With all Israel assembled around the rock, Moshe raised his staff and angrily challenged the people, saying, “Do you think that from this rock we will bring
forth water?!”
The people never got to respond. Moshe’s staff crashed down upon the rock, the water flowed, and God instantly castigated Moshe for the way he behaved.
The Netziv of Volozhin commented that God wanted Moshe to wean Israel away from relying upon such supernatural events. The people needed to learn, as they were now poised to enter Canaan, to live within the laws of nature. To rely upon God, to be sure, but to not expect that God will do the impossible.
As Jews, we have a profound respect for the limits of the possible. We understand and accept the lines — best as human beings can — between the achievable and the unachievable, the obtainable and the unobtainable, even when it’s deeply painful to do so. Within our religious system, we recognize, for example, that not every troubled marriage can be salvaged, not every question can be answered, not every illness can be recovered from.
“We do not rely upon miracles,” our rabbis taught. The Talmud’s formulation sums it up best: When something is possible, it is possible. When it is iy efshar (not possible), then it simply isn’t possible.
Thirteen years ago, a sweet, beautiful boy named Eitan was born with Down syndrome. It would have seemed reasonable at the time to presume it impossible that this boy would rise 13 years later to read his haftarah and deliver a bar miztvah address.
As the Talmud says, what is iy efshar is iy efshar.
There is, however, within our very same system of religious thought, a word, a mitzvah, that positions itself in perfect tension with the principle that “what is impossible is impossible.” It is the word l’hishtadel, to try hard. Not to try to defy the limits of the possible — rather, to challenge the odds, and to not simply accept things without a fight; to exert all one’s energy, because maybe, just maybe, it’ll work.
Within rabbinic teachings there is a long list of things that we are implored to try hard to achieve, difficult as these undertakings may be. We are taught, for example, that a person should exert himself to study Torah, even though we’re so tired after a day’s work. We should try hard to engage in acts of chesed (kindness and generosity) even when this requires us to stretch beyond our normal comfort zone. These teachings and others are testaments to the absolute conviction that human potential is invariably greater than we tend to think, and that the great majority of times we use the word “impossible,” we’re settling for a life that is a fraction of the life that actually could be.
Yet for most of history, there was one area that even the rabbinic tradition of l’hishtadel regarded as being simply impossible to do anything about. In talmudic teaching, people who were blind or deaf, or whose intellectual functioning was different or limited, were exempted from the performance of the commandments. This was a simple concession to reality, given the extreme limits that existed on enabling such people to live a normal life. Children like Eitan were historically left untrained in mitzvot and spent their lives outside of the passion and pulse of Jewish observance and celebration. It wasn’t until the last few decades that rabbinic leaders, in recognition of advances in education and technology, began to insist that in this realm, too, the Jewish community has the sacred obligation to try our hardest. It was due to their insistence that programs to include and educate children with intellectual disabilities began to emerge.
And while we owe our gratitude to these rabbinic leaders, the greatest heroes are the mothers and fathers of these children, our peers and our friends — who have brought the tradition of l’hishtadel to new and breathtaking heights by setting their sights on goals that others might have warned them were impossible. Mothers and fathers who redrew the line separating the possible from the impossible. Mothers and fathers who proclaimed loudly, “Despite the odds, we will try! Just as Abraham did when he heard that Sodom was about to be destroyed. And with better results, as Ruth did, when Naomi told her she had no future in Bet Lechem. And as Chana did when Elkana told her to accept her barrenness. And as Moshe himself did when he rose to become the teacher of Israel despite being of slow speech and of heavy tongue. And as a 40-year-old illiterate shepherd named Akiva did when he looked at the water dripping on the rock and boldly concluded, ‘I am not fated to illiteracy. I am educable. I will one day be able to read from the Torah.’ ”
When Eitan completed his haftarah and his address, none of us in the room thought we had just witnessed the impossible. We rather marveled, with tears and joy, over the human capacity l’hishtadel, to strive mightily.
Yosef Kanefsky is senior rabbi at B’nai David-Judea (bnaidavid.com), a Modern Orthodox congregation in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood.
