The power of partnership
The following is taken from, "Owning Our World -Lessons From Parshat Ki Tisa"
By Shalvi Waldman
When I was about 11 years old, one night my mother called and asked me to load and turn on the dishwasher. I really didn’t want to, but I did it anyway. After stuffing in all the dirty dishes, I reached for the detergent. It was right next to the regular dishwashing soap. I hesitated only for a moment, then poured the green liquid into that little plastic box, closed the door and pushed the button. I didn’t mean any harm; I was just curious if it would make a difference. I then went upstairs to sleep.
When my mother woke me in the morning, she let me have it, it had taken her two hours of her mopping up. I denied having done anything wrong.
Some months later, we got a thin plastic record in the mail as an ad for a fast-food restaurant chain. I pretended to be one of those “cool” DJs who would make interesting sounds with scratched disks. I had about 10 minutes of fun and succeeded in ruining the needle on the record player. This time my mother got smart; she made me pay for the new needle. It cost $46. That was months of babysitting money.
The difference between the two incidents was that I now owned the results of my behavior.
The lesson that I needed to learn was that of responsibility. As long as my mother “owned” the results of my actions, I didn’t have to. It was only when I was the one who had to deal with the consequences that something shifted. As long as we don’t feel that it is our world and that we personally will be dealing with the results of how we treat it, we will live in the moment, regardless of the long-term effects of our actions.
We see this very clearly from the beginning of time. When Adam and Eve were placed in the garden, they were told to “work it and guard it,” but at that point, they had invested absolutely nothing in their world. Everything that they saw was G‑d’s and not their own. They may not have intended for things to turn out as they did, but if they had personally invested as much in the world as G‑d had, they would have been much more careful about how they treated it.
This dynamic comes up again in the story of the golden calf. If you read the chapters in order, it is really very disturbing. G‑d sends 10 miraculous plagues, the sea splits, enemies are destroyed. Bread falls from the sky, water pours from a rock. They come before Mount Sinai and prepare for the most momentous occasion. One of the basic rules is “no other gods.” Forty days later, Moses comes down the mountain with the most magnificent betrothal rock anyone has ever seen, only to find the “bride” bowing to a golden calf.
We’ve heard the story so many times that we are not disturbed by it anymore, but we should be. Can you imagine? It is as if a couple were on their honeymoon, the groom walks away for a minute, and he returns to find that his bride left him for another man! It just doesn’t make sense.
When G‑d gave us the Torah, He had invested everything in the project. We had invested very little. He had created the world; taken us out of Egypt; turned nature, the work of His hands, upside down—all to bring us to the point of accepting the Torah. We were a bunch of newly freed slaves. We had little to invest and even less to lose. While there were other issues that led up to the calf, much of it was simply the fact that we did not feel that we owned our world.
Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, describes “awakening from above” and “awakening from below.” When spiritual bounty comes into the world from an awakening from below, it can be much more powerful than the gift of an awakening from Above. It has the power of partnership.
This lesson of balance and responsibility is one that applies to all our important relationships. Management theories, parenting skills, marriage improvement techniques—are all based on building a sense of ownership and responsibility.
“In the facades we put on for others we demonstrate our potential; through our children, we reveal our reality”