Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
If you’re grateful for your life, then you are grateful for all of it.     Stephen Colbert
 
Maybe you know his story and maybe you don’t.  Long before Stephen Colbert became the Broadway and television star he is, he was the youngest of eleven children of committed Roman Catholics, loved and cared-for by his stay-at-home mother and his very successful physician/academician father.  When he was ten years old, his father and two next older brothers were killed in a commercial airplane crash.  The bottom fell out of his world.
 
Colbert remains a practicing Catholic with a deep faith in God.  Asked in an interview how he can look back on the tragedy he suffered and the hard times that followed and still profess a faith, he responded, “If you’re grateful for your life, then you are grateful for all of it.”
 
So many of us, myself included, find it difficult to imagine the world around us as cause for unflagging gratitude. To be sure, as Americans we live with far more cause to appreciate the circumstances around us than so many others in the world who face daily challenges to mere subsistence for themselves and those they love. However, as I learned from Rabbi David Aronson, of blessed memory, on my very first day of seminary, a rich man with a stone in his shoe hurts just as much as a poor man with a stone in his shoe.  You cannot comfort a ten-year-old by pointing out that he still has one parent and eight siblings left.
 
Being grateful for all of your life does not mean deflecting the bad by appreciating the good.  It is an extraordinary feat of affirmation to be thankful for the sting of the bee in the same measure as its honey, and yet a person of such perspective understands the richness of being human that is present in every experience.
 
My own tradition affirms this approach as well. In the Mishnah, the collection of legal teachings derived from the Bible, there are instructions about acknowledging God’s beneficence in expected circumstances – upon seeing something majestic in nature, rediscovering a separated friend, enjoying a meal, acquiring new household goods. But a general principle also applies: One is obligated to recite a blessing for the bad that befalls him just as he recites a blessing for the good that befalls him.  That instruction is derived from a teaching familiar to Jew and Catholic alike: Love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might.  That is, not only with the happy parts.
 
I don’t know that in the moment of bereavement, little Stephen gave thanks for his life and all it had just become.  When I was much, much older – at a time when I might have simply glided to the end of a long career and retired – I made a decision write a new chapter instead.  The year that followed was an unmitigated disaster.  I was unsuccessful in my new endeavor.  I found myself marginalized in my former community.  Beloved relatives died. There was a roster of lesser and greater challenges that felt amplified by their sheer volume and context.  I was one miserable human being.
 
I was dared by my wife to be happy.  With her help, I looked around and understood I had a choice about how I reacted to the turmoil around me. I could be defined by it, or I could work my way through my troubles with an appreciation that I indeed had that choice.  I am grateful to her as well.
 
I caution you (and myself) against considering this attitude first-world privilege.  Of course, Stephen Colbert is on the other side of his tragedy, and I am on the other side of my significantly lesser challenges.  Gratitude is not dependent on overcoming the obstacles put before you; it is a conscious decision to live in a state of appreciation for the very fact of life, no matter its trials and tribulations, even as you feel the pain.  That’s why adherents of different faith traditions respond with some version of gratitude to any situation.  I most appreciate the call-and-response in charismatic Christian circles where one person proclaims, “God is good” and the listener responds, “all the time.”  But I equally appreciate the simple declaration in Hebrew to any moment – “Barukh Hashem,” Praise God – the truncated version of the instruction in the Mishnah.
 
With a table of bounty spread before us and a day set aside for giving thanks for it all, it is easy to consider them the fruits of being alive and sustained and arriving at this moment.  The virus has not disappeared, the challenges of society have not evaporated, and troubles and tragedies, as always, lie ahead.  But whether you take your cue from Stephen Colbert, the Mishnah or the teachings of your own tradition or philosophy, this much is true: If you’re grateful for your life, then you are grateful for all of it.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
Democracy is not an a la carte system. You must value the common good.     Peggy Noonan
Liberal democratic politics is dependent on our other identities.   Michael Walzer
 
I had a hard time choosing between these two pieces of wisdom to inspire this column, so I chose them both.  It seems to me they express the same essential insights, though from different perspectives.
 
Peggy Noonan is a Roman Catholic, Michael Walzer is a Jew.  Noonan is conservative, Walzer is liberal.  She is a capitalist, and he leans toward socialism and communitarianism.  She is mostly Republican, and he is more likely to support Democrats.  Both are proud to be Americans.
 
