This morning, at a minyan in Bal Harbour, two things arrived together.
The first: a rabbi visiting from Jerusalem lead us. He taught about manna, the bread that fell from heaven when the children of Israel walked into the wilderness with nothing in their hands. A blessing you could gather in the cool of the morning.
The second: as the service opened, a soldier rose to speak. He was a young man who had lost both of his legs to a land mine.
I have been turning those two things over against each other all day.
* * *
I have long believed that the difference between a curse and a blessing is not in the thing itself, but in the outlook.
A curse is what you call a circumstance when you stand inside it and judge it as it is, right now. A blessing is what you call the same circumstance once time has done its slow work. Once the passage of days has brought healing, feeling, and the kind of seeing that only arrives later.
In the moment, things can feel bad, but remember that you are looking outward. Your outlook sets your attitude. This too shall pass and as it passes, something opens. You begin to see inside; insight, after all, is only the sights that live inside ourselves and others.
For a long time, that was the whole of what I believed. The curse comes first; the blessing comes later; wait and the wheel will turn.
This concept is not my own creation. That a curse can ripen into a blessing is among the oldest consolations we have: gam zu l’tovah, “this too is for the good,” said the rabbis; the sages, the poets, and the modern psychologists each in their own way. I am not trying to add a small stone to a cairn that is already a mountain of wisdom.
What I am after is narrower and possibly stranger. Not the comfort that the blessing will arrive once time has done its work, but the possibility that the blessing was there all along, hidden inside the curse. The same substance only wrapped.
This morning, the rabbi from Jerusalem showed me exactly where to look.
* * *
The bread from heaven is man. מן. Mem. Nun. Then the rabbi turned the word over. The man who rose, generations later, to erase us, the villain of the Megillah and tyrant of Purim, is Haman. המן.
The same two letters sit at the heart of each. Mem. Nun. The blessing and the curse nearly mirror one another: manna hidden inside Haman, wrapped in an additional letter.
The name of the curse already carries the name of the blessing inside it.
This is the deep grammar of Purim itself. The Book of Esther tells of a day Haman had chosen for the destruction of the Jews; on that very day, everything was inverted. The Hebrew phrase for it is v’nahafoch hu, וְנַהֲפוֹךְ הוּא, which means “and it was overturned.” It is the heartbeat of the whole holiday: the reversal in which a thing becomes its own opposite.
You can read it unfold, line by line, as the Megillah unrolls. The gallows Haman built for Mordechai became the gallows for Haman himself. The honors Haman was sure were coming to him, he was forced to drape on the man he hated. The decree of death became a day of deliverance as sorrow turned to gladness.
The curse did not get traded for a blessing after the fact. The curse was the blessing, turned inside out.
Purim keeps a second secret, folded into the same scroll. It is also the holiday of hiddenness. In the entire Book of Esther, the name of God is never once spoken. It is only book in all of scripture where he goes unnamed and yet his hand turns every page. The name Esther itself comes from the Hebrew root for hidden, and the sages hear beneath it the verse haster astir panai, הַסְתֵּר אַסְתִּיר פָּנַי, “I will surely hide my face.”
This is the deepest wrapping of all. Not that the blessing is absent, but that it is concealed. It is the same hide and seek we play with our own lives. Esther hid her name for nine years, and Moses was raised a prince before he learned whose child he was. Each of them became themselves only by stepping beyond the prisons their palaces had become.
When Haman, the curse, carries manna, the blessing, inside it, one letter apart, it is doing exactly what the whole Megillah does. It hides the gift in plain sight.
The blessing is not always something that arrives later. Sometimes it was inside the whole time. Wrapped.
* * *
We wrap presents for a reason. A gift handed over bare is barely noticed. The paper, the ribbon, the box, the pause before the lid comes off: that is what teaches us to want what waits inside. A blessing that costs nothing to receive is a blessing we forget by morning. Hashem wraps the blessing in the box of a curse. The wrapping is not a cruelty. It is the very thing that makes us reach.
I learned this once, years ago, in a different sanctuary.
