Getting it Right
     An opera singer had just given a rather lackluster performance.  He was ready to leave the stage in shame, when, suddenly, a man stood up in the back row and started screaming, “Encore!  Encore!”  The singer’s spirits were lifted.  He obliged the request and repeated the aria from the opera.  As soon as he finished, however, the same man in the back row started cheering again, “Encore!  Encore!” so the singer sang the aria again.  When he finished for the second time, the fan again yelled for more, “Encore!  Encore!”  The singer, feeling quite awkward by this time, called out to the man, “My good sir, I am happy that you enjoy my music but how many times do you want me to perform this same piece?”  The man shouts back, “Until you get it right!” 

Staying Put or Moving On
     Insanity has been defined as repeating the same behavior and expecting different results.  On the other hand, there’s that old, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”  How do we know when we need to stay where we are until we get it right and how do we know when to admit that what we’ve been doing isn’t working and that it’s time to move on?
      To phrase this quandary spiritual terms: each one of us was created with a mission.  Our souls were embodied and given an exact number of days and hours to complete the tasks unique to us.  But how do we know when we are getting closer to our mission and how do we know when we are simply stuck in the same place and wasting our time. 
     When we were kids, we used to play a game where one kid was 'It' and leaves the room.  The other kids choose an item in the room that ‘It’ has to locate and when he returns, everyone says “hotter” or “colder” as he gets closer or farther from the item until he finds it.  Now, if only life could be that simple.  Imagine if, as we negotiated through our life, G-d would call out to us, “Hotter!  Colder!”  We meet a new person, apply for a job, consider a geographic relocation, and G-d is shouting, “You’re getting warmer.  Warmer!  Oh, now you’re red hot!” 

Abraham's Move
      This week’s portion begins with G-d’s command to our father, Abraham, to “Go away from your homeland, your father’s house and your birthplace to the land that I will show you.”  (Genesis 12:1)  Abraham was a man on a mission.  Abraham knew when he had to do.  True, it required faith to leave behind all that was familiar without foreknowledge of his destination.  But. on the other hand, he had clear instructions.  G-d told him to get up and go and G-d told him that He would show him where to stop when he got to where he needed to be.  That’s a lot more information than the rest of us will ever have to go when traveling the road of life.  Abraham was a prophet.  He heard the word of G-d.  The rest of us, it seems, are just trying to do our best – going on hunches, taking advice and sometimes just plain guessing.  But do we ever know that our lives are going in the right direction?  Do we even know what the right direction is? 

G-dly Direction for the Rest of Us
      The fifth Rebbe, Rabbi Shalom DovBer of Lubavitch once taught, “From the very moment that God instructed Abraham to leave his homeland and set out on his journey, the cosmic process of refinement began. Divine Sparks lay embedded in the physical world, awaiting their redemption. Saintly individuals, who possess clear vision, can perceive on their own just where the captive sparks they are meant to refine are located and go there on their own.  The rest of us are led by Divine providence to places or situations in which the sparks we are meant to liberate await us.”
      There are those rare, holy men and women who are clear conduits for the expression of G-d’s will.  They are men and women who are completely in tune with the purpose that G-d has for them.  They “see” where their mission lies and seek out the people, places and situations that are consonant with their true calling in life. 
     The rest of us – those who do not see the G-dly sparks or even know where they are to be found – are guided by another system: Divine Providence.  We may not hear G-d’s booming voice or see our destiny laid out before us in a prophetic vision, but we are always being guided, always being subtly pointed in the direction we must go.  We need only keep our eyes open, be sensitive and learn how to take a hint.
      A story is told of the Rebbe’s wife, Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka.  Often, she would get away from her Crowh Heights, Brooklyn neighborhood and be driven to a park in Long Island where she would enjoy the fresh air and quiet.  One day, as her car neared the park, the driver found the regular route was closed and was forced to travel along a parallel street. Suddenly, the sounds of a woman screaming frantically in Russian could be heard. When the driver stopped at the next traffic light, the Rebbetzin asked that he turn the car around and return to where they had heard the woman’s cries.
     They saw a woman, obviously distraught, standing on the curb and weeping while movers carried furniture on to the county marshal's truck.  The Rebbetzin asked her driver to find out what the situation was all about so he got out of the car and approached the marshal who proceeded to explain that the woman had not paid her rent for many months and was being evicted.
     When the driver returned to the car, the Rebbetzin asked him to go back and find out from the marshal how much the woman owed, and if he would accept a personal check.  The family owed approximately $6,700. The marshal said that he had no problem accepting a personal check, as long as he confirmed with the bank that the check was good.  When the driver informed the Rebbitzin of the details, she took out her checkbook and wrote a check for the full amount.
     The marshal made a phone call to the bank and then instructed the movers to take everything back into the house.  At her request, the Rebbitzin was speedily driven off before the woman ever realized what had happened.
     Curious to understand the Rebbetzin's motive for this magnanimous act of kindness toward a stranger, the driver asked the Rebbetzin what had prompted her to give such a large amount of monet to someone whom she had never even met.
     The Rebbetzin explained:  “Once, when I was a young girl, my father (the Sixth Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak) took me for a walk in the park. He sat me down on a bench and started to tell me about the idea of hashgachah pratis (‘divine providence’).  He told me, 'Every time something causes us to deviate from our normal routine, there is a divinely ordained reason for it.'  When we were forced to detour from our route, it occurred to me that there is a purpose for this.  When I heard the sound of a woman crying I realized why we were led this way.”

