A Perfect Life

There are moments in life when everything we have relied upon suddenly seems uncertain. The plans we carefully constructed no longer appear workable, the future we envisioned recedes beyond our reach, and the ground beneath our feet seems less secure than it did yesterday. We can find ourselves confronting circumstances we never anticipated, struggling with questions for which we have no answers, and wondering why the path ahead has become so difficult.

It is in such moments that we can begin to appreciate the greatness of Avrohom Avinu and the extraordinary significance of the first command Hashem gave him: “Lech lecha mei’artzecha umimoladetecha umibais avicha el ha’aretz asher areka,” to leave behind his land, birthplace, and father’s home, and head to an undisclosed place.

With these words, the Torah introduces us to the father of our nation, the man who would become the embodiment of emunah, whose life would illuminate the path for generations of his descendants.

We first learned the parsha when we were young, too young to appreciate the depth of its meaning. When we get older, we can better imagine what Hashem’s command meant to Avrohom and Sorah. A person builds a life in the place where he was born. He knows the people, understands the surroundings, and develops relationships and routines that provide him with a sense of belonging. Avrohom was asked to leave the world he knew and the foundation upon which he had built his identity. And for what? To go where? He didn’t know.

Hashem did not explain the plan to him. He didn’t provide Avrohom with an itinerary, describe the challenges he would encounter, or assure him that his journey would be entirely pleasant.

Avrohom was promised that if he left home, he would receive tremendous brocha, but he was not given an explanation of the road ahead or the destination.

But Avrohom understood that when Hashem calls upon a person to move forward, He does not always reveal where the road will lead. The obligation is to listen, to trust, and to take the next step.

Rashi, citing Chazal, explains that Hashem did not reveal the destination in order to make the journey more beloved to Avrohom and increase his reward for each step he took.

There are some people who enjoy traveling. I am not one of them. I tend to view a journey as a means to an end. I endure the discomfort of the journey because I want to reach a destination, and the sooner I get there, the better. I recently received an invitation to an out-of-town wedding, and it reminded me how much I dread plane travel, with the inevitable delays, the endless lines, the disappointments, and the hours strapped into a seat, waiting for the ordeal to end. If I want to reach a distant place, however, there is no choice but to endure the journey. The travel itself has little value. What matters is arriving.

The Torah teaches us that life does not work that way. In our journey through life, the road is not merely an obstacle standing between us and our destination. The journey itself is the destination. Every step taken in obedience to Hashem, every moment of trust when the outcome is uncertain, and every struggle through which we remain faithful rather than surrender to fear is itself an achievement. We may be focused on where we hope to arrive, but Hashem values the person we become along the way. We measure success by reaching our destination, but the Torah teaches us, through the story of Avrohom Avinu, that there is profound value in every step that brings us closer to Him.

We want to know where we are going. We want to understand what will happen next and how everything will work out. We seek reassurance that the difficulties we experience will lead to something better, that the sacrifices we make will produce the hoped-for results, and that the uncertainty we endure will ultimately be resolved.

But that’s not how life works.

We may spend years preparing for a particular future, only to discover that events have taken us somewhere else entirely. We may do everything we know to be right and still encounter disappointment. We may daven for a particular outcome, work hard to achieve it, and then find that things don’t work out as we expected.

Life is full of nisyonos. Sometimes, when we face a nisayon, we have no idea what to do or how to proceed. Sometimes, we know what to do, or think we do, but we are afraid to do it. But the toughest nisayon is when we find ourselves in a situation and try to figure out why Hashem put us in that situation.

We live in a world of nisyonos, tests that confront us throughout our lives and are woven into the fabric of existence. A nisayon can come in the form of an illness, a financial setback, a disappointment involving a child, a family difficulty, a failed undertaking, or a door that closes just when we thought it was about to open.

Sometimes a person is tested by a sudden crisis. At other times, the challenge is the slow accumulation of burdens that never seem to be lifted. There are tests of patience, tests of character, tests of faith, and tests of endurance. There are nisyonos that require courage, and there is the simple nisayon of getting out of bed each morning and doing what we know we must do.

