Gan Eden Doesn't Look Normal

I’m looking around shul and I see at least fifty people, old, young, a beautiful mix. A beautiful community.

But something doesn’t feel right. Something feels off.

Each one of us is so powerful, so extraordinary, beyond measure. Each of us can literally do whatever we set our minds to - be the greatest artist, businessman, or talmid chacham.

Our being is so powerful, it’s mind‑boggling. We’ve sent men to the moon. We’ve invented metal tubes that fly thousands of miles through the air with hundreds of people inside them. We’ve plumbed the depths of the ocean. We’ve found cures that once meant certain death.

Our being is eternal. Our being is beyond the form we see. Our being is other‑worldly.

Our being is God.

Yet somehow we forgot. Somehow we got caught up in what we’re wearing instead of who we are.

So when I look around tonight, I can’t understand how we’ve become trapped in this web of conformity.

How can a species this powerful be taken down by the mirage of “what will people say?”

This virus touches nearly everyone, and its remedy is the simplest thing: do it anyway.

We stand in conformity as if molded into place, and those who question it are called crazy.

We look for the map, forgetting we are the map.

We look for direction, forgetting the compass is within.

We look for answers, forgetting we never had questions.

The Midrash says that at the end of our lives we’ll be shown how the yetzer hara - the evil inclination- was just a thin piece of string holding us back. There was nothing there. It was a mirage.

How foolish we are to sign up for such submission. We live years in obedience without ever questioning what lies beyond the illusion.

Worse still - we only do it because everyone else does. How twisted this virus! How sneaky its hold!

The word normal is probably its origin.

The idea that we all must act, think, and be the same is its vehicle.

And the fear of being different is its fuel.

Everything we long for exists on the other side of that illusion.

The mold we live inside is hell.

What waits beyond it is paradise.

And the path forward is to remember - it was only ever a phantom of our imagination.

We need to remember we were born in God's image, not in someone else shadow.

איש