They see eye to eye on an essential truth that is melting in the heat of our current rhetorical intensity.
 
One of the blessings of the American ethos is the lifting up of the worth of the individual.  When the Declaration of Independence declares that “all men are created equal,” we understand (today, after processing this claim for hundreds of years) that it means “each person is created equal.”  In legislative and judicial halls and in political contests, we have debated and refined the notion of equality.  In fact, I might even claim we have come to appreciate what my colleague Rabbi Jeremy Winaker calls “radical equality.”  I know that for some folks, the word “radical” is a red flag.  But here, I mean it in its generic meaning – taking the concept of equality to its logical limits.
 
In recent years, equity has been added to the concept.  Many claim (and I agree) that before people can claim to guarantee equality, the playing field must be level.  An illustration I saw showed two kids standing behind the fence around a ballfield, watching the game.  The ground was flat, but the kids were of different heights.  In that sense, they were equal.  But the short kid couldn’t see the field.  So, a box was place for the short kid to stand on.  That’s equity that leads to equality.
 
All of that is well and good in theory, and few among us would object to such simple measures to ensure equal opportunity.  Yet the circumstances that Noonan and Walzer talk about are not so easily resolved.  Those that feel entitled to their rights and privileges are sometimes unwilling to create equitable and equal circumstances for others if they fear losing the full measure of those rights and privileges.  Before you get too judgey about others, consider that we all have those tendencies – the very few among us would elect to live in reduced circumstances as a way of making things more even. However, the idea that saves us from devolving into a dog-eat-dog society is the common good, the by-product of liberal democratic politics.
 
To their dismay – and mine – that commitment to promote the general welfare is what feels like it is slipping away.  Everybody, I think, endorses the notion of the general welfare (as long as it’s not what some people call subsidized unemployment), but the hyper-individualism that afflicts us makes each person’s definition of it more a reflection of the life they want to live rather than the common good.
 
Peggy Noonan suggests that the democracy we seek to preserve is not divisible into component parts which any given person sorts into like-and-dislike piles. The ability to live your best life is dependent on equitable opportunities for others to do the same.  You might get away with a me-first approach for a while, but it is the fool who doesn’t recognize the fragility life that ignores the totality for the sake of the particular.
 
Michael Walzer insists that our society, a liberal democracy (liberal, like radical, in its generic meaning) demands that each of us bring the whole self to the party, needs and gifts alike, commonalities and distinctiveness together.  The individual has, in turn, the rightful expectation that such wholeness will be embraced.  Denying or concealing the unique aspects of identity shortchanges the body politic and disables the interactions that allow our democracy to thrive.
 
I think Noonan and Walzer would laugh if I suggested they had the same message on any level other than general principle.  But I will take the chance at causing them a little entertainment.  Equality, leavened with a commitment to equity, can be achieved in different ways (which may be their point of mutual departure).  However we get there, the destination for each of us is a place of commonality that values the essence of who we are.

Wisdom Wherever You Find it
 
The moral utility of history lies in its capacity to remind us of our duty to stand vigilant against and to take action against perennial and pernicious forces that lead to discrimination, to genocide, to hunger, oppression, and injustice.                   Jon Meacham
 
My little black book of quotations has multiple entries from multiple people.  Often it is because a speech or essay contains more than one observation that demanded residence in my memory.  Sometimes it is because a person has an astonishingly consistent talent for sharing insight.  Jon Meacham is one of those people, and even though it has been a mere four months since he provoked one of these columns, he becomes the first repeat contributor because this quotation gobsmacked me.
 
I have written before about how history is a human construct that chooses among a myriad of events to create a narrative from the past to inform the present.  (I will pause while you reread that.)  That notion does not make history illegitimate as a concept or a discipline.  It only makes it less objective.
 
If you need evidence of how history and its lessons can be manipulated to change fiction to fact, I will point you to the belated awakening to the fabrications of the “Lost Cause” explanation of the Civil War.  Until very recently, the capital of my home commonwealth, Richmond, Virginia, boasted of the prestigious Monument Avenue over which enormous statues of Confederate war heroes presided.  They were promoted, erected, maintained, and protected by descendants of the Old South who rejected the legal definition of someone who conducts armed insurrection against the United States government: traitor.  The sore losers of the Confederacy, in addition to including in textbooks from which Virginia schoolchildren learned the redefinition “the war of Northern aggression,” sought to make noble cause out of the attempt to keep human beings enslaved for both economic and racial purposes.
 
