What Do We Do with Someone We Have Nothing to Boast About?
What Do We Do with Someone We Have Nothing to Boast About?
What Do We Do with Someone We Have Nothing to Boast About?
It is very easy to be proud of a child who excels. It is pleasant to tell people about the son accepted to a prestigious position, the daughter who graduated with honors, the student who succeeded, the employee who produces results. It is much harder to speak with the same enthusiasm about someone whose life does not provide us with a success story. The child still searching for a path, the sibling who did not “make it,” the student always at the bottom of the class, the employee who is not a star, the person in the community who is neither a Torah scholar, a major donor, nor someone of special status. What do we do with a person we have nothing to boast about, but who is still ours?
The four species place this question before us very sharply. The sages expound: the etrog, which has taste and fragrance, symbolizes one who has Torah and good deeds; the lulav, taste without fragrance, one who has Torah but not good deeds; the myrtle, fragrance without taste, one who has good deeds but not Torah; and the willow, which has neither taste nor fragrance, symbolizes one who has neither Torah nor good deeds (Vayikra Rabbah 30:12).
Then the Midrash asks a question we must not skip: “And what does the Holy One, blessed be He, do with them?”
That is exactly the question.
What do we do with the willow?
If the goal is to create the highest-quality bundle, the apparent answer is simple. Remove it. It adds no taste, no fragrance, and does not improve the data. But the Midrash's answer is astonishing: “It is impossible to destroy them. Rather, the Holy One, blessed be He, says: Let them all be bound together in one bundle, and these will atone for those” (Vayikra Rabbah 30:12).
It does not say that the willow may enter after proving itself. It does not say that it must pass a trial period. It does not say we should wait until taste or fragrance appears. It enters the bundle now.
But the Midrash says something deeper still: “and these will atone for those.”
In other words, it is not only the weak who need the strong.
The strong also need the weak.
That is an entirely different conception.
We are accustomed to thinking about society vertically: the one who has more gives to the one who has less. The wise teach those who do not know, the wealthy help the poor, the strong carry the weak. But here the sages say something else. Within the bundle there is mutual dependence. The etrog does not stand above the willow and graciously permit it to join. The etrog too needs the bundle. It too is not complete alone.
The sages state a related principle: “No person can touch what is prepared for another, even by the breadth of a hair” (Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 38b). Every person has a place that does not need to be taken from someone else in order to exist.
Yet we have built a world that measures people constantly.
Grades at school. Salary at work. Number of clients in a business. Number of views online. Degrees, prizes, roles, output. Measurement has great importance. Without measurement it is difficult to manage systems. But when a system of measurement shifts from the question “How much did the person manage to do?” to the question “How much is the person worth?” something very dangerous happens.
Because output can be measured.
A person's worth cannot.
Psychology uses the term contingent self-worth. Jennifer Crocker and other researchers have studied the way people base their sense of self-worth on particular domains such as achievement, approval from others, appearance, or success. When self-worth becomes dependent on outcomes, success is no longer merely success and failure is no longer merely failure. Every event becomes a referendum on the question: am I worth anything?
This sometimes begins long before a person reaches the workplace.
A child comes home with a test score of 95. The parents say, “You're a champion.” Next time the score is 72. The parent may say nothing negative, but the face changes. The child quickly detects the system. The child does not learn only that studying is worthwhile. The child may learn something else: when I succeed, I am a version of myself that is easier to love.
Years later, the child no longer needs a parent to administer the test. The person does it internally.
I received a promotion, so I am worth something.
The business succeeded, so I am worth something.
I was invited to speak, so I am worth something.
Someone else succeeded more, and something inside me shakes.
Achievements that were supposed to bring joy begin to hold the person hostage.
The Torah presents a different picture when describing the camp of Israel in the wilderness. Every tribe had a place, a banner, and a role, yet all camped around the Tabernacle: “The children of Israel shall camp, each by his banner, according to the signs of their fathers' houses; at a distance around the Tent of Meeting they shall camp” (Numbers 2:2). They are not identical, and their roles are not identical, but the shared center does not belong to the most successful tribe. Everyone is arranged around something greater than themselves.
At the giving of the Torah it says: “Israel encamped there opposite the mountain” (Exodus 19:2). Rashi, following the Mekhilta, comments: “as one person with one heart” (Rashi, Exodus 19:2). This does not mean that everyone became equal in spiritual level. The people remained composed of very different individuals. Yet at the moment of receiving the Torah, belonging to the covenant was not granted only to the outstanding.