Life is rarely simple, and oftentimes things happen that involve pain and hurt. Bitachon and emunah do not demand that we pretend suffering does not hurt. The Torah does not ask us to deny the reality of pain, suppress our tears, or greet every disappointment with a smile.

Emunah is not the absence of pain. It is the knowledge that even when we are in pain, we are not abandoned. It is the conviction that the world has a Master, that our lives are not governed by random forces, and that the circumstances we cannot control remain within the domain of the One who created and sustains us, and that everything He does is for a good purpose.

A nisayon places a demand upon us, and we retain the ability to decide how we respond. We can allow adversity to harden us or use it as an occasion to deepen our compassion. We can become embittered by disappointments, or we can learn from them to become more sensitive to the disappointments of others. We can allow uncertainty to distance us from Hashem, or we can use it as an opportunity to turn to Him with a sincerity we might never otherwise have discovered.

We don’t choose the nisayon. We don’t seek out challenges, but when we know they are presented by Hashem, we are better able to deal with them, confront them, and grow from them.

A person can endure hardship and emerge wounded, exhausted, and struggling. Emunah and bitachon guide us to continue seeking Hashem, to continue doing what is right, and to refuse to let circumstances rob us of the values by which we live.

There is another lesson in Avrohom’s journey that deserves our attention.

After Avrohom obeyed Hashem and arrived in Eretz Canaan, the Torah relates that a famine struck the land. Avrohom was forced to go down to Mitzrayim.

Consider the apparent contradiction. Hashem had told Avrohom to leave his homeland and travel to the land He would show him. Avrohom followed Hashem’s command, but upon reaching the destination, instead of finding the promised abundance, he encountered a famine so severe that he could not remain in the land.

The famine was a nisayon to see if Avrohom would question Hashem’s promise.

What happens when we do what is right and things go wrong? What happens when we make the responsible choice, follow the path we believe Hashem wants us to follow, and discover that the outcome is not what we expected?

We may have worked honestly, treated others fairly, and fulfilled our obligations, yet suffered financial losses. People devote themselves to raising their children with care and love, and then their children disappoint them, forcing them to face difficulties they never imagined. We may have invested our hearts in a worthy endeavor and watched it fail. We may have davened with all our strength for a certain outcome and then found ourselves confronting the reality we desperately sought to avoid.

We imagine that if we are on the right path, the road should be smooth. We expect that doing what is right will protect us from painful surprises and that fulfilling our responsibilities will produce the results we seek. The lives of our avos teach us otherwise.

Avrohom’s greatness lay in responding to each stage of his journey as it came, continuing to live with the knowledge that Hashem was directing his path even when the circumstances were difficult to understand.

This is a lesson we need when life does not conform to our expectations. A disappointment is not a verdict on our choices. A closed door does not mean that our efforts were wasted. And a difficult chapter does not tell us how the story will end.

We are responsible for making the best decisions we can following the Torah, making appropriate efforts, and doing our hishtadlus. We are not responsible for controlling the outcome. That distinction can spare us from a lifetime of unnecessary guilt and frustration.

We do our part. We strive to act properly. We daven for success. And when events unfold differently than we hoped, we continue forward.

As children we thought that every good story has a happy ending. The struggles are temporary, the obstacles are overcome, the right people find one another, and everyone eventually lives the life they dreamed of. We expect our own lives to follow a similar script. People imagine that they are entitled to the perfect job, the perfect family, financial security, a beautiful home, and a life in which everything falls neatly into place. When reality fails to deliver that picture, they feel cheated. They look at what they have and see what is missing, measure their lives against what they imagined they would be, and wonder why the happiness they expected remains so elusive.

Part of growing up is learning that life is not a fairy tale, and part of developing emunah is recognizing that we are not the authors of our own stories. Hashem determines the circumstances into which we are born, the blessings we receive, the challenges we confront, and the roads we travel. To the degree that we learn to live fully and faithfully within the reality Hashem has given us, we attain happiness.

