Today I am an (old) man.

This is the D'var Torah I delivered at my (and Brian Weiss's) bar mitzvah service on 25 Elul 5770 (Sept 4, 2010):

Vayelech

I would like to thank all of you for being here today. Now you know the lengths we will go to get a minyan on Labor Day weekend.

Brian has just told us about the importance of choosing life; I am going to talk about death. Whether we like it or not, that is what the second parashah, Vayelech, is about.

These Torah portions, which unfold as Moses looks at the end of his life, coincide with my Hebrew birthday, and are portions that have special meaning at this point in my life. Most bar and bat mitzvahs are 13 years old and are looking ahead at a story that has yet to be told. I am 50, soon to be 51, so I am still a lot closer to my teens than I am to Moses’ 120 years, but I can understand where he is coming from on the last day of his life.

Moses did more than any of us can ever expect to accomplish, but the things that occupied his thoughts on his last day were the things left undone. He led a nation out of slavery, through the desert, and to the threshold of a new home and a new way of living. He spent more than 40 years preparing everyone for that moment, but now it is time to die and let a new leader finish the job.

Like many of us, his thoughts are not on the things he has done, but on those things he will never do, and a concern that what he had to offer was not really wanted, and would not be remembered. At every opportunity, the people have abandoned his teachings and yearned for the slavery he had led them out of. He knew that even in our own land, this would happen again and again.

When we hear the words “choose life,” most of us think of a life that is warm, predictable, and supportive. We have an idealized image of our families as the people who will never let us down, no matter what, and we feel let down and even abandoned when they fail to live up to that ideal. We may wonder what is wrong with them, or perhaps what is wrong with us.

As far as my own life, I have never married, and I have no children. My legal career, if you can call it that, seems to have ended before it ever began. I have no home that I can call my own. I have not seen my mother or any of my brothers in more than four years. I cannot afford to visit them, and none of them have come to visit me. I have two college degrees that I worked long and hard for, but with each passing year, it becomes less likely that I will ever be able to use them.

Like Moses, and like many of us, I look back at my life and wonder what impact, if any, my life has had, and like the children of Israel, it is tempting for me to long for the days when my responsibilities were fewer and little was expected. After all, in the ways that society measures a life well lived, mine does not measure up, and like our ancestors, I can find myself longing for Mitzraim: Egypt, the narrow place, the land of our enslavement.

So what does it mean to choose life? Are we chasing an ideal that can be seen but never realized, in the same way that Moses could see Canaan, but could never enter it? Is Moses telling us to choose something that is unreachable for most of us, perhaps for all of us? No, because this standard did not come from Moses or from the Torah. It comes from ourselves; it comes from our yetzer ha-ra, that inclination that leads us toward evil.

We measure ourselves against images of happy, healthy families who live in beautiful homes and are always there for each other and where everyone lives happily ever after. In the movies we watch, it’s always the sidekick who dies, never the hero. The hero triumphs and lives on, ready to fight the next battle. We see the hero as us, or more accurately, as who we believe we should be. Then, when our own lives fail to live up to those expectations, we feel like we have failed, that we aren’t living up to a standard that can be reached by anyone who is willing to work hard enough, and since we couldn’t reach it, there must be something wrong with us, either a lack of ability or a lack of ambition, or perhaps there is something wrong with the world.

The Torah paints a different picture. We look at Moses’ family and see an image that is much closer to our own reality. Aharon, Moses’ own brother, made the golden calf. His sister Miriam spoke badly about him. Moses’ ultimate goal of leading the people into Canaan was never realized, and completely due to his own bad judgment. That job passed to a younger man, and Moses went off to die alone.

If we compare his life to the standards that we place on ourselves, even Moses cannot live up to them. Our logical conclusion would be that despite all of his dedication and hard work, Moses was abandoned by his people, his family, and even his G-d, and there must have been a reason for that. By that measure, he was not much of a hero and his life story did not have a happy ending. But, if we take the Torah for what it is, not what we impose upon it, and if we choose life for what it is, and not what we impose upon it, then we can understand in our kishkes, in our gut, what it truly means to choose life.

When we choose life, we choose something that is hard, complicated, even cruel. There is so much of it that looks completely meaningless, both in the world and in our personal lives. But this is only what we see at the surface. Like Torah itself, life is complicated, with many layers and facets.

When we are commanded to choose life, it is not a command to chase the idealized version that society presents to us. That ideal certainly has its rewards, but it is not what Moses presented to us, it was certainly not the way he lived, and it may well be one of the false teachings that Moses warned us about.

On the last day of Sukkot, we will read the closing words of the Torah. As we do every year, we will read that there has never been a prophet like Moses, nor will there ever be again. As we read those words, we need to remember that the Torah also teaches us that Moses had disappointments in his life that were very much like our own. He lacked faith in himself. Others lacked faith in him. His own people didn’t seem to understand him at all. If anything, they were afraid of him.

Using the standards we try to impose on our own lives, we would note that Moses was a loner, the product of a dysfunctional family, was known to run from his problems, and failed at the ultimate goal of his life due to his own shortcomings. But by the standards the Torah provides, we see his life as one that was filled with meaning, and that no one will ever succeed at the level that he did.

So what makes Moses so different from the rest of us? Most important, he remembered the people’s goodness much longer than he remembered the parts that were not so good. As the Torah teaches us, G-d remembers our sins for no more than three generations, and remembers our goodness for at least a thousand generations. This was the standard that Moses applied to his own life. It is a standard that we should apply, and not just to others, but to ourselves.

We all remember Moses’ warning to the people that we will forget his teachings and suffer terrible consequences, but all too often, we forget his assurance that we will return, and the great certainty that he placed in that return. Torah confronts us with our weaknesses, but remembers our strengths, because both qualities are part of creation, and both have their place in a meaningful life.

As we move into the Days of Awe, may we remember that the commandment to be holy is not a commandment to conform to an ideal that we have placed upon ourselves. It is a commandment to be true to ourselves, to our community and to the Infinite.

Shabbat Shalom.