From small to monumental

I try to focus this blog on two interrelated things: Shabbat and Mussar. That’s the intersection that underpins my new book, The Shabbat Effect. The are many ways to frame a Shabbat practice and the one I bring forward is seeing Shabbat as an opportunity to get free from the ceaseless torrent of distressing and life-sapping involvements that fill our everyday life, in order to be free to cultivate certain inner traits: peace, rest, awareness, holiness, material satisfaction (what I call “enoughness”) and the like that are explored in the book.

You have to wonder how you could possibly develop these sorts of inner attributes without taking action to clear away the soiled mundane that is the essence of a Shabbat practice. (The word shabbat itself comes from the root that means “to cease.”)

This week I want, seemingly, to digress. Everything I write and teach has been put through the wringer of my own life experience, and while it might originate in teachings from previous centuries, if I have not put it through my own test of living the teaching, I can’t offer it up with conviction, so I don’t. And there is something from my own experience that I do want to offer up this time that, at first glance, seems not connected to Shabbat or Mussar, but you may be surprised.

This past week (May 14^th, to be exact) marked the 230^th anniversary of an event that took place on that date in 1796. Edward Jenner, an English physician, vaccinated 8-year-old James Phipps in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, England, with material collected from cowpox lesions that had erupted on the skin of milkmaid Sarah Nelmes. Later, on July 1^st, Jenner exposed Phipps to the human smallpox virus, and the child did not get the disease. This experiment demonstrated the protection conferred by vaccination.

Of course, vaccination is in the news these days because irrational thinking has taken hold in some segments of society and the direct result has been an increase in cases of measles, polio and malaria and other infectious diseases.

But as I said, there is something in this topic that is related to my own personal experience, and I will focus there.

In 1974, Bev and I decided that when I finished my master’s degree at Oxford, we would drive our car to India. It was possible to do something like that in those days. Turkey was not restive, the Shah was in power in Iran, Afghanistan had not yet been invaded by Russia or the US, nor taken over by the Taliban. Pakistan was safe. And so, we made the trip over several months and drove into India.

It was largely a pleasant, interesting and uneventful trip. There were some surprises – like Greece and Turkey going to war over Cyprus on the day we were driving across the border between those two countries. That was harry! But we made it across without incident and proceeded to traverse Turkey by making our way from one hammam (traditional Turkish bathhouse) to the next.

We were not in India long before we realized we’d be staying for a while. The option of drifting from ashram to ashram in a cloud of smoke did not appeal, and so we began to look around for something useful to do. We soon got a recommendation to check out the WHO smallpox eradication program that was ramping up at that time.

We showed up at the smallpox office in southern Bihar state (now Jharkhand), volunteered, and soon found ourselves being part of the effort to wipe out a disease that had been a scourge on humanity for millennia.

The year we joined the program – 1974 – was an epidemic year. Those came around roughly every 7 years. The disease would rage through the population and infect most of the people who were not vaccinated or had not survived the disease itself (which provided natural immunity), and it took about seven years for a new pool of vulnerable people to accumulate that would sustain the next epidemic. Since most of the people who newly entered that pool did so by means of being born, epidemics overwhelmingly affected children. The mortality rate was 30%.

Of course, the year after an epidemic – in our case, 1975 – saw a real dip in the number of smallpox cases. And because the disease was transmitted person-to-person by airborne water droplets, the dry summer season within that year of minimal infection would be the period when incidence of the disease would be at its lowest. That one season of that one year came into focus as our golden opportunity to stamp out smallpox, before the rainy season came, the number of cases started to rise, and we entered the next epidemic cycle. If we could interrupt transmission for just 21 days, the virus would be vanquished.

And we did it! People from around the world, from Brazil and Canada, from the US and Russia, Slovakia and Poland and, of course, India, and elsewhere, put aside differences and came together with the common purpose of benefitting humanity. We each made a small contribution, adding our drop to the bucket that eventually snuffed out a disease that had killed millions.

And therein lies a lesson that applies both to Mussar and to Shabbat, and that is: Don’t belittle the little. Every change, whether a small improvement in our personal lives or a monumental transformation on the global stage, is ever and always the culmination of many small steps.

Rav Yerucham Levovitz, the revered Mussar mashgiach [supervisor] of the Mir yeshiva in pre-war Belarus, wrote:

A person must always think, what did our ancestors do that caused God to desire them? A person should know that all the success of the holy ancestors, and all the great ones of the world, was in this: That they did not … distinguish big from small. Rather, they would snatch and utilize everything. A person who contemplates the holy Sages will see that all their work and engagements were in small matters, and for such a thing they sacrificed themselves.

And so, it was in the smallpox eradication program, and so it is in our work on ourselves in the way of Mussar, and so it is as we look to stretch and grow through evolving our Shabbat practice. Edward Jenner jabbed some virus into the arm of 8-year-old James Phipps in England, and today, 230 years later, no one anywhere in the world needs to be vaccinated against smallpox.

Never belittle the little. Every small act has the potential to change global history.

I would love to hear about one of your small actions that you recognize as important for both yourself and others. Please write about it in the comment section of this post.

With Gratitude,

Alan