The metaphorical boulder sitting in the middle of the road blocking your path can be viewed as an invitation to make beautiful use of what looks ugly.
If this was about making lemonade out of lemons it would mean: Reality is ugly. Make the most of it. But it’s not about the lemonade. It’s about deciding to be the one who makes the lemonade. The lemons are fate. The decision to make lemonade is free choice.
What is the dynamic between fate and free choice? Hakol tzafui ve’hareshut netuna (Avot 3:15) (All if foreseen and free choice is given.) The usual understanding of this is: God foresees everything that will happen. It would seem to follow that God knows what I will do before I do it and I therefore have no choice in the matter. Nonetheless there is no contradiction. I do have free choice.
I heard a different twist on this from my son who learned it from his teacher. He writes about the teacher and student relationship, about music and about life.
“In a canon there is a great deal of structure.’All is foreseen’ – The law is fixed. On the other hand ‘choice is given’ (Rabbi Akiva) and I can make my own contribution. This is an important lesson in music and an important lesson in life. Our world is filled with rules yet if we only think about the rules we will miss out on life. It is easy to fall into a situation where the canon is only a rule, like a mathematical game. Bach has sometimes been accused of this. But Leonard Bernstein taught that music is joy…”
“Sometimes in a canon one voice chases the other and suddenly because of the rule the voices are reversed and the first voice chases after the second. A canon cannot be played properly by only one player. There must be two and there must be a connection between them. Sometimes the connection is teacher teaching student and sometimes the connection is reversed and the student teaches the teacher.
“Most importantly the student does not turn into the teacher but the teacher actually turns into a student. Everyone becomes a student. Torah scholars were referred to as ‘students of scholars.’
“At times the distance between the voices is so small that it’s difficult to distinguish whether the sound is a cannon or an echo. The voices are different from one another in distance and time but they are also very close. When both voices have humility they are intertwined and do not necessarily listen only to the rules but to the connection between the voices and when that happens the music is sublime.”
God creates the rules and gives us a space for adding to creation.
God does His job. We do ours. God is not a boss who only gives rules. Our job is to use our creativity to make a difference in the world, to continue the creative process. Like a teacher who is willing to also be a student God is happy when we innovate.
A space has to be made for this innovative creative process to take place. The teacher can’t demand that the student simply spit back what he’s learned from his teacher. The teacher has to provide challenges to simulate and provoke the student’s creative juices.
This is what happens in life. The word reshut in Hebrew (referred to in citation above) can be translated alternatively as ‘choice,’ ‘permission,’ ‘something optional’ or ‘domain.’ Only something that is given space can be held in our hands. Only when space is made to take hold of something – when we have options and permission – only then does it become something we can truly choose.
A remaining question is: a) How can we turn something ugly into something beautiful? and b) Why is this my job?
Both questions can be answered at once. This world is a world of values, that invites us into a space wherein we can take values, which are only ideas and potentialities of beauty and goodness – and make them real through the situations where we embody them.
No such possibility exists in a purely spiritual world. A world of pure value is not a space where you can add value. There is nothing to add and nothing to do. It’s all perfect already. The only place where you can actualize values is here in this imperfect world within the confines of material existence through concrete action.
The “gifts” of our material existence sometimes look ugly but the values that we can make real in that space are beautiful. The metaphorical boulder sitting in the middle of your path is an invitation to find values in the tangible.
There is gratification in feeling that this path has been paved especially for me, even if I’m not getting feedback from the environment telling me I’m there. The greatest value of all is not in transformation of the tangible situation, which might not change at all, but in the “I” that freely chooses to embody values.