21 May 2026
Question
Rabbi, I believe in G-d. I’m spiritual. I try to be kind, thoughtful, moral. But honestly, I can’t understand why G-d would want me to wrap leather boxes on my arm, nail a mezuzah to my door, eat dry crackers for a week, or wear strings hanging from my clothes. Surely if G-d wants anything from us, it’s sincerity, love, goodness, spirituality. These rituals seem so random and mechanical. Why would an infinite G-d demand such mundane things?
Answer
You remind me of the husband whose wife went away on a trip. Before leaving, she said to him, “Please pick me up from the airport Wednesday morning at 7:00 am.”
Wednesday arrives. She lands. She walks into the terminal and looks around. No husband.
She waits. Calls him. No answer. Forty minutes later, annoyed and exhausted, she gets an Uber home. She opens the front door, and there he is, asleep on the couch. He wakes up from the slamming door.
“Where were you?” she asks.
He says, “I slept in. Because I was up all night writing you a poem.” And with a big smile he presents her with a piece of paper: “Here it is.”
Now maybe it was a magnificent poem. Maybe Shakespeare himself would have been impressed. His wifewasn’t. Because she didn’t ask for a poem.She asked him to pick her up at 7:00 am.
The poem was what he thought she would appreciate. But relationships are not built on giving the other person what you think is meaningful. Relationships are built on responding to what they ask for.
That’s Judaism.
If religion were left to us, we would all write poems. We would invent moving ceremonies, mystical experiences and feel-good rituals. And that may seem very holy.
But at Sinai, G-d said: this is what I want from you. Put on tefillin. Put a mezuzah on your door. Eat matzah on Passover. Wear tzitzit. Why does He want these things? No idea. Maybe because the point is not the object. The point is the relationship.
Real love means learning to step outside yourself and enter the world of the other. That means putting aside what feels good to you, and doing what the other asks of you. Just because they asked.
There’s a time and place for poetry. But sometimes there’s nothing more romantic than simply showing up at the airport at 7:00 am.
