Lazy Lying or a Lion in the Streets?

This week, listening to Wisdom - I’m grateful for my dentist’s assistant who during a routine cleaning gave me some honest feedback and some great advise - it has to do with being less lazy and more on top of my dental hygiene - especially flossing, which honestly, I often skip. But I’m taking their wisdom to heart - and to teeth..

Honestly - we are all a little lazy, and sometimes - a lot. Maybe it’s about how we take time to take care of ourselves, or others, tasks we took on but neglect, or just the winter nights, now longer, that make us want to hibernate and stay in bed? There is also spiritual laziness - taking the shortcuts and fast food solution to life that don’t afford or award us the wisdom and long lasting relief that will help our systems improve and help us provide a better planet for the future.

What will help us be less lazy and more productive and helpful to ourselves and others? There’s so much help that is needed out there in the world.

Whoever wrote Proverbs also thought of the human love of being lazy and devoted several references to anti-lazy speech. The admonishment not to be good for nothing shows up seven times through the book with different wake up calls and gentle to not so gentle rebukes.

One such rebuke showed up this week, in chapter 22, which by the way, according to scholars, is likely borrowed from a much earlier Egyptian collection of aphorism called the Instruction of Amenemope - translated and adapted into the Hebrew and into the Bible.

It includes this very vivid scene of how we let fear fabricate reality to justify our resistance to action:

אָמַ֣ר עָ֭צֵל אֲרִ֣י בַח֑וּץ בְּת֥וֹךְ רְ֝חֹב֗וֹת אֵרָצֵֽחַ׃

The lazy person says, “There’s a lion in the street;

I shall be killed if I step outside.”

Prv. 22:13

You can hear the sarcasm, thousands of years old, likely from an Egyptian context where wild lions did roam the roads. But what is this really about?

The lazy one - all of us at some point or another - would rather stay in bed and either make up stories about lions in the streets or simply choose to let those fears, even if legit, take over and prevent the person from venturing out or taking on the tasks at hand.

The indication here is that this claim is false. There is no lion. Just lying to ourselves and making up extraordinary excuses to avoid getting out there and doing what we need to for whatever reason..

I have empathy for this tactic and yet want to reflect on how to deflect this kind of thinking.

It isn’t just about the personal preference of staying under the covers and not dealing with whatever on my to do list -- but also echoes in the public sphere -- where sloth becomes communal lack of accountability and responsibility for what’s wrong in the streets and in society and what is our role in stepping out and up to deal with damage.

Yes, at the moment there are lions in the streets -- in the shape of leaders who might be elected but still choose chaos over order and violence over peace. The wish to stay indoors and let the lions roam so that we will not be harmed is real -- but isn’t good enough. If we all keep lying to ourselves the lions will enter our homes and our safety will be shattered.

So with all respect to laziness and whatever we do to avoid the hard work of repair and justice -- here’s a gentle wake up call, courtesy of Her Wisdom, leading into the winter season in which we can can do what we can to support each other more, donate, show up, lean in and not let lazy win when love needs us present.

I’m grateful to my dentist for reminding me not to be lazy and to floss each night with gusto. On it. And so many other ways to take better care of myself and of others. I’ll def. Smile bigger.

Hope this helps..

Thank you for joining me below the bible belt.

Shabbat Shalom.