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A few months ago, a new friend of mine and I parlayed our love of children’s and young adult literature into a book club.  With a few like minded people we know, spanning East Coast to West, we call ourselves “Retro Readers.”  Once a month over zoom, we talk about the books that played such an important in making us who we have become.  Next on our list is a treasure by Natalie Babbit called Tuck Everlasting.

It's a story about a family who unwittingly drinks from a spring of water in the woods that grants them eternal life… and about what happens when a young girl named Winnie Foster stumbles across their secret.  One by one, each member of the Tuck family has a chance to explain to her how they feel about their unique fate.  When it’s Mae, the mother’s turn, she says the following:

“Sometimes I forget about what’s happened to us, forget it altogether.  And then sometimes it comes over me and I wonder why it happened to us.  We’re plain as salt, us Tucks.  We don’t deserve no blessings—if it is a blessing.  And, likewise, I don’t see how we deserve to be cursed, if it’s a curse.  Still—there’s no use trying to figure out why things fall the way they do.  Things just are, and fussing don’t bring changes.”

With these words, it seems that Mae has stumbled across another discovery.  Not of a spring of water this time, but of an essential facet of the human condition.  In our encounters with both joy and tragedy, we often wonder what we could have done to deserve what’s happened.  How intense that link is.  Time has stopped for this family—whether a blessing or a curse—and Mae wonders on behalf of all of them: “Why us?” 

Their story may be fictional, but this response is incredibly true to life.  It’s quite possible that the only answer to the question “why us?” is that there is no why.  But entertaining the notion of randomness leaves most of us so restless and frightened that we’re still apt to search for or invent reasons.  As Mae Tuck put it, we try to figure out why things fall the way we do.  And we Jews, in looking for answers, do tend to fuss!

And Torah, time and time again, presents us with a framework for our efforts that is at once comforting and maddening.  The second of our two portions this week opens with God setting immutable conditions before the Israelites: “Im b’chukotai telechu v’et mitzvotai tishmoru va’asitem otam…”  If you follow my laws and faithfully observe my commandments, and do them, you will have rain and harvests and bounty.  Your vintage will overflow.  You will have security and plenty.  You will triumph over your enemies, and will feel bound to God for all time.

And what if the Israelites fail to obey the commandments?  Just the opposite of all those things will prevail.

Comforting, if only it worked that way.  And infuriating, because we know it doesn’t.  Everywhere we look are outright examples of just how profoundly life doesn’t play out according to the theology of reward and punishment.  For most of us, we need look no further than our own lives, the lives of our loved ones and our wider communities, to understand that we suffer not because we have sinned or even because we have strayed… but because suffering is part of what it is to be human.

When Mae’s husband, simply called Tuck, has his turn to explain their predicament of eternal life to Winnie, this is what he says: “Dying’s part of the wheel, right there next to being born.  You can’t pick out the pieces you like and leave the rest.  Being part of the whole thing, that’s the blessing.  But it’s passing us by, us Tucks.  Living’s heavy work, but off to one side, the way we are, it’s useless too… I want to grow again, and change.  You can’t have living without dying.  (So) if that means I got to move on at the end of it, then I want that, too.”

These words of his as well as those of Bechukotai tug at some of the biggest questions we have.  Their implications are worth grappling with… worth a little fuss!  This may or may not bring changes, but it is a process that almost always allows us to discover new waters… not of eternal life, but of more forgiving ways of seeing ourselves, and our lives.

Join us for services at 7:00 tonight, where we will celebrate a restful and restorative Shabbat together.

Rabbi Gutterman