JBD – Jews of the Melbourne CBD is now on LinkedIn. Follow us here.

Mincha continues at 1.00pm at A-P GF/459 Collins, using the WhatsApp group to confirm a minyan each day.
Weekly sushi & shiur continues on Wed at 1.10pm at A-P GF/459 Collins – and via zoom. Current topic: property set-backs. Details here and on the WhatsApp group.

Thought of the Week with thanks to Rabbi Dovid Gutnick

A significant contributing factor to anxiety and mental fragility is our desire for certainty in an increasingly uncertain and chaotic world. It is well known that there is a primal but damaging human instinct to crave certainty and total control over every aspect of our lives.

We ordinarily read the famous words from this week’s Torah reading, “Do not say in your heart: ‘My strength and the power of my hand have produced this success for me,’” as a warning against arrogance. The successful person looks back and forgets G-d, forgets those who helped along the way, and imagines himself to be the sole author of his achievements.

But perhaps the verse describes a deeper untruth that we are tempted to tell ourselves “in our hearts,” born not so much from arrogance but from fear and anxiety because human beings find uncertainty so difficult to tolerate. We convince ourselves that everything depends upon my strength, my intelligence and my decisions, because if it does, then perhaps everything can be controlled. My success can be secured, my future predicted, and nothing need lie beyond the reach of my hands.

The Torah responds in its very next words:

“Remember Hashem your G-d, for it is He who gives you the power to create abundance.”

Certainty is found not in the strength of your hands but in the mystery of the Divine reality. To be sure we must actively pursue our dreams, strive and take responsibility; yet we must also resist the fiction that our hands control every outcome.

In the preceding verse, Moshe tells the Jewish people to remember the wilderness and the manna. Manna was an education in uncertainty. They could not manufacture it, secure its long-term supply or fully understand it. They received what they needed one day at a time.

Life is in parts terrifyingly uncertain. We are unsure what tomorrow will bring, and such uncertainty is instinctively uncomfortable. The Torah trains us to hold uncertainty more gently and faithfully, recognising that ultimate certainty is G-d’s business.

In these words, Moshe encourages the children of Israel to travel onwards towards the Promised Land despite the uncertainty ahead. We need not know precisely how the story ends in order to write its important next chapter.

Let us learn the wisdom to hold uncertainty faithfully and tenderly. Doing so diminishes the ego. It frees us from the brittle pretence of being all-powerful. It opens us to trust in the Creator of heaven and earth – the only One to whom the uncertain future is already known.