In that context, I am inspired by the observation of Mr. Meacham that history has a moral utility.  “Utility” is ultimately practical.  But “moral” is all about values.  The narrative we construct out of the loose pieces of the past is used to justify the present and guide our path to tomorrow and the next day.  Right now in our country we are witnessing a scramble to use the tiles and stones of yesterday to create a mosaic that represents today.  For someone who considers themselves at least modestly informed, the picture that emerges is enlightening not only for what is included but also for what was left in the scrap heap.
 
That is the case with the folks who are digging their heels into the contemporary manifestations of “Lost Cause” thinking, imagining a great America past that can be great again.  It is also the case with folks who have bet the farm on various theories about how the flaws of the past have become systemic and must therefore be plucked out of today’s narrative and ground to dust.  In both cases – and many others – the utility of history is to create a today of their choosing.  If I had hope of a constructive conversation (and let me admit that the lack of such a hope is my problem, not theirs), I’d love to ask about the values being served by that utility and what it means for people who do not subscribe.
 
It is worth noting that Meacham’s formulation came almost incidentally (in an unbelievably well-crafted presentation) as he introduced a panel to pay tribute to Elie Wiesel on the occasion of the dedication of a tribute to him in the National Cathedral in Washington, DC.  The cathedral has quite literally constructed a mosaic out of selected tiles and stones to create a narrative.  It has also been reevaluating some of those pieces and removing or replacing ones that tell a story that does not represent their values.
 
I take a small amount of pride that I was able to move past being impressed by the phrase “the moral utility of history” to what followed it in Meacham’s formulation.  It was a statement in the midst of his acknowledgment of the failings of the church (not just Episcopal) regarding outsiders (not only but especially Jews), and of the United States government in acting on behalf of the victims of the Holocaust (not just but including Elie Wiesel).  The moral utility of history, please notice, is to caution us to stance and action consistent with our values: preventing discrimination, genocide, hunger, oppression, and injustice.  I don’t think he meant it as an exhaustive list, but I’d be pretty happy to start with those successes.
 
As I think of history in the context of this insight, I hope I can remember to give up the fruitless arguments about what is relevant or not, what is accurate or manipulated, what is important or negligible.  Everything is both.  At least as important is that moral utility.  What are the values any telling of history promotes, and what does that telling do to get them realized.

 
Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
Our rights are self-evident, but they are not self-executing.  Rep. Steny Hoyer
 
I have long believed (and written about previously) that God did not create sin in order to prohibit it.  That is to say that stealing, murder, adultery and lying and some 500-plus more prohibitions in the Torah were more an indication of the capacity of humanity to get into trouble of all sorts than of the Creator’s sour view of human nature.  If, left to their own independent devices, people always did the right thing, the Ten Commandments would have been the Three Enhancements (I am the Lord, honor your parents, observe the sabbath) and we probably would have had the Two Books of Moses.
 
As a theistic believer, I also believe in sin.  Sin is that which separates me from God, or from godliness if you prefer.  But you do not have to believe to understand this concept of sin.  Sin is what separates you from goodness, rightness, loving-kindness.  And that’s why both religion and government have laws – to define wrongful behavior and provide a path to rightfulness.
 
Oh, Jack.  How religious of you.
 
But it’s not so farfetched, I contend, to consider the analog between religious law and secular law appropriate.  Sure, there’s the obvious comparison between Thou Shalt Not Murder and laws against homicide.  And you can draw a line from prohibitions against gossip and talebearing to slander, libel, and words you never heard in the Bible.  But it is also correct to consider that something that does not appear at all in Scripture – civil rights – is nonetheless grounded there in ways expressed and protected in our society.
 
There are human hierarchies in the Bible, to be sure.  The Children of Israel (formerly Hebrews, later Jews) enjoy a favored position.  Certain other tribes are protected, others are suspected.  And then there are slaves.  I point out, these are not “enslaved people” as far as the Bible is concerned.  And neither are they indentured servants, as Jews can become in lieu of debt repayment. They are members of certain tribes who can be bought and sold and who, though mandated to receive respectful care by their masters, are not entitled to redress if injured or worse.
 
