Five Small Centimeters That Changed Everything

There’s an old Jewish tradition that when you make a big purchase, such as a house or a car, the first thing you should do with it is an act of giving. I had that concept instilled in me from a young age, as I watched my grandfather, of blessed memory, who was a real stickler for it. He was a giver in general, so of course he didn’t stop giving after that first chance, but it was really important to him, especially when he got a new car, that the first thing he should do was to give someone else a ride.

This concept weighed heavily on me last week when I got a new oven. This new oven, to be clear, was a long time coming. When we moved into our apartment a year ago, my husband and I had to buy all of our appliances (apartments in Israel often come without appliances). Rather than purchasing a brand new fridge, oven, and washing machine all at the same time, we bought all three second-hand. It saved us a lot of money at the time, and we figured that when the time comes, we’ll refresh them, one at a time, by buying new. The thing with the oven was that we had a 58-centimeter-wide space to be able to fit the oven. The standard oven size today is 60-centimeters, which wouldn’t fit. So we bought the only oven that would fit: the lone, old 50-centimeter oven that was restored to good working condition.

For those unaware, a 50-centimeter oven is awfully small. I could fit nine cookies on a tray at a time, that’s how small it was. But it was our oven, and we were determined to make it work. And we really did. We planned out our cooking schedule to balance out the oven needs, we put pans in lengthwise so that they would fit, and I dutifully did multiple rounds of cookies every time I made a batch. And then the burners started dying.

In December, when we lost our big burner, my husband decided that we would buy a new oven. But we didn’t really want to buy another 50-centimenter, so my husband, who is quite handy, spoke to the landlord who gave him permission to enlarge the space for the oven. It took some time until my husband finished reserve duty and had the time to do the work, but two weeks ago, he took some power tools to the kitchen, made a very large mess (which he cleaned and cleaned and cleaned again), and enlarged the space by exactly five centimeters.

In the grand scheme of things, five centimeters is fairly insignificant. Yet, for us, it made all the difference in the world.

Details Matter

I think about those five centimeters as I think about this week’s Torah portion. We are now up to the sixth portion of the book of Exodus; this week we will be reading Mishpatim, which literally translates as laws. And this portion is filled with laws governing various minutiae of life, jumping from topic to topic as it spans a broad array of what it means to be Jewish. Included in this week’s portion, by the way, is the first injunction against cooking milk and meat together, from where we learn many of the laws related to kashrut.

After the Ten Commandments in last week’s Torah portion, in which God outlined for us the ten foundational principles that bind the Jewish people together, these small, detail-oriented commandments seem very unimportant. Does the Torah itself, the word of God, really need to go into detail about what should happen if an ox gores someone? Do the details really matter?

The answer, of course, is yes. The details matter a great deal. Our actions matter a great deal, including the small, seemingly insignificant ones. God cares deeply about the little things, because the small things that we do shape our characters and form us as people. In the words of Aristotle, “Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

It’s five small centimeters that make all the difference in the world. And then, of course, it’s what I’ll do with those five centimeters. I had a lot I could have done. Like make supper, for instance. But I had company coming from overseas this past weekend, so the first thing I did with my new oven was bake a cake for them that I had waiting at their apartment when they landed. I had my grandfather’s spirit guiding me and three thousand years of minute, detailed law reminding me to make the absolute most of those five, small centimeters.