Scheduling Conflicts

This post was originally published on http://thoughts4mysoul.wordpress.com/
Balancing the world of Torah and the world of work can, for many people, be a delicate dance.  Today I’ve gained a renewed perspective on how grateful I must be to work for a Jewish organization and not participate in the dance.  Unfortunately, this understanding, sadly, came at the expense of watching another struggle.

A close friend of mine realized only today that an important two day meeting conflicted with Shavuot. It was an avoidable predicament that left this friend in lurch on how to communicate with the boss.  The conversation had to take place sooner or later, but the boss was hard to reach until late in the evening. The whole day was spent with an anxious sense of doom…

It wasn’t my predicament, but I too worried about the outcome. Would this be a chillul Hashem (desecration of the name, or basically when Jews do something that leaves a bad impression)? Would the Torah be blamed for this, or simply the lack of forethought?

I finally spoke to my friend tonight and, thank God, everything worked out. The boss is put off, but it looks like it will not be considered a permanent strike.

This morning I davened for my friend. I asked God to just make it all go smoothly, to let the boss be in a good mood and that God should not “harden his heart.” Of course I was concerned for my friend and my friend’s future, but the chance of these actions creating a negative view of Jewish life was also on my mind.

While I grew up surrounded, for the most part, by Jews, and I have spent a large portion of my adult life immersed in the Jewish world both socially and professionally, there is a large part of my family that is either not religious or not Jewish. These people do not necessarily comprehend the perspective of my community on absolute truth and absolute laws. I can’t drive on Saturday ever – period, end of story. (When I was overdue with my son, the nurse said that the hospital might call me to induce me on Saturday. When I told her I couldn’t answer my phone that day, she asked why I couldn’t make just one exception.)

Upholding the Torah way of life in a world that does not understand is always challenging. Jewish law often sets Jews apart from the cultures in which they life…and while this may be, practically, to limit social interaction, it is also a constant reminder to our own selves that the world does watch us, does note how we are, does take our solo actions as the actions of the whole.