It is telling that slavery disappeared from Jewish tradition a very long time ago.  That’s not to say no Jews since Biblical times (and into the 19th century) ever were enslavers, but within Jewish law and tradition, slavery became understood as inconsistent with the bedrock belief about the dignity of human existence. How?  I would suggest that that the moral repugnancy of slavery became self-evident.
 
(The prejudice against outsiders did not completely die with the end of slavery.  But that’s another story.)
 
Sometimes religion is ahead of society and sometimes it is the other way around, but I hope that, at least in the United States, they are about at the same place.  As Rep. Hoyer says, our rights are self-evident.  If you understand the meaning of that term, you know that they are not divinely revealed, except perhaps in the broadest possible sense of the words, but that our country was founded on the notion that every person is of equal worth and privilege by definition.  To believe otherwise, to behave otherwise separates you from goodness, rightness, loving-kindness.  It is sinful.
 
Left to our independent devices (because we are, after all, an independent people), we have exercised our capacity to get into trouble of all sorts by affirming self-serving interpretations of those rights at the expense of the same rights of others.  We even formalized the human hierarchies in the document establishing the country where all men are created equal, choosing to define “men” by race, gender, and other designated privileges.
 
But self-evident is self-evident.  So, despite the ignorance of some and the bigotry of others, we have been trying to legislate and educate our way out of sin for more than 250 years.  That’s not as long as it took the Jews to abandon the Biblical permissions of slavery, but it’s long enough.  If being self-evident were enough, the Bill of Rights, which happen to number ten, would have been the Three Suggestions (separate your recyclables, buy low/sell high, don’t buy a car in its first model year).
 
But even the self-evident needs some help.

Wisdom Wherever You Find it
 
Because of you, I live.      Kinley Strohl
 
There are all sorts of friendly rivalries between the wisdom of Islam and Judaism.  Arabic and Hebrew, the native languages of each tradition, have at least as much in common as French and Spanish, but there is no sacred literature that originated in the romance languages.  When I discover that something I learned from the Bible or Midrash has an analogue in the Qur’an or Hadith, I am delighted.
 
I will admit it wasn’t always that way for me.  It is amazing how possessive you can feel of something that you claim is a universal truth.  If I heard something I recognized from Islam (or any other tradition, for that matter), I used to think immediately, “Well, we had that first.”  Like it makes a difference.
 
Now, I accept it as validation.  If something I consider to be revealed truth has been revealed more than once, it seems to me I can spend less time worrying if it is genuine.  And I have become pretty liberal in my definition of that validation.  For example, does the narrative of Abraham’s offering of his beloved son have enough to teach if I learn it from Isaac and you learn it from Ishmael? 
 
If parallels are good, identical reflections are even better.  The Mishnah, teachings from the rabbis who lived in the early centuries of the common era, contains a discussion of the essential holiness of every human being.  After expanding on the reason that all of humanity has a common ancestor in the first earthling, as the Bible says, the teaching insists that whoever preserves a single life preserves an entire world.  The Qur’an affirms that exact same teaching as part of its holy and immutable revelation.  Even if you are neither Jewish nor Muslim (or even if you don’t profess a faith at all), how cool is it that as a matter of undisputed principle, the dignity and centrality of every human being is affirmed without argument in distinct “philosophies.”
 
When a teaching like that is also validated by the realm of science, I think it is more credible still – not because only science is true, but because also science is true. The differences among people of distinct geographic origin, racial heritage, ethnic identity, and any of the other ways we have found to slice and dice the human family are negligible on a molecular and genetic level. Each of us has all of us in us. Preserving a single life preserves an entire world.
 
That’s not to say we do not have our distinctive emphases that make some of us tall or brown or inclined to like chocolate ice cream more than vanilla. Or that, more than we’d like, something that threatens that entire world emerges in a single life.
 
A bunch of years ago, a seven-year-old girl was diagnosed with cancer that could have ended her life.  Her hope was a bone marrow transplant.  A nursing student in Pittsburgh heard about it and, true to her studies, took the test – a cheek swab – to see if she could donate.  “All I knew was that she lived in the United States and that no one in her family was a match,” said Sarah Aiken. Sarah was that match.
 
On the weekend of her wedding, that little girl, by then a healthy teenager, showed up to celebrate the couple and meet the woman who had saved her life.  As you can imagine, it was an emotional peak to an already powerful time.  The girl, Kinley Strohl, gave her donor a charm bracelet with these words: Because of you, I live.
 
