This week, we read one of a series of double parshiyot, Behar and Bechukotai. Both parshiyot are rich in verses which lend themselves to diverse explanations and elaborations, many of which are to be found in the vast Midrashic literature with which we are blessed.

I’ve chosen to focus on the opening phrase from the second of our two parshiyot, Bechukosai. It reads, “Im bechukosai telaichu,” which is generally translated as “If you follow My statutes…”. However, the literal translation, and exact meaning, of the verse is “If you walk in My statutes.” The verb “walk” in this context is a bit puzzling, even provocative. What might it mean to “walk” in statutes, to walk in the laws of Torah?

To address this dilemma, many commentaries quote the following passage in the Midrash Rabba on this verse:

“If you walk in My statutes”. This is expressed in the verse (Psalms 119:59), “I have planned my paths and have redirected my feet toward Your teachings.” Thus, King David said to the Master of the Universe: “Each and every day I plan my destination toward a particular place, toward a specific residence. Instead, my feet guide me to Your synagogues and study halls, l’batei knessiot u’I’batei midrashot”.

The eighteenth-century commentator, Rabbi Chaim ben Atar, author of Ohr HaChaim, offers no less than 42 explanations for this unusual phrase and this startling Midrash. In the sixteenth of these many interpretations, he suggests that “walk” might mean “travel.” Thus, the meaning would be that if you are about to travel on a journey, you are advised to study a bit of Torah beforehand so that you “walk/travel” in the company of the Torah you have studied. The Torah thus accompanies the traveler on his journey, sheltering him from the dangers of the road. This approach echoes the teaching of our Sages in Talmud Bavli Berakhot 14a to the effect that it is prohibited to depart upon a journey before one has engaged in Torah study, as is written (Psalms 85:14), “Justice goes before him as he sets out on his way”.

The twentieth-century major halachic authority and tragic victim of the Holocaust, Rabbi Yissachar Shlomo Teichtal, favors this interpretation of the Ohr HaChaim, over the other forty-one. He writes:

This Midrash tells the story of King David who would not embark upon any journey, whether a short foray or a lengthy expedition, without first studying some Torah. Of course, King David had access to many study halls, but we can nevertheless emulate his practice even if study halls are not available to us. Torah study in the privacy of one’s home is acceptable, and even a brief verse or two of Torah will suffice if that is all that time allows.

There is another way of understanding King David’s statement as narrated in the Midrash. King David is, in a sense, reporting upon his own experience. After all, he is a king, and a very busy one at that. He starts off his day with all sorts of plans, appointments, meetings, and destinations. He has worldly responsibilities of all sorts. His intentions correspond to his royal role.

Yet somehow, at the end of the day, and often long before that, he finds himself in the beit midrash studying the Almighty’s Torah. Has he deliberately and consciously abandoned his plans and mundane tasks? No!!

Somehow his “feet” have misled him. His inner self has propelled him to take a detour and follow the path to the study hall rather than the path to lesser destinations.

I have found this “take” on King David’s experience an apt metaphor for so much of the human experience. Do not most of us chart our futures guided by all sorts of plans regarding our education, our lifestyle, our careers, our relationships? At times, those plans are realized, although seldom exactly as we thought they would turn out. Often, however, fate intervenes in unpredicted and unpredictable ways, and we find ourselves in situations far removed from what we had anticipated. In moments of religious contemplation, we may even come to realize that it was not fate that intervened, but a Divine source, a surprisingly new spiritual script written and guided by the One Above.

Frankly, I have felt this “Davidic” experience more than once in my own career. I began as a teacher of Torah to high school boys. I was tempted to pursue higher secular education and pursued and obtained advanced degrees and professional training in the field of psychotherapy. I found employment in school systems, clinics, colleges, private practice, and even Jewish community work. I enjoyed those experiences and found them meaningful and spiritually rewarding. I knew where I was going—or so I thought.

My “feet” kept taking me back to synagogue and study hall. Opportunities arose, environments changed, the times beckoned, and I found myself teaching Talmud, delivering Torah lectures to a wide array of audiences, and leading prayer services. I went through a series of career changes, some moderate, and some totally life changing. My children, now grandparents themselves, would often tease me tauntingly, saying “Daddy, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

I’m not sufficiently presumptuous to compare myself to King David, but I’ve concluded long ago that he was not speaking only for himself in that beautiful Midrashic passage. He was talking about a very widespread basic human experience.

I especially have come to see this human experience play out in a wide range of social contexts.

One dramatic instance of this phenomenon can be discerned in the so-called Baal Teshuvah movement. We have been witnessing this development for some sixty years now. Men and women, some quite young, some middle aged, some quite old, who were ignorant of Jewish observance and who were planning totally secular, nay gentile-like, lives, who were already living lives totally ignorant or deeply alienated from things Jewish. At some point, after some chance encounter with a rabbi or teacher, after spending a Shabbat in an observant home, after meeting a man or woman with whom they fell in love and who introduced them to an observant life-style, or any one of a multitude of other scenarios, their “feet” led them not just to synagogues and study halls but to a redefinition of their entire lifestyle.

There are other instances of this phenomenon, but let us conclude with one dramatic one. I refer to the young men and women with lifelong exposure to traditional Jewish observance. We refer to them in a language similar to the verses I’ve been referencing in this essay. We call them “off the derech,” off the path. They very much resemble, of all people, King David. They too have started their “day” planning to wander in so many directions, all “off the path.”

But at some point, for a nearly infinite number of reasons, their “feet” have redirected them. Sometimes it is an inexplicably retrieved “leap of faith.” In other circumstances, it is a long, arduous, and back-and-forth process. But it is often, increasingly often, that their paths twist and turn back to “the path,” the derech. Typically, it is not precisely the derech they once abandoned.

It is a derech that fits them as individuals and that allows them to return to an authentic and personally satisfying Jewish life, a return to the batei knessiot u’batei midrashot that speak to them and meet their legitimate and sincerely desired spiritual goals.