The fairy-tale ending we seek is not necessarily the life in which every problem disappears and every wish is fulfilled. It is the life in which we learn to embrace our circumstances, find meaning in our struggles, appreciate our blessings, and recognize that even the challenges we would never have chosen can become part of our growth. When we stop demanding that life be perfect before we allow ourselves to be happy, we begin to discover a deeper kind of joy, one that does not depend upon everything going the way we imagined it would.

As long as we measure success by the standards peddled by a superficial culture—perfect children, effortless wealth, physical beauty, dazzling white teeth, a sprawling house on a generous lot, and an expensive car in the garage—we will always find someone who has more and something in our own lives that falls short. We will spend our days chasing an image of happiness that keeps receding just as we approach it.

We can spend a lifetime waiting for the perfect life, never realizing that the life Hashem gave us is the one in which we were meant to find our purpose, our growth, and our joy, and that this is the truly perfect life.

The perfect life portrayed in fairy tales does not exist. There is no life in which every dream comes true, every relationship unfolds as hoped, everything follows the path we envisioned, and every day brings only satisfaction and joy. That imaginary perfection distracts us from the perfection we are capable of achieving in the lives Hashem has actually given us.

For the truly perfect life is not one in which a person is spared nisyonos, but one in which he confronts them and triumphs. It is a life in which challenges, as unwelcome and painful as they may be, become opportunities for growth. It is a life in which disappointment deepens our understanding, adversity strengthens our emunah, and struggle brings out reserves of courage, patience, and compassion we might never otherwise have discovered. We may not choose the tests that confront us, and we need not pretend to welcome them. But we can choose to face them with emunah, to learn from them, and to refuse to let them defeat the person we are capable of becoming.

The perfect life is not the life in which nothing goes wrong. It is the life in which, when things go wrong, we grow stronger in emunah, greater in character, and closer to the person Hashem wants us to become.

This is the lesson we learn from Avrohom Avinu, whose life stands in stark contrast to the fairy tales that shape immature expectations of happiness. When Hashem told Avrohom, “Lech lecha,” He accompanied it with extraordinary promises. We could have imagined that Avrohom’s life from that point on would be an upward trajectory of luxurious glory. We would have thought that Avrohom would be spared the disappointments and hardships that ordinary people have to deal with.

Yet, almost immediately after arriving in Eretz Canaan, Avrohom encountered a famine and had to go down to Mitzrayim. He had no children and had to send away his relative who came with him. He had to fight a war with local kings. The journey that began with promises instead brought him deprivation. Though he did indeed live a blessed life, Avrohom’s life was marked by repeated nisyonos, each demanding new measures of emunah and bitachon.

But the first of our avos paved the way for us and showed us how to live, teaching us not to measure the truth of Hashem’s promises by the comfort of our present circumstances.

The fairy tale ends when the obstacles disappear and everyone lives happily ever after. The Torah’s version of a good life emerges through the obstacles themselves, when a person confronts a nisayon without surrendering or abandoning his emunah.

Avrohom did not become Avrohom Avinu because his life unfolded according to a comfortable script. He became the father of our nation because he remained loyal to Hashem’s truth through a series of challenges and difficulties.

We do not choose our nisyonos, but we do choose how we respond to them. Like Avrohom and Sorah, we can choose to live lives of purpose, goodness, and growth, even when circumstances are not what we had hoped or imagined. We learn to appreciate what we have rather than dwell on what we lack, to recognize the many brachos Hashem has bestowed upon us, and to take advantage of opportunities to deepen our emunah, strengthen our character, and become better people.

As bnei and bnos Torah, our mission is to live as Avrohom and Sorah did, bringing kedusha and goodness into the world and striving to become worthy of the continued brachos and protection that Hashem bestows upon us as we continue the chain of the mesorah in our families, preparing the world for Moshiach Tzidkeinu.