yom Kippur at the Western Wall. That would seem bizarre bordering on impossible.
Yet that is what happened.
When Yaakov went to Egypt he knew he was going to an immoral environment.
But G-d told him to go. And he therefore knew that he was being handed not just a challenge, but an opportunity.
Yaakov fortified his spiritual fortress. He sent his son Yehuda to open a Yeshiva for Torah study. This enabled the extended family of Yaakov to relocate to Egypt and still maintain their integrity and wholesome embrace of G-d’s mission. The G-dly and saintly mission of Yaakov didn’t diminish in Egypt at all.
On the contrary. The commentaries explain that Yaakov didn’t just survive in Egypt, he THRIVED in Egypt.
SPIRITUALLY as well as materially. His children, grandchildren and great grandchildren continued in his path. In Egypt. In the capital of decadence and immorality of the world Yaakov and his family maintained and developed an island of holiness outshining even the one he had left behind in the land of his ancestors.
As it turns out things are not the way they seem. The G-dly energy derived from transforming the assumed spiritual decline into a spiritual elevation actually provided a deeper and more intense spirituality than living in the holy environment of Israel would have provided.
Thus, the best years of his life, in all aspects including spiritual, were in Egypt.
(This was a temporary journey though. Ultimately, after Exodus, the ascent to the holy land of Israel was the goal).
Which means that yes, a person may indeed have a more profoundly spiritual experience in a place that seems most incongruous. This is not a permission slip to seek incongruity. Rather it removes the excuse that so many use for not developing their spirituality because of surrounding inappropriate environments.
(Click here for a variety of scholarly classes expounding on this thought as taught by the Rebbe in a printed essay on this weeks Parsha).
The one-liner lesson from all this is, that even when it looks like you have been handed the ingredients for vinegar, if you look closer you will see that vinegar is made of grapes. It may actually be wine in disguise.
Even if it no longer looks salvageable. The grapes seem to have turned to vinegar already. Nonetheless with G-d’s omnipotence, even situations that look, feel and actually are detrimental can be transformed to reveal their latent powerful good. A good that like in Yaakov our Patriarchs case, is even stronger than easy-to-come-by good.
Let me not beat around the bush.
Everyone has something to say about 2020.
I used to think the best way to describe it was a year of lemons. And tried to encourage myself and those around me to make lemonade.
Nope. I now think it’s a year that we were handed grapes.
Grapes have huge potential.
For some, those grapes turned sour to vinegar. May G-d comfort them and strengthen them.
For the blessed ones, they were grapes that turned to wine. For many, the wine is still maturing.
For high quality wine, you have to work hard and be patient. The maturing process is very important. If you are one of those who are still waiting for the grapes to turn to wine may G-d bless you to have good quality wine. May the effect of this challenging year turn to a source of unimaginable BLESSING.
Talking about wine. Let’s talk about sweetness. Sugar is critical to wine. The natural sugars that are contained in the grapes are the most natural, high quality and health pleasing way of making wine. But as I learned from my Zaydeh you can even turn ‘jibress’ to wine by adding sugar and water.
King David says in Psalms ‘wine gladdens the heart of man’.
FAITH. SIMCHA. JOY. OPTOMISM.
I have never felt or understood the importance of faith, joy and optimism in life as much as I have felt it in 2020.
(If you have time for hearing more about joy and positivity as taught from a Torah perspective here are links to the three part Positivity-Bias Zoom Classes Class 1, Class 2, Class 3)
Caring for others is an identifying feature of this year.
I have never witnessed as much genuine camaraderie, charity, benevolence and empathy as I have during this past year.
One of the stories that touched me very deeply, I would call it my ‘story of the year’ is as follows:
Mrs. L, an elderly woman who had recently lost her husband, was dreading Pesach this year. Pesach without her husband would be devastating enough. The lockdown of COVID-19 and the fear of infecting their elderly grandmother and mother, meant that not one of her children or grandchildren could host her or come to her for the Seder. Never in her life had Mrs. L. had a solo Seder. She was dreading it.
Thankfully she lived in a Jewish neighborhood and had neighbors, the K family, who lived across the yard in a nearby building. They arranged to position their Seder table near the door to their porch. When they opened the door to their porch and Mrs. L. opened her door, she was able to hear the goings-on in this neighboring family’s home.
After Pesach Mrs L. received calls from her anxious children who wanted to know how she had survived the emotionally excruciating ordeal of the Seder nights.
To their surprise she was buoyant and elated. Mrs. L. couldn’t stop exclaiming her absolute amazement at the beautiful Seder she had experienced as an ‘across the yard guest’ at the K family seder. ‘The kids asked the Ma Nishtanah four-questions, the singing was joyous and I really had a full Seder’ said Mrs. L. to her kids.
‘The most miraculous thing of all, was that the K family have the same exact tunes for the Passover prayers as my late husband, your late father. All those traditional melodies that I so enjoy and cherish and that we sang at our family Seders for the last fifty years, were sung. Its totally wondrous that they happen to have those exact traditions’.
Now it was the turn of the kids to reveal a secret to their mother.
‘The K family called us several weeks before Pesach, once it became clear that you would be all alone, and suggested that they invite you as guest from across the yard. They wanted to make your experience complete and meaningful and asked us to record all of our family traditions and melodies’.
This my dear friends is the ‘story of the year’ for me.
It is the way we should live our lives. Not just helping people who need our help. But investing heart, time, thought, energy and creativity in finding the best and most effective and most soothing way of being loving and kind to others.
Click here for a quick but deep thought on this from the Hayom Yom.
Our Jewish year changed at Rosh Hashana. It is now year 5781 since G-d created the world.
5781 in Hebrew can spell out the following optimistic wish:
ת הא שנת פלאות אראנו
May it be a year of ‘wonders I show you’. i.e. may G-d shower upon us VISIBLE wonders. Visible and comprehensible to all of us. Even from our physical vantage point.
The most awaited for wonder and miracle is the imminent arrival of Mashiach. May he come speedily in our days, AMEN!!!
Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi Yosef Kantor