Do you know my favorite line from a movie? Some might think it’s classic like, “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse,” from the Godfather, or maybe something fitting of my personality like, “There’s no crying in baseball,” from A League of Their Own. Let me tell you that my favorite line from any movie comes from a 2001 masterpiece featuring the voice talents of Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy, Shrek. In the scene, Shrek is explaining the complexity of ogres by describing them as onions, as they have layers. Donkey (voiced by Eddie Murphy) cannot fathom why Shrek would use a stinky vegetable like an onion and begins offering suggestions for sweeter options when he blurts out THE line. “You know what ELSE everybody likes? Parfaits! Have you ever met a person, you say, ‘Let’s get some parfait,’ they say, ‘Hell no, I don’t like no parfait.’? Parfaits are delicious!” Can you argue with that logic? Desserts are delicious and I’ll go as far as to say everyone loves dessert!
It’s kind of strange to say that we love dessert in general. How is it possible to “love” an inanimate object that is going to find its way from your plate into your mouth? And not to be too detailed or gross, but part of nature a few days later. It’s not uncommon to treat everyday objects as though they have feelings and emotions. How many of us have had a name for our car and when something happens to that car, speak to it as though it will soothe that car? It’s similar to the tradition of covering the challah on Shabbat. We cover the challah so it does not become embarrassed while Kiddush is being recited. The challah is embarrassed? Does anyone else find this odd? Did some bubbe from the old country make up this tale to explain the order of the blessings?
Coincidentally, there is a similar teaching about this week’s Parsha, Va’eira, where Moses cannot bring himself to “hit” the water of the Nile to perform the first plague. Instead, the teaching says he passed the role over to his brother Aaron. Our sages say Moses couldn’t go through with this because the water played a role in saving him as a baby. Just like the food and car I mentioned before, we know water does not have feelings. Rabbi Menachem Lehrfield of the Jewish Outreach Initiative points out that “It’s not about the water, it’s about Moses.” “For Moses to truly feel a sense of gratitude with people, he had to go so far as to feel that gratitude toward water. He had to have that sensitivity to an inanimate object knowing that by going that far it would affect the way he related to other people.” If I am trying to become a more sensitive person, if I go out of my way to make sure I don’t hurt the feelings of bread, how much more so am I going to be careful to make sure I don’t hurt the feelings of another person?
As you walk into our building in the coming weeks, I encourage you to partake in a project started by our school. We asked students to discuss and create “tags” of gratitude that are being hung on a “gratitude sculpture” that is displayed just outside the school office. We should all take the time to process all of the wonderful things we have to be grateful for.
Shabbat Shalom,
Danny Glassman