Shabbat Sermon: If Our Cup Feels Empty, Even When It Overflows with Guest Speaker Rabbi Ravid Tilles

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life

The question always is, what’s next? And the answer is, let’s be together.

What’s next? This is a question that weighs on me in every facet of my life. My son Avishai, who many of you know well after his many years at Hebrew school here and around at services, for a long time would have the same question for us when we first woke up. “What’s for dinner?” And, truthfully, we hardly ever knew. It’s hard enough to keep of track of who is getting who to where they need to be when. So the thought of what any combination of us will be eating, 12 hours later, is impossibly daunting.

Despite our best efforts to have a routine for the five of us, we find ourselves taking it one day at a time, one hour at a time, one moment at a time.

My phone is constantly reminding me, what’s next. Meetings, appointments, commitments - I feel very busy. And when I speak to my friends in my age group and demographic, they also project as being very busy. We sometimes wear busy-ness as a badge of honor, proof that we are worthy of the blessings of life that we have been bestowed. And more often we use busy-ness as a shield, an excuse, for why we haven’t lived up to other commitments or why we haven’t stayed in touch.

“You know, the start of school is so busy, and then it’s so busy right before the holidays, then it’s really busy during the holidays, then it’s really busy right after the holidays then it’s really busy before break,” and so on. What’s next? I find that my contemporaries, and I would surmise, anecdotally, all people ever, are always keeping busy with the next thing. Asking, what’s next?