At The Shul in Surfside, I heard a teaching about a son sent into town to receive a blessing from the Rabbi. The Rabbi gave him these:
May you plant, but never harvest.
May your house be destroyed, and may you forever be a guest.
May your table always be dirty and messy.
The son came home furious. These are curses, he told his father. What kind of Rabbi did you send me to?
His father unwrapped each one.
Plant but never harvest: may your children outlive you and never be cut down before their time.
May your house be destroyed and you be forever a guest: may your spirit, after you are gone, live on as a welcome presence in the hearts of those who loved you.
May your table be dirty and messy: may children and grandchildren and great grandchildren crowd around it for generations, in all their loud and compassionate chaos.
Why, the son asked, did he deliver blessings dressed as curses? Why not say it plainly?
Because life is rarely what it appears on the surface. What we first see is almost never what we finally understand. The Rabbi wanted the boy to learn to dig past the wrapping to the nechama, the soul, that lives inside each circumstance and each person.
(The Rabbi gave five blessings in all; the complete teaching is at the end of this blog.)
* * *
President Ronald Reagan loved the story of two twin boys — one a pessimist, one an optimist. The pessimist wept in a room full of new toys, certain they would only break. The optimist laughed in a room full of manure because, with all that manure, there simply had to be a pony somewhere.
Two rooms. Two boys who decided, before they ever looked, what they would find inside.
* * *
This morning When the soldier rose to speak, the box stopped being a metaphor as he told us about the moment he came back to consciousness and realized that both of his legs were gone. The first clear thought that surfaced up through the pain, before the grief, before the arithmetic of everything that was now gone, was not why me. It was not what now. He understood, immediately, that he had been given a new mission. Hashem took away my legs, he said, in order to give me wings.
I have nothing to add to that. I only know I will spend a long time trying to deserve having been in the room to hear it.
* * *
There was more to the service and some of it was mine.
When the Torah was taken out, I was given the honor of the first aliyah, the one set aside for a Kohen. I carried something private up to the bimah with me. It had been a heavy week. An Achilles tendon that tore and tore again and is still relearning how to hold my weight. A hard appointment with the doctor yesterday, my healing slower than I had hoped. I stood for the blessing quietly wondering when I would walk normally again, when I would step back onto a tennis court.
Eight months earlier, the morning after the surgery meant to repair that tendon, I awoke to a voicemail. I had just cancelled a trip to Bahrain to see my friend Khalid, and he had called to console me. In Islam, he said, we say khayr. When something bad happens to you, it is because God wants to draw you closer to Him, and to bring good things to you. So I suppose that is what has happened. Lying there, sore and sorry for myself, I thanked him; I did not actually believe, or understand, what he meant.
Then came the second aliyah.
It went to the soldier who had spoken, and beside him, a second soldier, who had also lost both of his legs. The two of them were called to stand beside me in front of the Torah for their aliyah. When they completed their Torah reading, our minyan stood, and together with both soldiers, we all danced. The soldier who had lost his legs about eight months earlier, the very same month my own tendon tore for the second time, danced with us. As he danced, he announced to the room, with confidence and determination, that his dancing was only going to get better.
I had walked in that morning grieving a ruptured tendon. He had no legs, and he was promising us he would dance better next time.
The ache in my heel did not disappear. The road back is still long and I still want my tennis court. But standing there, my worry was returned to its true size, small enough, at last, to carry. Beside his, my own curse looked almost like a gift.
Khayra, Khalid had called it, months before I was able to feel what he meant.
I came into the minyan believing that time turns a curse into a blessing. I left wondering whether I had it wrong. Perhaps the blessing is there from the very beginning, hidden inside the one thing we are trying hardest to escape.
Man and Haman. The manure and the pony. The legs and the wings. The wrapping is not the obstacle to the gift. The wrapping may be the gift itself. Even a torn tendon. Even the long walk back to the court. Wrapped with faith.
* * *
Heaven’s bread still falls.
One letter hides the blessing:
unwrap, and find wings.
