Rabbi Irwin Wiener, D.D.
On the desk in the White House Oval Office, during the presidency of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was a bronze plaque affixed to a wooden surface that read: “O God thy sea is so great and my boat so small.” It reminded him of the awesome responsibilities of being President of the United States.
To me it signifies the importance we should place on accomplishing impossible tasks, such as the constant repair needed in the tear of human experiences.
We find death and misery everywhere. There is hate and destruction that consumes us. These constitute the eternal evils that sometimes make us much lower than angels. So low, in fact, that we feel as though we have sunk into the abyss, the emptiness and vastness of an endless cycle of despair.
And sometimes we have such noble ambitions: to make right all the wrongs, to put aside petty antagonisms and indifference. But to do this we sometimes need to make deals with unscrupulous people and ideas. In our zeal to correct the injustice and inhumanity, we look the other way and believe the ends justify the means.
Each of us is part of an experiment that began when life was breathed into our nostrils and a soul was placed in our keeping. Each of us is responsible, in part, for the whole Universe: responsible for hunger and disease and desolation; responsible for alienation and wars. And we are especially responsible for our conduct with one another, because it ultimately leads to all these horrible and despicable things.
We look around and think how great the sea is and how small our boat is. Can we ever row to happiness? Can we ever realize the dreams of the generations: to love each other, to ensure justice for all, to be merciful in our dealings with our neighbors, to understand that caring is true benevolence?
Many of us have lived several lives. We have witnessed death and rebirth. Our faith has been challenged. We have laughed too few times and cried too many. We try to make sense of family. We try to understand our place in the scheme of things. The boat may be small in an endless sea, but it should encourage us to keep rowing until we can all see land.
We are blessed with many opportunities into new chapters in the time allotted to us. We can live life as we would have wanted to if we had the chance to do it over again. We must love more intensely those we hold dear.
If we can touch someone with sincerity and honesty, we certainly will feel richer for it. If we endeavor to help someone, there is an approving nod from those who preceded us. And when our time is done and we are missed, then the impact we had will reflect our thoughts and aspirations.
Whether it be peace throughout the world, the elimination of hunger, the defeat of dreaded diseases such as cancer, the setting aside of religious prejudice and killing in the name of God, or all these things, we will be able to see land, not from a distance, but right in front of us.
Then perhaps we will fully understand the answer to the age-old question: Why is there so much suffering, and why hasn’t God sent someone to make sense of it all? The answer is within our reach, because the answer, quite simply, is that God did send someone. God sent us!