2/20/2022 - The Hallmark Moments, Hiddur Mitzvah

 "But what the Jewish way of life does by imposing rules on our eating, sleeping, and working habits is to take the most common and mundane activities and invest them with deeper meaning, turning every one of them into an occasion of obeying (or disobeying) God." -To Life! by Harold Kushner

"Only when man is mindful of this precious endowment can his life be influenced by the divine will." -Everyman's Talmud by Abraham Cohen

Despite the infinite amount of words in our language, there is sometimes no way to avoid clichés and Hallmark moments. There's a reason everyone loves movies like Love, Actually, and Notting Hill. But, like most things I've discovered these past few months, the metaphysics of Judaism has the exact phrase that captures the indescribable moments in life - hiddur mitzvah.

I wonder if the moments we choose to beautify in our life are attempts to feel what Jews felt at Mt. Sinai. There's probably a reason I am sometimes moved to the point of tears on Shabbat. There is a profound difference between looking at a painting and what the artist felt while creating it. While I believe there are endless meanings to life, I believe one of the meanings is trying to transcend ourselves to look at a painting and feel what the artist felt as they put their all into its creation.

Like a Simcha, I have found that these beautiful moments do not necessarily have to be moments of grandiosity, they can be small. I want my Jewish identity to be more than a description, I want it to be intricately woven into my life so I can feel the beauty and sacredness of the life God blessed me with.

Prayer has helped me reach that endless goal - taking moments of my day to stop and speak to God. As mentioned in previous posts, I have found that blessings before I eat and consciousness of dietary restrictions have been more rewarding than difficult. When people ask me why eating pork is a Jewish dietary restriction, I don't have the type of answer they're looking for. I don't think it's because pigs are dirty, God made all things and saw them to be good, and it's certainly not because bacon tastes bad, because it's actually delicious. I don't think eating pork is going to damn me, I think it's a Jewish way of giving me the choice to make everyday life holy. A chance for me to find God while I stand in a Five Guys and choose to not get a double bacon cheeseburger. I find that following a more kosher diet is one of many beautiful representations of free will because it makes an everyday task deliberate and genuine through the ability of choice.

But, shockingly, there is more to life than eating. There are our words, our allocation of time, our careers, our relationships, and so forth. I've been trying to make those parts of my day just as profound as striking a match on Shabbat.

Again, prayer has become a powerful force in my life. When I wake up in the morning, I push the grudge of waking up early for work out of my mind and instead cover my eyes and recite the Shema. It has acted as a kick-starter to my day because, despite the infinite variables of life, I was given another day of life. It is no different than a friend giving me a gift. That friend took the time in their life to think of me and get something they thought I would enjoy and so I thank them. Through Judaism, I have found that any gift is actually multiple gifts - the gift of the object itself, the gift of thought, and the gift of sharing life with another by taking a part of our life and spending it thinking of another. The absolute bare minimum we can do in return is to thank them for those beautiful gifts. Despite the cliché, there is so much truth to the saying that it is the thought that counts.

What is ironic is that time is relentlessly endless, yet our time is finite. What we choose to do in our time is the conscious decision of how we allocate our time. Time, being precious, is our chance to invite God to spend it with us. My solitary Sundays are not just a chance for me to unplug and recharge, but it is also the deliberate decision to spend a day of my week with God. My friends are aware that my Sundays are generally off-limits, with the exception of my sister's birthday a few weeks ago that fell on a Sunday. But not off-limits in the sense that my door is shut and locked, but off-limits in the sense of not dedicating my time to running errands or dedicating my time to someone other than God. My friends are always welcome to join me in my apartment as long as they are aware of how I spend my Sundays. I've had friends come over on a Sunday because they need to study for a test, or they were painting something, or sometimes just wanted to be around someone while they scroll through their phone or play a video game while I sit at my table reading and/or writing.

Careers can be a tricky aspect of our life to make holy. It is of course a way to pay the bills, but a career cannot be fulfilling if it is just a chore. Working in human resources, at any company, is a completely thankless job. One of the first things you learn in HR is that you're not going to make many friends outside of the HR team. I understand when people get tense when they hear, "HR needs to speak with you." I still get tense when my boss says it to me even though he's the nicest guy ever. But I do love HR, I do not see myself leaving that department. However, it is thankless in the sense that people go to HR for one of two reasons - they're forced to or they have exhausted all other options.

Yes, a very large part of HR is enforcing policies. A good HR department is formed for the interest of the employees, if it's not, then I'd suggest moving companies. But HR as a whole is one decision - am I only going to enforce policy or am I going to help the employee? Am I going to say, "Sorry, you missed the deadline to enroll in benefits, try again next year," or am I going to say, "You missed the initial deadline to enroll in benefits, but let's see what we can do." The choices made in HR don't affect a website or marketing plan, it affects the employee's well-being.

I used to very much be the HR person that only strictly enforced policy, and I still have to, but, surprisingly, Judaism has influenced my work approach and I think it's because I let Judaism into my everyday life. It has taken a few months, but what I have been trying to do is create a safe space for employees. I want them to feel comfortable coming to me for help and I want to give all parties a fair chance when I have to do investigations. HR at Amazon has a really thoughtful motto - assume positive intent. As in, don't assume the worst in people, help them until you cannot. When I read that with my Jewish lenses on, it sounds pretty darn Jewish to me.

Bear with me, but this choice I make at work is actually quite Jewish in nature. HR is very thankless, but am I only going to do my job and help employees because I know I will get a thank you? In other words, am I only going to help employees if I get something in return? Judaism has made me realize that if I strictly live an, "if A then B," life, then I am not embracing life. I don't want to only do good when it benefits me, I want to do good because I am intuitively compelled to do so. I want to be a good person simply for the sake of being a good person, not because I'm forced to.

What makes us human is free will, our ability to make a choice, but what makes us divine is what we do with free will. 

But there are so, so many more ways that I have made my body a vessel for Jewish light. Even embarrassingly silly things. I wash my hands before I touch Jewish texts, I dress nicer on Fridays to welcome the Sabbath bride, I even clip my nails before Havdalah so I can remove the work I did with my hands last week and start new this week. There are even moments when I am walking down the hallway to my apartment after work and I see this strong beam of light stretching underneath my door, eager to pull me in. My apartment faces where the sun sets and that beam of light doesn't appear under my neighbor's door. Sometimes I think that that beam of light never appeared under my door until I started seeing light the Jewish way.

I wish there was another way to verbalize this, but the number of times Judaism has filled me with intense emotion to the point of joyful tears are countless. The number of times I have let the Havdalah candles burn a little longer, inhaled the aroma of challah a little more deeply, visualized prayers a little more vividly, read into the words rather than only reading the words a little more consistently, celebrating holidays a little more deliberately. The Jewish emotions that fill me and overflow as tears in my eyes are so indescribably beautiful that it feels more like a sixth sense than a thought.

I don't think I chose a Jewish life, I think I chose to water the Jewish seed within myself and am letting it flourish.