Bob De Moor

October 10, 2020

As we approach the darker, drearier winter of pandemic discontent, our congregation is providing a number of educational, social, and interactive events, both in-person and online, to give us a chance to experience the communion of the saints. I urge you to take a serious look at these and sign up for what looks meaningful to you. You can find details in the bulletin, on the church’s Facebook account, and by logging onto www.westendcrc.ca.

One activity that sounds really good to me is a writing project that Janet Greidanus is pitching to our seniors. She’s going to work with a number of them to identify, write up, and collect meaningful stories from their lives that they can pass on as a living legacy to their kids and grandkids.

That got me to thinking about stories I might share. Unfortunately, most I can think of are not the ones that would set a good example—but maybe that’s okay too, right? Not every story needs a specific moral. Besides, often the ones that have some moral-ethical ambiguity can be the most instructive.

Like the time when my brother and I were teenagers. Dad had always bought big cars with little engines, but this time around he’d actually bought a little car with a big engine—a candy-apple red Ford with a V-8 engine. He was justifiably proud of it. He let us drive it but he begged us to be really careful with it.

My brother and I took it for a test run. No problem for either of us—we drove responsibly despite the urge to unleash those three-hundred-plus horses under our foot.

We thought we’d done fine until we took one last look and discovered, to our absolute horror, that there was a dime-size hole burned into the front seat. It seems that my brother had tossed his cigarette butt out the window only to have it get blown right back in. We saw our lives pass before our eyes…

How to avoid justifiable homicide from the car’s bereft owner?

One, and only one, means of sustaining our miserable existence occurred to us. The offending butt was unceremoniously cast from the window. With the ingenuity that arises only out of the most desperate situations, the ashtray was accessed and one of our dad’s cigarette butts was placed next to the hole in the scorched fabric. Fortunately, Dad’s cigarettes were clearly identifiable because he rolled his own.

Suffice it to say that we never heard a peep from our progenitor and the only pain we endured because of this tawdry episode was to our respective consciences.

Fast-forward twenty years, during a family rebellion—er, reunion. We fessed up. Dad remembered the incident because, despite the clear evidence before him, he knew he couldn’t have done it. He always used the ashtray because he knew what happened when you try to toss a butt to the winds. Fortunately, the passing of twenty years did a lot diminish any homicidal mania he might still have harboured.

So where am I going with this?

In reflecting on the Torah (the first five books of the Bible), a venerable Jewish commentary boldly states that each and every one of the sacred commandments must be broken in order to save a human life. So, if you must do work on the Sabbath to save your neighbour’s bacon (oops, in Israel it wouldn’t be bacon now would it?) from the well, then that’s what you must do. If you must steal food so your starving neighbour can keep soul and body together, then that is what you must do. And if you can keep your father from murdering you or your brother (even if that brother had the filthy habit of smoking at the time), then that is what you must do. Why? Because each and every commandment God gave was intended specifically to save and protect human life—its quality as well as its quantity.

It is the spirit and the Spirit of the law that we must follow, not the letter.

Wearing the rose-coloured glasses of twenty years of distance from the incident and a generous glass of wine, Dad did not disagree.

Given your own predisposition to tell the odd “white lie,” what do you think?

And what’s your story? I’ll gladly open up some space in Directions so you can tell us about it—if you tell us the honest truth that is.