Finding Your Song
     This week, a program on NPR told the story of Moshe Cotel.
     Cotel was raised as a religious Jew, but by age 13, the genius child prodigy had written his first symphony and, as he relates it, embraced classical music as his religion.  At 23, he won the prestigious American Academy Rome Prize for music composition and studied in Italy for two years.  Eventually he was appointed to the faculty of the Peabody Conservatory of Music at Johns Hopkins University and rose to chairman of the composition department.
     Although he had drifted from his Judaism, Cotel still indentified strongly as a Jew and in the mid-1990s, composed an opera called “Dreyfus" which depcited the notorious anti-Semitic trial of a Jewish officer in pre-World War I France.  The opera was performed in Germany and Austria and Cotel was invited to conduct.  To brush up on his German, he began taking language instruction from an elderly German widow, to whom he explained his opera.  The old German lady was clearly moved by the story but said little more about her feelings about the theme of the opera.
     Sometime afterward, Cotel was walking to synagogue one Shabbos morning when a familiar voice behind him greeted him in Hebrew.
     Cotel turned and, to his surprise, there stood the elderly woman who had tutored him in German.
     “Where did you learn Hebrew?” he asked.
     “I’m taking lessons now,” she replied.  “I never told you when you took those German lessons from me that I was born Jewish.  During the war, my parents placed me in a Catholic orphanage to save my life.  In my old age, I’m coming back to my Judaism, and it was because of you.”
     Cotel was stunned. “My life changed in that moment,” he said.  “I knew I had to become a rabbi. It just flew down into my head. Without knowing it, I had changed this woman’s life in her final years.  One of the basic teachings of Judaism is that everyone is born into this world with a task, with a mission, and our challenge is to discover what that mission is, to hear it above all the static we have in our heads.”
     So, as a world renown composer in his mid-50s with a lifetime of accomplishment behind him, Cotel resolved to leave music behind and begin a new life because of the effects of a serendipitous encounter with an old woman.
     But the story doesn't end there.  There were more sparks for Cotel to redeem and G-d's gentle providence led him to those as well.
     As he finished his studies, Cotel proposed, out of laziness, to perform a rabbinical thesis rather than write one.  So he was permitted to give a piano recital in which he paired traditional rabbinical monologues with pieces of classical music.  To his surprise, he soon found he had something of a hit on his hands.
     Word about the piece, “Chronicles: A Jewish Life at the Classical Piano,” quickly spread among rabbis, cantors and Judaica scholars.  Over the last five years, Cotel has performed it 64 times across the United States.
     “The whole thing kind of grew.  None of this was on my life plan.  If you told me my life would move that way a couple of years before it happened, I’d have said you were crazy. But G-d works in strange ways.”

Knowing the Flow
      We've all heard the expression, "Go with the flow."  That's certainly better than fighting the flow, denying reality or brooding about frustrated expectations.  But it's not enough just to sit back, relax and watch things happen.  Finding our calling, zeroing in on our G-dly sparks, means that we have to have the awareness and presence of mind to "know the flow."  How do we know which direction G-d is really leading us?
     When life takes an unexpected turn, we need to look around and think, "Look at where I am.  How am I needed in this place?  What unique opportunity to be of service is presenting itself now?  Or am I needed in another place?  Can I be more useful somewhere else?" 
     Wherever we find ourselves at this moment, G-d is giving us ample indication as to whether to stay or go, and if we are to go, which direction we must travel.  We often make life decisions based on a preconceived plan or a script of the kind of life we think we ought to have.  But living up to our purpose means letting go of all that and having the courage and sensitivity to follow the music of life to the place where we are needed.