Why wrap a gift?

Dear friends,

Manu, almost four, is the world’s greatest gift receiver. Hannukah was beautiful this year in large part thanks to his joy and gratitude at whatever was in the terribly wrapped gifts he received after candle lighting. This may sound trivial, that a four-year old is happy to receive a gift. It’s not. It’s actually a complex and often difficult experience both for kids and adults.

At our lovely Hannukah celebration last Sunday I read If Not Higher, a story By the great Yiddish writer I.L Peretz. It tells the story of the rabbi of Nemirov who would disappear every morning during the month of Elul, and his congregation speculated that he went up to heaven to plead on their behalf. A visitor to the town, determined to find out where the rabbi is going every morning follows him one morning as he wakes up before dawn, dresses in peasant clothing, cuts down a tree in the forest and chops up the wood, and then knocks on the door of a poor, old widow. Putting on a peasant accent he offers her cheap wood, insists that she can pay him back another time, even scolds her for having little faith in God when she says she will never have money to pay him. He lights her fire to warm her house and leaves.

It’s a simple folk story, which as the good ones can do, left me thinking on it all week. The greatness of the rabbi lies not in the act of tzedakah itself, warming up the woman’s home, but in the way he wraps the act in a costume that allows her to accept it. Like us, she has trouble accepting gifts. She has pride, doubts about her character perhaps, knowledge of others in harsher conditions maybe, which make her prefer to sit in the cold than to accept an act of kindness. The rabbi knows this, and puts in the time and effort to make his gesture appear transactional.

We might place this type of charity on the third highest level of tzedakah according to Maimonedes: Donations when the donor is aware to whom the charity is being given, but the recipient is unaware of the source. But Maimonedes does not have a category that fits this case exactly, since the widow is made to not consider the gift a gift, nor know the true identity of the giver, although she thinks she does.

I recall a line from the High Holidays Piyyut, El Nora Alila that Rabbi Jim and me translated as follows:

Awesome trickster, wild giver
Help us see that we’re forgiven
At last receive what we’ve been given.

We receive a lot from a lot of sources. Mikol Melamday Hiskalti, I have been made wiser by all of my teachers, says the Talmud, pointing to the gifting powers of a far greater pool of people than the one we call teachers, and one might say the category extends beyond human beings, or even beyond gods. Anything can be a gift, but it is often incumbent upon the giver to wrap it properly. Matanah, Hebrew for gift, traces back to Matan Torah, the giving or gifting of the Torah. This rather tricky gift, rejected at first by the masses bowing to the shining gold of the calf, was then rewrapped in a new word – oraita, meaning light, as the Torah is called in Aramaic.

This morning I was brought to a halt by the suggestion that even death could be experienced as a type of gift, if we define it in a particular way: “Death is the force that shows you what you love and urges you to revel in that love while the clock ticks,” wrote BJ Miller, a hospice and palliative medicine physician in the NY Times, in piece called What is Death? Love, gratitude, appreciation of our lives, the doctor suggests, can come wrapped in death. Or perhaps we might say that life is a gift wrapped in death. Maybe that's what Shakespeare meant when in his final play he wrote: We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

Now that the Hanukah gifts have been unwrapped, let us try to accept those we’ve received, figure out the best wrapping for those to whom we want to give, and work on accepting the gifts and the wrappings that are handed our way.

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha