PURIM 3 - FRAMEWORKS AND THEIR SHORTCOMINGS

Hopefully you can conjure and articulate a narrative or framework about your life in which things make sense. A framework helps us understand why we are doing something, what we can expect for ourselves, what we can expect the results will be, what challenges are likely to come up, how we might overcome them, etc. A framework lends a sense of order to all the components of a particular set of factors. 

For example, you might hate your job, but you remind yourself that going to work everyday allows you to provide for your family, and that allows you to get over the aggravation of going to work. In this framework, every misery is mitigated by the benefits of your family having food or shelter, or the possibility that your kids will be better educated and more successful than you. 

It gets trickier when we’re talking about religious life and religious acts. Convincing frameworks are harder to come by because it is far more difficult to speak about anticipated results of religious acts. But this difficulty doesn’t make it less necessary - just harder to come by. After all, iff I don’t have a framework in which to understand, say, prayer, then it stops making sense, and then I either stop doing it, stop thinking about it, or stop believing I can actually invest myself in it. And none of those are very satisfying answers. So my framework might not be hermetically sealed, but it’s got to offer me at least some context.