October 2024
Steve Lotter
I don’t know how many of you remember the Chicago Bear Devin Hester who entered the NFL Hall of Fame this year. He was the greatest football return specialist and was honored for it with his induction.
His induction speech was beautiful for several reasons but what amazed me the most was my memory of when Hester got to the Bears, he was not polished. He was very reserved and shy and had a thick Southern accent, so it was sometimes difficult to understand what he was saying. Given his mediocrity as a wide receiver the insinuation was that he wasn’t very bright. Yet there he was almost 20 years later, speaking beautifully from the heart, expressing gratitude but also wisdom. He said “You might have a plan of what you want to be, but it might turn out that God has a different plan, accept what is given to you and be your best at that”.
Listening to Devin Hester’s talk and watching his transformation brings us to the opening lines of the book of Deuteronomy which we will conclude this month. “These are the words that Moses addressed to all Israel on the other side of the Jordan. Reading about Moses for so many weeks, we forget how remarkable this opening verse is. For Deuteronomy offers the final speeches and oracles of Moses that Moses will share with Israel. They are among the most powerful words spoken in the entire Torah. Yet when we first met Moses, he made it very clear that he was a tongue tied, uncommunicative, stammerer. Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and free the Israelites from Egypt?” and “Please, O Lord, I have never been a man of words… I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.”
This led the midrash to state: Israel said to Moses as he shared these Oracles, “Yesterday you said (in Exodus 4:10), ‘I am not a man of words.’ And now we can’t get you to stop?! Rabbi Isaac said, “If you are impeded in speaking ability, study and recite Torah and you will be healed, [as] Moshe had studied all of the Torah.” … This text is related to Isaiah 35:6, “Then the lame shall leap like a hart, and the tongue of the mute shall shout for joy.” Come and see. When the Holy One said to Moses (in Exod. 3:10), “I will send you to Pharaoh,” Moses said, “You are doing me an injustice for ‘I am not a man of words.’ … When I go on Your mission, they will examine me, asking whether I am a representative of the Omnipresent. Then it will be revealed to them that I do not know how to converse with them. Will they not laugh at me, saying, ‘Look at the agent of the One who created the world…! He cannot reply properly!’ See here, something is wrong! ‘For I am slow of tongue’” However, at the end of forty years Moses was able to elucidate the Torah in seventy languages. The mouth that said in Exodus 4:10, “I am not a man of words,” said in Deuteronomy 1:1, “These are the words.”
The 19th century Hasidic Master known as the Sfat Emet, taught, “The Book of Proverbs 15:4 teaches, The tree of life is a healing for the tongue”, The language of Torah releases the tongue. As our midrash earlier noted “Then the lame shall leap like a hart, and the tongue of the mute shall shout for joy.” … In the book of Jeremiah 23:29 God says, Are not My words like fire? It is the way of fire that all who draw near to it become enflamed. So it was with Moses and Torah: he became entirely Torah. Something like this happens to everyone who studies Torah; such a person is transformed into a ‘master of Torah”, everything according to the amount of Torah study.
Then the Sfat Emet takes a bit of a turn – In fact all of Creation came about through Torah; “In the beginning God created’ means “God looked into the Torah and began to create the world. And it is written in Isaiah, 43:7 Everything is called by My name and for My glory I created it”; to which the Sages said, “All God created was created only for God’s glory and glory means Torah. Every creature teaches us something; there is a way to learn from each of them the glory and the will of God. This is the song that lies within each creature.”
What the Sfat Emet is expressing here is that while Torah may transform a person, Torah is more than learning the material in the book we call Torah. Torah is the blue print with which the world exists, thus just as we can learn from Torah, so too from our earthly experience. That is what Devin Hester was expressing intuitively in his gracious induction speech. He learned from all of interactions in his life, they all taught him something – how to be a mensch, how to play football, how to accept the skill that he excelled in even if it was not on offense or defense.
This is a lesson I learned participating in Faith in Indiana the last 5 years. Now our local advocacy group is called, We Make Indiana, it is a social justice advocacy group for northern Indiana. I was tasked with calling Dan Schaetzle the County Councilman to meet with our group. Councilman Schaetzle is a very conservative member of the County council. We Make Indiana fights for mostly liberal policy issues. Before my involvement in this group, I would have been very anxious to call a Council member. Who am I to call this elected official? But after working with Faith in Indiana, I have learned that elected officials are just like us. They work for us and so it’s no big deal to call them and ask for a meeting. In this case I had to ask several times and kind of assuage the councilman’s fears that he was meeting with people ready to attack him. In the end we met, we learned about what motivates him. He learned what we hope to change in our county. There was polite disagreement but also possibility to find common cause.
The ability to grow and change is a gift that our faith believes in dearly. We believe that Torah study is one way for it leads us on an ethical path, a way to see the world that tradition tells us is from a Divine perspective. But the Sfat Emet adds that human experience is valuable as well in helping us grow and adapt and develop, not just because experience is valuable but because all of our human and environmental experiences ultimately have their source in God. May we appreciate each of our life experiences and may we be privileged to find the Divine in each one.