Free Yourself to Find Yourself and Go!

My seventy-five-year-old client comes to see with swollen legs. These legs have walked miles and miles. They’ve stood, and they’ve stood. They’re tired and swollen. She went through one trial after another. And now she’s tired and she doesn’t want to walk any more, she doesn’t want to stand anyone. She just wants to lie down.

She’s a widow and she continues to complain about her deceased husband. Her stories of her childhood are filled with bitter tears. The mistakes her mother made! In an hour’s massage I hear millions of them. Life was not easy for her. Life is not easy for her. She comes weekly with the same complaints and weekly with a new, but repeated story.

***

A different woman comes with an aching back. She’s only forty-one, but walks with an oldness that is so, so heavy. Bli ein hara, she’s a stay-at-home mother of twelve children. I ask her if she’s able to rest in the mornings. She tells me that she spends her mornings crying in bed. Crying in bed? “Why?” I ask her with worry. Why? Because she spends her mornings mourning the kind of relationship, a closeness, with her mother that she never had. A painful cycle repeats itself and she just can’t go forward.

***

I’m sleep deprived, overwhelmed and irritable. I’m not behaving the way I want to or should behave. There’s a lot of situational realities that I could blame my short temper and impatience on. I would love to look for justifications and excuses. But this morning as I pray and the tears stream down my eyes of pleading to Hashem to help me, it hits me. If I don’t take responsibility for myself, for my actions, what will be of me? I’m going to fall over and over again. Same patterns, same excuses.

I must go to the supermarket, but I don’t go. I should be working, but I don’t work. There’s a pile of laundry. One hour. I take one hour and I don’t do anything. I close my eyes and I rest. An hour of rest; it’s a gift from G-d. I’m a different person.

I think. “Who am I and where am I going? Elana, do what you need to stay true to who you are. Find yourself by freeing yourself. Free yourself from thinking, “This is who I am. There’s nothing to do about it. This is the situation, there’s nothing to do about. I can’t go forward because there’s no way to change what was past. Elana, free yourself from these falsities. Go to yourself, go into yourself, go forward with yourself. Go!”

***

Hashem said to Abram, “Go to (for) yourself from your land, from your relatives, and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation; I will bless you, and make your name great, and you shall be blessed (Bereishit 12:1-2).”

Go to (for) yourself: For your pleasure and for your benefit-Rashi

Avraham Avinu’s first trial, his first test? To distance himself from rationalizations, from excuses, from whatever it is that was and that could continue to hold him back. It was a most difficult test, to force Avraham to choose between G-d’s will (which is only to benefit us) and between his nature or understanding of reality. This is a true trial, a test.

Can I do it? Can I change? After so many years can I let go and move on? Do you know how old Avraham and Sarah were when G-d commanded them to go?

They were in their seventies…

Free yourself to find yourself. Free yourself by taking responsibility of yourself. An arduous task, but because we have Avraham and Sarah’s precedent, and with a lot of prayer and help from Above, it’s obtainable.

May we merit to find our true selves, to be able to go from whatever holds us back so that we can forward with goodness, blessing, with benefit to benefit…

Shabbat Shalom,

Elana