On one of my first trips to New York City I participated in
a tour of the Lower East Side. It was
quite amazing to see where the Jewish community had originally settled here and
to visit the tenement blocks and the buildings which made up their homes.
For me, what struck me most, was the fact that they lived in
such difficult conditions, in such trying and hard times, and yet, through
this, they had struggled and overcome the challenges placed before them to
establish a community. This was the generation that built the institutions, and laid
the foundations, for their children and future generations of the Jewish
community and we are the lucky heirs to their building.
In this week’s Torah portion, as Moses continues to talk to
the people about what will happen when they enter the land of Israel, Moses
warns them, when you have eaten your fill and built fine houses to live in and
you have accumulated much wealth, beware, lest then that you forget God. In this way, Moses recognized that when we become
comfortable, when we become affluent, when we no longer have to struggle, it’s
easy to forget where we have come from. It’s easy to forget our past and to forget those people who put in so
much so that we would be able to live in the way that we do.
In the Torah, Moses was talking about God and the way that
God had led our ancestors out of slavery in Egypt through the wilderness to the
Promised Land. And for us, we might wonder
about whether we forget God but we might also wonder whether we forget those
previous generations who sacrificed so much.
And as we remember where we came from, and remember our
community’s history, we might wonder – what is our obligation? What can we learn from those that went before
us? How have we laid foundations for the
future? Where have we built up
communities?
In many ways we are the lucky generation who live in the
fine houses and are able to eat our fill and we must always remember those that
came before us and we must always be conscious that we have a responsibility not just to their memory, but
to the future generations who will come after us.
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