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Let Us Treasure Our Mona Lisas
In her Book of Useless Information, Barbara Cartland informs us that when the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in Paris in 1911 and thereby went missing for two years, more people went to stare at the blank space in the museum than had gone to look at the masterpiece in the twelve previous years. Far from being “useless,” this intriguing bit of information tells us something important about human nature. It points to our all-too-human tendency to fail to take adequate note of precious things while we have them. But let one of them be taken from us, and we become painfully aware of the “blank space” in our lives, and our attention is sharply focused on that “blank space.” The walls of our lives are crowded with Mona Lisas, but we are unmindful of them. Countless blessings attend us daily, and we are so insensitive to them. The more often and the more regularly we receive any blessing, the less likely we are to be aware of it. What is constantly granted is easily taken for granted. “I have often thought,” Helen Keller wrote, “that it would be a blessing if each human being were stricken blind and deaf for a few days at some time during their adult life. Darkness would make one more appreciative of sight; silence would teach one the joys of sound.” Too often it takes a serious threat to our blessings to make us aware of them. It was reported that a mother was taking her young son to Salt Lake City on a melancholy mission. The boy had lost the sight of one eye several years before, and in the intervening years doctors had tried valiantly to save the remaining eye. Now they had come to the reluctant conclusion that the eye could not be saved. Before the darkness set in, his mother wanted the boy to have a fond, lingering look at the majestic mountains of Utah so that he could take that splendid image with him into the sightless future. Can we read such a story without becoming acutely aware of the myriad Mona Lisas that constantly beckon to us and that we persistently overlook? The words that Frances Gunther wrote in her Afterword to Death Be Not Proud, after the death of her teenage son to brain cancer, are filled with poignant wisdom: All the wonderful things in life are so simple that one is not aware of their wonder until they are beyond tough. Never have I felt the wonder and beauty and joy of life so keenly as now in my grief that Johnny is not here to enjoy them. Today when I see parents impatient or tired or bored with their children, I wish I could say to them, “But they are alive, think of the wonder of that! They may be a care and a burden, but think, they are alive! You can touch them--what a miracle!” All the parents who have lost a child will feel what I mean. Others, luckily, cannot. But I hope they will embrace them with a little added rapture and a keener awareness of joy. Too many of us look upon prayer exclusively as an effort to obtain blessings we do not have and would like to possess. This, however, represents a rather small fraction of Jewish prayer. Rather, one main function of Jewish prayer is to make us gratefully aware of the blessings we already possess and too frequently fail to notice. The Sukkot holy day period, too, teaches this lesson of appreciation and gratefulness for the Mona Lisas of our lives that we often do not notice. By removing ourselves from our homes even for basic functions like eating, we become more attuned to the effort that is involved in building and maintaining a home, the struggle to produce food and for us to prepare it. By taking us out of the comfort zone of our routines, we become more appreciative and grateful of all of our lives--and more deeply joyful in our lives. As we wave the lulav and etrog in our sukkot this holy day, let us have an awareness that they are pointing to all of the “little things” in the sukkah which represent all the substance that inhabits our quotidian existence. Let us treasure our Mona Lisas while we may. Ḥag Samei-aḥ! A joyful Sukkot holy day period–and beyond! Rabbi J.B. Sacks |
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