Sing along if you know it!
The bear went over the mountain (3x), And what do you think she saw?
She saw another mountain (3x), And what do you think she did?
She climbed the other mountain (3x), And what do you think she saw?
She saw another mountain (3x), And so on and so on…
A teaching of the Piaseczner Rabbi (Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Warsaw, 1889-1943) summoned up that childhood lyric for me this week. Writing about the need for preparation in the performance of mitzvot, the Piaseczner offers a parable:
“A person climbs a tall mountain. Do we only say that she went up the mountain when she arrives at the peak? (No!) We can say (she went up the mountain) with each and every step she takes. Even when she is only halfway up the mountain, she has already ascended the mountain, above all the people who are (still standing) at ground-level. If the mountain were not so high, she would have already reached the peak. You could say that she has already ascended the mountain, but now she has further to go on a second mountain, which is found above the mountain she has already scaled.” (translation, Rabbi Yael Saidoff)
Just as each step of climbing a mountain is climbing the mountain itself, so too each element of preparation for performing a mitzvah is itself a mitzvah, as long as one focuses one’s energy on that mitzvah at each step along the way. With the ‘right’ awareness, the first step is itself a complete journey, even as it leads to the next step and the next, and so on and so on…Indeed, “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
For the Piaseczner, our Ancestor Isaac is the great exemplar of this kind of spiritual awareness. Isaac, whose adult story is told in Parashat Toldot, journeys along the same path already traveled by his father Abraham. He’s the second batter making his way around the same bases already traversed by the lead off hitter! And Isaac’s son Jacob will undertake some of the same travels in the next generation. All of the matriarchs and patriarchs, and especially Rebekah and Isaac, climb mountains, aware that their ascent – significant and sacred in its own right – is also a lead up to the next ascent and eventually to an ultimate ascent.
Keep climbing!
One holy step at a time.
One of these days, we may actually get ‘there’!
Shabbat Shalom.