* * *
Torah References
Noah and the Flood (Genesis 6): It looked like the end of the world. God set out to wash away a corrupted earth; yet, folded inside that destruction, was an ark, and Noah’s faith, and a family and the animals carried safely on the water. What appeared to be the curse of annihilation was the blessing of a world purified and reborn in goodness.
Joseph’s Coat and Dreams (Genesis 37, 44, 45, 50): The coat of many colors began as a father’s favor, a garment of beauty. Then his brothers’ jealousy turned it into bloodstained evidence of a death that never happened. His dreams, in which his family bowed before him, read to those same brothers as arrogance, and they sold him into slavery and let him rot in prison. Every gift arrived looking like a curse. But the slavery carried him into Egypt; the prison carried him to Pharaoh’s trust; and the dreams came true in the only way that mattered. When the famine came, the brother they had tried to bury was the one with the power, and the grain, to keep them all alive. The curse of his rise was, in truth, their rescue.
The Rabbi’s Five Blessings (Full Text)
The complete teaching from The Shul in Surfside. The Rabbi’s blessings, as the son first heard them:
May you plant, but never harvest.
May you bring others into your home, and may they never leave.
May you send your own out from your home, and may they never return.
May your house be destroyed, and may you forever be a guest.
May your table always be dirty and messy.
And as his father unwrapped them:
Plant but never harvest: may your children outlive you, and never be cut down before their time.
Bring them in and may they never leave: may your children marry, and may you welcome those families and hold them close.
Send them out and may they never return: may your children build homes of their own, happy enough that they never come back alone and unmoored.
May your house be destroyed and you be forever a guest: may your spirit, after you are gone, live on as a welcome presence in the hearts of those who loved you.
May your table be dirty and messy: may children and grandchildren and great grandchildren crowd around it for generations, in all their loud and compassionate chaos.
The Same Secret, Across Traditions
This consolation is not ours alone. It surfaces wherever people have suffered and then reflected.
Hinduism
Swami Vivekananda, “An Answered Prayer”
He asked for strength, and was given difficulties to make him strong.
He asked for wisdom, and was given problems to solve.
He asked for courage, and was given dangers to overcome.
He asked for love, and was given people to help.
He received nothing he had asked for, and everything he needed.
The monk who carried the practice of yoga to America left this prayer, which holds the whole idea in miniature.
Zen Buddhism
Mizuta Masahide (1657 to 1723)
蔵焼けて 障るものなき 月見哉
kura yakete / sawaru mono naki / tsukimi kana
Barn’s burnt down; now I can see the moon.
The poet and samurai watched his storehouse burn to the ground; the loss removed the very thing that had blocked the view.
Islam
Khayr
The good that hardship is sent to carry. The Prophet taught that the believer’s every circumstance is good, gratitude in ease and patience in pain, and that when God wills good for someone, He sends them trials. You have already met this teaching in the body of this piece, in Khalid’s voicemail from Bahrain.
For Further Reading
Esther, Moses, and Finding Your True Self in the Palace: Esther hid her Jewish identity in the palace for nine years; Moses was raised an Egyptian prince before he knew whose child he was. Each became who they truly were only when they stopped hiding and answered the call, Moses with a single Hebrew word, Hineni, “Here I am.” The companion to this piece: the blessing, and the self, both wait wrapped and hidden until we find the courage to uncover them.
Gam Zeh Ya’avor: “This Too Shall Pass”: King Solomon sends his most trusted minister to find a ring that can make a happy man sad and a sad man happy. What comes back is a plain gold band engraved with three Hebrew letters, gimel, zayin, yud, which spell gam zeh ya’avor, “this too shall pass.” A meditation on how the passage of time levels both our sorrows and our joys, and how to enter even a hard year.
What Is a Crisis?: A crisis, this piece argues, is a state of mind, not a state of being. Drawing on Jonah and the sailors caught in the storm at sea, it is a reflection on slowing down, breathing, and staying calm in the face of an uncertain future, so that the worry of what might happen does not consume the present moment.