Before entering the covenant, Moses says: “You are standing today, all of you, before the Lord your God: your heads, your tribes, your elders, your officers, every man of Israel; your children, your wives, and the stranger within your camp, from the hewer of your wood to the drawer of your water” (Deuteronomy 29:9-10). The Torah goes out of its way to list the extremes. From the leaders of the people to the hewer of wood and drawer of water.
Why?
Because one can say “everyone” and still think mainly about the important people.
So the Torah spells it out.
Even someone whose name appears nowhere is inside the covenant.
This is not a claim that every person is suited for every role. Certainly not. We do not appoint someone to run a hospital because “everyone is equal,” nor appoint a judge because measuring qualifications is forbidden. Roles require ability, responsibility, and achievement. Equality of human worth is not equality of skill.
That is precisely the distinction we sometimes lose.
One can tell a child, “You did not study enough for this test,” without saying, “You are a disappointment.”
One can tell an employee, “This result is not satisfactory,” without making the employee feel personally disposable.
One can tell a person, “Your behavior is unacceptable,” without erasing the person together with the behavior.
One can set boundaries and still leave belonging intact.
This distinction is especially critical in a family. Some families unintentionally develop a “family etrog,” the child who succeeds, brings honor, and is spoken about proudly. Beside that child, a “family willow” can grow, the child who is always compared, always worried about, and whose current activities no one wants to ask too much about at family meals.
Sometimes that child knows exactly what role has been assigned in the family even if no one has ever said it aloud.
The child is the problem.
What happens when a person lives for twenty years inside such a role?
Research on labeling and interpersonal expectations suggests that the way others perceive and define a person can influence both behavior and self-perception. Not every label becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a person is not imprisoned by the expectations of the surroundings. But when a child repeatedly hears that he is “lazy,” “problematic,” “not serious,” or “the one who always gets into trouble,” an identity can begin to form around that description.
Here the Midrash about the willow becomes much more demanding.
The Holy One, blessed be He, does not say: pretend there is no difference between an etrog and a willow.
There is a difference.
The Midrash itself says so.
But after defining the difference in the sharpest possible terms, it says: “It is impossible to destroy them.”
There are things that can be discarded when they stop working.
A broken device is replaced.
A failed program is closed.
A product that does not sell is discontinued.
But a person is not a product.
A family is not a factory.
A community is not a list of high achievers.
And a society is tested not only by how high its strongest members rise, but also by what happens inside it to a person who, in this period, has no achievement to display.
There is another layer here.
We tend to think that the “willow” is always someone else.
But life is long.
A person can be an etrog at forty and a willow at eighty-five.
A senior executive can retire and discover that within a month the phone hardly rings.
A person who was the center of the family can grow old and need someone to drive him to the doctor.
A Torah scholar can reach a stage when memory is no longer what it was.
A wealthy person can lose money.
A person who was beautiful, strong, and sought after can discover that the body changes.
If we build a world in which a person's worth is determined by what that person provides, we have built a world that, sooner or later, almost all of us will be afraid to live in.
Perhaps this is why the Midrash does not merely say, “Let them all be bound together in one bundle,” but adds the verse, “He founded His bundle upon the earth” (Amos 9:6), explaining that when Israel becomes one bundle, as it were, the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, is exalted (Vayikra Rabbah 30:12). The bundle is not social decoration. It says something about how we understand a human being.
The Holy One, blessed be He, does not ask only what taste you have and what fragrance you have.
He also asks whether you are part of the bundle.
Perhaps this question should be brought home.
Not: who in the family succeeds?
But: who in the family feels that success is required in order to belong?
Not: who in the community contributes?
But: who fears that if one day there is nothing to contribute, no one will look for them anymore?
Not: which child brings us satisfaction?
But: does the child who currently brings us mainly worry still know, beyond all doubt, that the chair at the table is not being tested?
The four species do not teach us that there is no difference between people. They teach something much deeper: achievements can be measured without using them to measure the right to belong.
And here is the truly difficult test.
Remove the etrog from the bundle, and it is missing.
Remove the lulav, and it is missing.
Remove the myrtle, and it is missing.
But if you remove specifically the willow, it is no longer the same mitzvah.
Perhaps because the great question of a society is not only how many etrogim it manages to grow.
The question is whether its willows still have a place inside the hand.