Lech L’cha - finding the one cause that is holding things back
Genesis 12:1 - 17:27 | Isaiah 40:27 - 41:16
Summary: Often a situation is held down by exactly one cause, one blockage. It is a great ift to be able to find it. Plumbers do that. Avraham did too - he discovered that the world was blocked by a lack of chesed.
***
There are certain lessons that can only be learned when one’s plumbing has backed up and the truck is in the driveway and they’re pumping out the septic tank. Suddenly the veil is lifted and you remember that so much of what is happening is taking place underground, and there are systems upon which you depend but you cannot see, and there are things that work until they don’t, and you are so glad that there are people who know how to make them work again.
Even after the septic was pumped, the guy - I think his name was Will - wanted to find the exact place where the main from the house intersected with the pipe that led to the septic tank. He seemed to know almost exactly where it would be, and started digging. Lo and behold, after a few minutes, he found the cover below which that intersection would lie (right under my cucumber patch, incidentally). A few minutes after that, we were both staring at that joint, covered in some sort of beige gritty muck. “Well, there’s your problem!” There it was. “Sand and grease. Make sure not to pour oil down the drain.” (I thought I was careful. I guess I wasn’t.)
For the guy holding the shovel, this was all in a day’s work. He’d done half a dozen of these already since 3:30 that morning, and had one or two more to go before he could wrap it up. For me, despite all efforts to the contrary, it was a sort of out-of-body experience. It was genuinely striking a chord deep inside of me that I was finally able to identify.
Even more mystifying to me than the guy’s ability to find the intersection of this and that pipe was the fact that the problem could be traced to one exact place. The problem had one location, one cause. Just like my car was making a strange noise because the casing of the blah blah was poorly attached and was rattling around. The mechanic found the problem and fixed it and now it doesn’t make any noise. The problem was in one place. For some reason I always find that utterly shocking.
I suppose I am so used to assuming all problems are bigger, dynamic, elusive problems that cannot be located in one exact place or attributed to one exact cause. I would have assumed that septics just back up, and engines just wear down, and people are just complicated, and you keep on keeping on and address the acute needs when they arise and then get back to the regular work until the Holy One decides it’s time for another round. But sometimes you can actually point to the one thing, the one cause.
That, of course, is scary. Once you find it, you can’t blame anything or anyone else. “Well, people just use too much toilet paper!” Maybe. But if we are more careful about sand and grease, that won’t matter. “It’s an old car!” Sure. And if all the casings are properly checked we could get another 150,000 miles out of it. And, closer to home, “Life is hard! Things are stressful!” Yes. And if you make sure to keep your joy up, then you can handle all the difficulties and the stresses without them tearing things apart. Joy, communication, love, discipline, whatever - there are definitely times when there is definitely ONE THING upon which everything else hinges. If we know it, and can focus on it and move the needle, then things will work. If not, I’ll be seeing Will way more often than I want to.
Fortunate are those who find the “one thing” - at least the “one thing” that applies to this period of time - and embrace it with courage.
**
OK. Let’s assume that Will is right. Grease and sand are coagulating and blocking the pipe that connects the main to the septic. Let’s go one step further and pretend that a family member is intentionally pouring grease and sand down the drain in order to muck things up. At this point, I could invite Will to sit with our family and try to figure out what break in communication, what ill will, what power dynamic, what need for love, what cry about injustice is emerging and demanding our family’s attention. It could be that Will’s got what it takes, and he is equally as adept at finding emotional blockages as he is at finding physical ones, but I suspect we will send him on his way and engage someone with a different skillset when addressing our family’s emotional septic tank.
Because who knows where the root of the problem really lies? Is this actually “just” a plumbing issue? Perhaps. More than likely, though, there is a vertical stack of issues, the bottom layer of which happens in plumbing, the top layer of which exists somewhere between here and the Holy One.
About 3800 years ago, when the first great Plumbing Emergency flooded the world, everyone perished except Noah and his family and the animals that accompanied them. In looking to understand what - and where - the problem was, humanity, like Will, thought it was a straight plumbing issue, and that the sky might be falling, so they sought to hold the sky up with a Tower in Babel. The reader knows that something was broken at a higher level, and this breakage caused the flood - “evil had abounded in the land.”
It is onto this broken stage that Avraham enters. Avraham, emergency Plumber of the Soul of the World, where is the blockage here? It will not be enough to find the muck where the main meets the septic tank. We need to know where the muck is that is mucking up the place where the main meets the Will of the Master of the World. This is not a problem that Will the septic guy could solve.
Avraham feels about and discovers that the blockage is in Love. (Or perhaps he embodies Love and that is why he is chosen.) He does not tell us how he knows, but he knows. Love is the One Thing. This, and this only, is where the problem lies. Olam Chesed Yibaneh - the world shall be built upon chesed.