That phrase turns up in a lot of places, too.  Thanks to this case – and others like it – there is a remarkable validation that is only possible because of the partnership between sacred wisdom and the endeavor of science.  Whoever preserves a single life preserves an entire world. One world saved another.
 
You might, too.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
Silence can’t be misquoted.   Bishop Larry Campbell
 
In Hebrew, a “koontz” is a trick, sometimes what in English would be called a prank, sometimes a hack, and sometimes what a smart aleck says to get away with something.  I really considered using a koontz for this column, putting Bishop Campbell’s words at the top and leaving the rest of the page blank.  But I can think of other ways to provoke eye-rolls and cheap laughs.
 
Plus, I don’t think his observation is always right.
 
The context of his remark is worth telling.  He and I served together on the Commission on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion of the Commonwealth of Virginia (how’s that for a title?) established after the demonstrations in Charlottesville that attracted violent extremists, mostly from among domestic supremacists.  The work of the commission lasted over a year, across two administrations, and yielded very little in the way of measurable results.  If you have never worked with a large bureaucracy, you may find that more discouraging than it should be.  If you have, you know that changing the course of a cargo ship from a rowboat looks impossible in the moment, but even a slight adjustment can affect the vessel’s direction significantly before it reaches port.
 
As part of our work, the members of the commission spent time in groups of a dozen or so to talk about our own experiences that challenged a sense of being fully enfranchised in community and society.  As you might imagine, a collection of citizens that was racially, religiously, ethnically, geographically, and self-identifyingly diverse produced some very powerful personal stories.  There were tears and shivers and a whole bunch of hugs as the stories of discrimination, disadvantage and denigration were shared, mostly in quiet tones and the expected combination of sorrow and shame. I found it very hard to wrap my mind around how the people in the room – indigenous, gay, black, rural and others – could find the equilibrium to contribute to our efforts enthusiastically and optimistically after the formative experiences they shared.
 
Only one person wasn’t talking.  When I asked him why he wasn’t saying anything, he replied with a deadpan look on his face, “Silence can’t be misquoted.”
 
It was the perfect thing to say in that room so thick with emotion you could almost hear the hearts breaking.  The room exploded in laughter (which brought people from other groups rushing in to see what happened).
 
The bishop wasn’t trying to pull a koontz.  He correctly perceived the hazard of basing important justice work on a collection of grievances.  The notion that by addressing the particular individual or group concerns to correct a particular circumstance – tribal land claims, local teacher shortages, lack of broadband access – our Commonwealth could declare victory and move on was simply false.  It was important for us to know each other as stakeholders, but not to presume a course of action based on sympathies alone.  Our concerns needed to be systemic, not piecemeal.  Our commission was formed because of a battle over a statue.  Our work involved more than figuring out what happened that August day in Charlottesville.
 
At the same time, there are times when silence speaks volumes, and volumes can be easily misquoted, or at least read selectively.  The Talmud insists that silence implies agreement, and there are times when that agreement is morally wrong and times when that agreement is factually wrong.  But that’s the subject of another discussion.
 
When the work of the commission ended, we send out a note of thanks to each of the members acknowledging that the dreams we had when we first met felt unrealized despite our best intentions.  But we also listed the initiatives that emerged out of our collective work, the individual initiatives we inspired and the forward motion to which we contributed.  We were in that rowboat, alongside a ship filled with Virginia’s long history and entrenched culture, pushing hard against the bow in an open sea.
 
Take a look at the heading of the Commonwealth and how, in these years, it has shifted in new and more just directions. The course correction is far from complete, but it is underway. If you ask me if the Commission on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion had much to do with that, I will have no comment.
 
Silence can’t be misquoted.

​Wisdom Wherever You Find It

To many a modern Jew, the Tanakh is at once a holy book and an embarrassing one.    Benjamin Sommer

He’s talking about me.

Tanakh is an acronym for the Jewish Bible formed from the first letter of each of its three divisions – Torah (the Five Books of Moses), Nevi’im (the prophetic literature) and K(h)’tuvim (the various scrolls and historical writings).  Some folks call it the Old Testament, a name I used to take great offense at until I got old myself.  When I refer to it in English, I mostly just call it the Bible. People who want a more expansive definition of what constitutes that collection are welcome to raise the issue.

