Books, Bar Mitzvahs & Construction

Yesterday was a special day in Chabad. Hey Teves has become book day, and it’s customary to buy Jewish books. Here are some of my recommended reads and buys (from Amazon).

When it rains, it pours. In the past year and a half, we only celebrated one, impromptu Bar Mitzvah for Asher Dewey, masked, outside in our backyard, but now we have two Bar Mitzvahs in a row! Tomorrow, Bradan will be celebrating his Bar Mitzvah, and next week will be David Silverstein’s. 

And now, to a construction lesson I learned from my boys.

You know the good feeling of killing two birds with one stone?

In an unlikely combo, we’ve managed to combine contractor with childcare/schooling.

For the past month, our boys (Mendel 5, Levi 4, & Shalom Ber, 1) have been spending all day fixated on watching the contractors work. We can barely get them to come inside for lunch!

Children are not known for having long attention spans.

But somehow, they are managing to spend hours at a time watching construction.

I’ve been thinking about it for weeks now.

Why is it so easy for them to closely pay attention to construction?

And I just thought of a possible answer.

The most seminal Chabad teaching is the purpose of creation, namely to build a “home for G-d”.

On Shabbos, 39 types of labor are prohibited. Upon reflection, each one of those types of labor further “create” and build the world up.

And construction is the most basic, and obvious type of work.

Sometime construction starts with demolition (like it did in our project, in a minor way).

Small, junky homes are being replaced with large mansions and luxury apartment buildings.

And there are many other types of labor. Planting, writing, cooking, igniting flames, sewing, cutting etc.

We spend so much time teaching children knowledge, but they are programmed from the womb (almost) to comprehend an be fascinated by building, because this is the purpose for which G-d created us.

A contractor’s tools are hammers, drills, saws, and tape measures (which are all included in the 39 types of work).

And as they progress, they’ll figure out that there’s more to G-d’s vision than just building buildings and planting gardens.

Building the world up also means to make the world a good place. We build goodness and kindness too.

The tools for this mission are the 7 Noahide commandments. I speak about them at every opportunity, especially with gentiles (like at a City Council meeting a couple weeks ago, with a planner at the city counter, a salesman at a car dealership and I talk about them all the time with our contractors).

As Jewish people, our job includes even more than buildings, gardens, books, and even more than goodness and kindness.

Our unique job is to build the world into a holy place.

The tools for this mission are the 613 commandments from the Torah. These 613 mitzvahs include uniquely Jewish actions that don’t apparently make the world good or better, but snatch the materialism of the world and infuse it with G-d’s will, making it holy.

May G-d bless us all to embrace our mission, and like my boys, get fixated on building. Building the world up with productive work, making it a good place with the 7 commandments, and finishing the job by making it a holy place with Jews fulfilling the 613 uniquely Jewish commandments.