“It’s on you.” My son, Yonah, and I were talking about what to do with some of his earnings. “Give tzedakah,” I told him, “five times chai, 5X18.” I said.
“That sounds like a commandment, Abba.” He likes to remind me that I’m not God.
“You heard it as a command, with no choice, because sometimes the best lessons come as orders from our tradition. Tzedakah is a requirement for both me and you.” I explained. “Mitzvot are indeed commandments, but they also require our choosing to do them and following through. God’s not and I’m not going to find the links to the tzedakah addresses you want to support.”
The very first Jew, Avraham, was told by God to “Get up and go to a land I will show you.” God added a small word to the commandment, the verb “Lekh – go!” The small word God added was L’kha, “‘It is on you.” Thus our parsha is called Lekh L’kha.
God was telling our ancestors and us, to this day, that fulfilling mitzvot is a choice. It’s “on us.” When we embrace our mission and do mitzvot according to our own free will we make our covenant with God come alive again and again.
I’ll be checking back in with my son about where he gave his tzedakah and exploring more about how it feels to be told what to do and asked to embrace it wholeheartedly as a Jew.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Bolton