What I love about the Bible is how messy it is.  You can’t get past the second chapter of the first book (Genesis, for those of you uninitiated) without finding a contradiction.  The scientific illogic of the story of creation – in which plants spring up from the newly-formed world before the creation of the sun – is apparent to anyone who has put a healthy Ficus tree in a moving van for the half hour it takes to get to your new place.  And the unanswered questions about where Cain and Abel got their wives and who the giants were that coupled with human women are mind-bending.  And those are only a few of the narrative problems.  Wait until we get to Leviticus!

As the (purported) record of God’s interaction with human beings in general and Jews in particular, the Bible’s claim to authenticity is powerful for believers like me.  When I am asked by skeptics how I explain verses that are inconsistent with what I believe the divine will to be, my go-to answer is that the Bible is true, just not always accurate.  That generally gives me some time to escape while the listener is parsing my reply. 

But that answer does not work well when considering certain non-negotiable aspects of the eternal instructions for being a Jew in right relationship with God.  For example, if I accept the notion of sin (I do), then how do I return to right relationship?  The Torah prescribes animal sacrifice and does so in such specific terms that even my modern and squeamish sensibilities cannot substitute “something of material worth” for the unblemished goat, let alone contrition, prayer and a generous act without knowing it is a hack.

I find myself embarrassed by both belief and doubt, by both practice and neglect.  My consolation and comfort are that the Bible itself seems to be self-aware, metaphorically speaking, of the inconsistencies and challenges that emerge not just in the Torah, which covers a relatively contained period of history, but in the Nevi’im and K’tuvim, which cover a much broader span of history and geography.  Of course, we are thousands of years and billions of experiences beyond even that sweep of reportage.  If there is embarrassment about the contradictions, inconsistencies, anachronisms, and outrageous presumptions in this sacred collection, it is holy embarrassment.  It is a commitment to struggle with the Tanakh and with what is in it in the name of being in a living relationship.

It may be that there is no time that is more embarrassing than the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur.  As remarkable a day as it is with its message of the power of atonement and forgiveness and its penetrating ritual and liturgy, there is only one small part of the day that resembles the Biblical origin of the ritual.  Buried in the doldrums of the afternoon, a long telling of the atonement sacrifices and ceremonies in the Temple – which has not stood for almost 2000 years – is often truncated or eliminated by us embarrassed contemporary Jews.

I have grappled with and groaned through it fifty or sixty times but finally arrived at a place that justified my holy embarrassment, thanks to the circumstances of this terrible pandemic that opened opportunities I might otherwise never have experienced.  Ishai Ribo, an orthodox Jewish Israeli folk-rock singer, delved into the service of the High Priest on Yom Kippur and created his own interpretation.  It became the basis of that liturgical dead spot at B’nai Jeshurun synagogue in New York City in a way that moved me to deep (and penitential) tears in my Virginia home.

(It begins at the 5-hour, 42-minute mark here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx7dBX00lR0.  Be patient with the introductory comments – you will not be sorry.)

The potential for such moments of explosive meaning keeps me returning to all the difficult parts of my Holy Scripture.  Not despite my embarrassment.  Rather, because of it.

​Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
I don’t kid myself that anything I do is ever done.    Mazie Keiko Hirono
 
One of the most underappreciated punctuation marks in the English language is the ellipsis.  It is three periods in a row, and it indicates that something has been omitted.  When used in a quotation, the missing part is often some of the words.  But when reporting a suggestion, an emotion, or a potentially controversial idea, it is an invitation to the reader to finish the thought out of their own experience. 
 
I am a serial abuser of the ellipsis.
 
It is my belief that any idea worth considering is an invitation to the reader to add their own perspective.  And while I probably give the impression (okay, maybe sometimes intentionally) that I have the whole picture, the fact is that the observation of Sen. Hirono of Hawaii is the wisest attitude to have.  Though she has accomplished plenty in her life of public service (read her book, Heart of Fire, An Immigrant Daughter’s Story), she learned early that whatever goal she achieved was never permanent.  It is true of federal legislation, which is of no surprise to anyone.  But it is likewise true of a garden or even the deepest of friendships.
 
