When Will the Worry Stop?

Rabbi Michael Feshbach

Temple Anshe Hesed

Erie, PA

I have always been a little bit of a worrier. Not to a neurotic degree, perhaps, but enough. There have been occasions when I wasn't worrying. Once or twice, on those occasions, I would worry about why I wasn't worrying. I can't say it's an innate Jewish trait, since I know many much more mellow Jews. But it doesn't seem as excessive in a Jewish community as it might amongst of group of, to take a random example, Hawaiians. So, I worry. (You know the story about the typical Jewish telegram, right? It says: "Start worrying. Details to follow.")

Sometimes, there are real things to worry about. It took us a long time to have our first child. I needed surgery (twice). My wife had two miscarriages, and surgery herself in between the two. We spent the better part of four years wondering whether we would ever be able to have children on our own. Now that Benjamin Samuel has been born everything is right with the world. Right? Well...

But I have learned the lesson of all parents: we have graduated, it seems, into a whole new realm of worries. Objects tossed on the floor absent mindedly become potentially serious hazards. Violent scenes on television automatically tuned out by adults have totally unknown effects on small children. Turning around for a moment is a gamble and a risk. All this... and he hasn't yet even started to crawl. ("Just wait," some of you have told me in mock reassurance. "It only gets worse.")

All these worries is why I very much like one particular commerical airing now, about a father and a son learning to drive, with the son careening off the road in crazy manuevers. Then the next scene shows the father waking up from a dream, hurrying into the other room, and checking out his son... who is still an infant, sleeping soundly in his crib.

So I recognize a new level of worry, and am able to laugh at myself about it just a bit. But. There is something worse than worry. And, for me, it is new. It is sheer terror.

I can't read the newspaper the same way anymore. Or listen to the radio. A few weeks ago, NPR had, on its radio reader program, a book about a child named Benjamin who was kidnapped, who came back and his name was Samuel. I couldn't stand it. And that was just fiction! The real thing is worse.

Yesterday, as I write these words, seven junior high school girls were massacred in Israel. There is never a time when I would not have been stunned, and saddened, and moved. But now, I cannot stop thinking about them. Their parents. Their families. Their friends. The smiles swept from the world. The first loves that will never be. The scientists and scholars and soccer moms of a future that will never happen.

King Hussein was gracious (this time) in saying that the bullets were aimed at him and his children. But I feel the same way. I know the genesis of overprotection. It is in my own heart.

When will the worry stop? Only when the flowers have bloomed, and the stories of ourselves are fully told. Only when the threads of our lives are woven into the tapestry of time. Or, perhaps, not even then.

And when is the occasion to take stock of our blessings, to review our lives, and try to do better? Judaism teaches that we are to do repentence on the day before we die. What day is that? we may ask. To which, in the echo of our heart, we receive an answer. The answer is: aha!