I remember hearing her say those words and connecting them in my head to one of the earliest teachings I learned from the Talmud, the compendium of Jewish law and lore.  “Yours is not to complete the work, but neither are your free to refrain from it.”  It is amusing to me that I went there because Sen. Hirono identifies as a Buddhist, not a theistic Jew like me.  And the rest of that Talmudic teaching is a thinly-veiled admonition about God’s insistence that we all overcome our laziness and do God’s will while there is time.  There’s a catchy tune to the whole thing.
 
But the essence of the teaching, wherever you find it, is captured in those three dots.  Imagine them at the end of any claim of achievement or accomplishment: I have fallen in love… We bought a house… The voting rights bill has reached the floor… The war is over…
 
So whether it is with an autonomous authority (God) or it is with an internal compass (mindfulness), what does the ellipsis demand of you?   When those three dots appear at the end or even in the in the middle of a sentence, what are you supposed to do?
 
I think the first thing to do is wonder why they are there.  What was the author’s intention in leaving something out?  Compare these two thoughts:
 
Though she spoke to him tenderly to him, his heart did not respond.
 
Though she spoke tenderly to him, his heart did not respond...
 
Call it provocation or laziness, when there is something known to be missing, the reader must (quite literally) fill in the blank.  The thought cannot be complete without the participation of the reader’s curiosity and conjecture.
 
The ellipsis is a convention of punctuation and a literary device.  When it is used to create intrigue in a written text, yours may not be to complete the work, but neither do you find yourself free to refrain from trying.  Used in print or on the screen, it allows the author to purposely engage the reader.
 
But real time has a place for the ellipsis as well, not as punctuation, but as mandate.  Nothing we do is ever done, no matter how definitively we declare so.  Sen. Hirono’s observation illustrates the truth that life is an ellipsis.  Either something is missing in the middle, or something is left to be done at the “end.”  You shouldn’t kid yourself otherwise.  There may be no author to engage you, but the ellipsis is there nonetheless.
 
I am a little worried that I have beaten this metaphor to death, but…
 

 
Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
He couldn’t construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well.  Cormac McCarthy
 
The book from which this quotation is taken is called The Road.  It is absolutely exquisite while, at the same time, absolutely brutal.  Read it at your own peril.
 
In the course of the story I will not recount here, a father realizes the price of remembering his life during happier times for his son who, like all children, has an interest in earlier days.  Imagine the simple delights of your own youth – ice cream, a first kiss, a trip to Disney World – being described to a child who will never know them.  Remembering those happy times aloud also means delivering the despair that will accompany the telling and the hearing.
 
When I was a kid, one of my favorite TV shows was “Insight.”  If you never heard of it, don’t be embarrassed.  A production of Paulist Fathers, it was a sometimes heavy-handed series of what I can only call morality plays.  Every actor you remember from the 1950s-1970s was in one or more of these half-hour dramas about “the spiritual crises of our times.” In particular, I recall an episode that starred William Windom and Jane Wyatt.  He was an executive of an energy company who had been unwilling to listen to the dire predictions of the impact of production on the environment.  Wealthy beyond reason, he and his wife lived in a climate-controlled apartment outfitted with a machine that would play the sounds of birds and other animals now extinct.  From all those years ago (more than 50, in fact), I remember the denouement: his little granddaughter removed her gas mask outdoors and was killed by the polluted air.
 
Across half a century, McCarthy gives voice to the casualties of nostalgia dramatized in a slightly hokey TV show.  We all grieve for pleasures past, pleasures that cannot be recaptured.  If the good times have not been succeeded by others, recalling those memories means recalling the grief.
 
A colleague of mine who comes from the Mediterranean Jewish community once told me that he never understood the European Jewish custom of naming a child for a deceased relative.  “Every time I go to a naming ceremony, people are crying in remembrance.  They seem to overlook the joy of the baby!”  I have to admit it made some sense.  No matter the intent you have in naming a child, it won’t take long before the name becomes their own.  But the world we try to construct for the child out of our loss carries with it a reminder of what is no longer.
 
Faith communities deal with this phenomenon all the time.  The foundation of Christianity is hope emerging from loss.  The Christian worshiper is confronted with the reminder of both in the symbol of the cross.  It doesn’t matter if the cross is empty, as among the Protestants, or if it has the representation of Jesus, as is Catholic tradition.  And on the most sacred of days – Easter – the story of loss is necessarily recounted as part of the message of hope. 
 
My own Jewish community is no different.  Every day traditional Jews recall the destruction of the Temple as we hope for its restoration.  Every year we devote a full day to mourning that loss, chanting the Book of Lamentations (another book to read at your peril), to be followed less than a week later by a celebration of love.  And, of course, we cannot remember the glories of our vital and productive communities in Europe (and elsewhere) without reconstructing their decimation.  It is present in their music, their humor, their art, even when we reinvent it.
 
This sad truth has dawned on America in many ways over the last generation, but especially over the last five or so years.  We can’t celebrate progress without emphasizing those who have been left behind.  We can’t bring our soldiers home without recalling every life fallen for the cause.  We can’t acknowledge the miracle of an almost instant vaccine without reporting the numbers for whom it came too late.  I would suggest, all as it should be.
 
But there have been those who have stirred up anger over inevitable loss as they tried to construct the world they (think they) knew for the next generation’s pleasure.  The disappeared ice cream, kiss, or trip to Orlando was a snapshot, not a context. That’s the perniciousness of the word “again” when it is used in a slogan.
 
No one persists in a moment of time because no moment of time persists. I guess in the end, pain is what makes sweet memory sacred rather than cause for continuing despair.  Hard as it is, the loss is both necessary and inevitable.

 Wisdom Wherever You Find It


My grandfather was my Google before there was an internet.   Luis Gutierrez


First, some context.  This Luis Gutierrez is not the congressman from Illinois.


Joe Schifrin thought he would be a bachelor his entire life.  He was especially devoted to his elderly mother despite the fact that his childhood had not been a halcyon time.  Later in life, he met Nancy, and before they married, she embraced the Judaism that was so important to him.  Nancy’s daughter had a complicated life, so when her two oldest children were still little, Joe and Nancy took them in and raised them as their own.  So there was Joe – just a few years earlier quietly resigned to life as a single man now raising grandchildren he hardly knew.


I know it was not always easy for Joe.  Though he was possessed of a gentle demeanor, he never had a good role model for dealing with frustration.  I was the family rabbi, and Joe and I had many discussions about childrearing. He was reluctant to believe he was doing as good a job as I assured him.


Luis is one of those children.  His gentle and beautiful sister Jacqueline died tragically young as his grandmother Nancy declined into dementia.  In the end, Luis was all the family Joe had.  When Joe died, Luis had become the remarkable and successful young man Joe had raised him to be.  And in paying tribute to him, he said these words: My grandfather was my Google before there was an internet.  


If you have children or grandchildren, you know there is a period in their lives, beginning when they first learn to talk and continuing until you die, when they have a proclivity to ask questions. (Our family favorite came during errand-running from the back seat: Mom, how do they make car seats?)  Until and unless you put a computer screen in front of them, the major source of information they have is you.  You can tell them to look it up or ask their other parent or figure it out for themselves.  You can answer them with the letters introduced to our family by another one of my kids: LMGTFY (let me Google that for you).  But they will ask you anyway.


And that is something to celebrate. 


As Luis discovered, when a person knows a lot, there is a lot to learn from them.  And when that person is willing to share that knowledge, conversations take place that deepen not merely learning, but relationships.  All the challenges that persuade a parent (or someone acting in loco parentis) that they are failing at the job melt away from a child’s memory if you just take their questions seriously.


Joe was a pretty smart guy, but you don’t have to be.  Nobody knows everything, even if someone small thinks you are Grandpa Google.  “I don’t know” is a perfectly acceptable answer.  In those circumstances, adding “that’s a great question” makes it better and “let’s look it up together” makes it best. 


The old aphorism that necessity is the mother of invention is only partially true.  Curiosity, though perhaps fatal to the cat, is really what impels a person to learn and then to apply that learning.  A parent who can help a child cultivate curiosity offers a skill set that can last a productive lifetime.  A curious child who becomes a curious adult asks questions that are answered not because of practical necessity, rather because of a longing for broadening and deepening understanding of the world around us.


I am part of that generation that had to develop research skills if I wanted to know something, and so I have a basis of comparison with the speed and comprehensiveness of the internet.  I am glad for Google, but I yet contend that when you do research online, you never learn things accidentally.  You get what you ask for…and nothing else.


But in a conversation between younger and older people, you get the best of both worlds. And, honestly, if it turns out Grandpa Google is wrong every now and then, it is a small price to pay for the appreciation that builds between two people, one flattered to be asked and the other thrilled to be answered.