Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
Everybody lives next door to somebody in this town. 
​  Jen Halperin
 
I grew up in Wilmette, Illinois on a horseshoe-shaped street with a little pipestem at the top. Maybe everybody’s neighborhood was like mine, but if it were, the world would probably be in a little better shape.  The kids in my generation alone – all of whom are now senior citizens – made a lot of difference in their respective chosen professions: law, medicine, business, and more. One guy in law enforcement cracked a huge murder case, and another had two distinguished careers as a police chief. Two guys are TV writers (different genres) of renown. One is an expert on American songwriting. One is a world-famous triathlete. I am just scratching the surface.
 
I now live in Alexandria, Virginia, as close to DC as Wilmette is to Chicago. Over the years, my proximate neighbors have served Presidents of the United States, as chair of the Joint Chiefs, high up in the Federal Reserve, and as Members of Congress and the Senate.
 
In Los Angeles, everyone who isn’t in show business has a neighbor who is. In New York, it’s likely finance or law. A college friend’s father was mayor of their small city in Iowa. Everybody lives next door to somebody, and not just in this town.
 
I am not sure what the allure is of reflected glory. Whether it is fame or notoriety, people take a peculiar pride in proximity. I have noticed my own inclination to try to establish connections with new acquaintances by mentioning someone we have in common – as if that means anything!
 
And, by the way, I find it’s true even among folks who live a lower-profile life. “I know so-and-so” is a very usual way to establish credentials when trying to enter a social circle or exert some kind of influence.
 
Sometimes the behavior reaches levels of absurdity. I once stood next to my wife as a man chatted her up, and when he asked her name, he responded, “Oh, are you related to Jack?”  She said she was, and he replied, “He’s a good friend of mine. How is he doing?” (She said, “Why don’t you ask him yourself?”)
 
All sorts of dismissive idioms have become current to describe this phenomenon. Name-checking, humble brag, and a couple too profane for a family column are ways the kids these days try to show they have no use for the games grown-ups play, but it’s a sham. The culture of celebrity in which we live has spilled over from show business to whatever the business is in any neck of the woods, and the only thing that distinguishes the young Turks from the old poots is who is considered worth mentioning.
 
I will admit that it is hard to avoid dropping the name of a famous neighbor when the opportunity arises. But it’s worth practicing restraint. Everybody lives next door to somebody, but every somebody has to live in that next door.  Sometimes home is the only refuge from that fame or notoriety, and the Grand Poohbah is no less entitled to it than the grunt who just put in an eight-hour shift. If someone well-known chooses not to advertise where they live, basic decency demands that the rest of us respect it.
 
And notwithstanding the cliché that it’s not what you know, it is who you know (actually “whom” is correct here), living near an accomplished or notorious person doesn’t make you fortunate, prestigious, or contagiously famous.

I will tell you who is worth living near. The family that lived across the street from that house in Wilmette, Illinois was no one you ever heard of. But every little kid in the neighborhood knew that if you rang the doorbell, the mom who answered always had a cookie for you.

That’s even better than living next door to the rabbi.

 
Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
I know the future is on my side.    Clarence Darrow
 
Something we hear a lot of today is the challenge to be on the right side of history. Depending on what you expect that side to be, you are either encouraged or horrified to consider what that challenge means.
 
For me, the most powerful moment in Kander and Ebb’s “Cabaret” (done to perfection in the film version, I think) is in the beer garden scene. An apple-cheeked young tenor is shown in close-up as he begins to sing an engaging song of optimism, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” which gradually engages the patrons, who rise to sing with him. As the camera pulls back, we discover the singer is a member of Hitler Youth, complete with khaki uniform and swastika armband. And in the crowd, only a grizzled old man remains seated and dismayed.
 
I shake each time I see that scene, and I can feel my body tense as it approaches, whether on screen or on stage. No doubt, the desire of the characters in that vignette is to be on the right side of history.
 
So, I think it is slightly dangerous to find wisdom in the words of Clarence Darrow. His assertion that the future is on his side comes near the end of his very long (like 3-day) summation of his defense of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two college students who had committed a murder just to get away with the perfect crime. Darrow was arguing at length against the death penalty for this crime, insisting that capital punishment would eventually be outlawed entirely. Multiple times he referenced the trends in the law and public opinion, asserting the inevitability of its abolition. He was right for a while. Then he was wrong.
 
I am struck by the deluge of reactionary legislation in statehouses all over the country. So much of it has to do with gender and sexual identity. I am genuinely mystified at the hysteria in some quarters over love, libraries, and lavatories, all of which are drawing more regulation than pollution and food safety these days (which, face it, are more likely to threaten heterosexual lawmakers than gender-neutral bathroom stalls). The scramble to erect blockades to the honest public expression of an honest internal landscape says more about the insecurity of the proponents of these barbed-wire barriers than anything else.
 
They are fighting a losing battle and, as such, are on the wrong side of history. You may hear that as a moral judgment, but it is not – it is a practical one. Everyone knows and loves someone who is gender non-conforming, just like everyone knows someone who has a same sex orientation, just like everyone knows someone with Type B Positive blood. Being unaware leaves that detail where it ought to be: the private business of the individual person. And as the transformative campaign for marriage equality showed, that personal connection is the most effective tool in overcoming bias.
 
Unlike the past, however, the future is not irreversible. Darrow did not live to see the death penalty essentially outlawed by the Supreme Court, but it was.  He also did not live to see that decision effectively nullified. There is no limitation to the havoc that can be caused by unshakeable opinions and unlimited resources. It helps if you have a catchy song and a sweet-faced child to sing it, but even that isn’t necessary. Mostly, you need fear. If more people were afraid of being executed than being the victim of a capital crime, Darrow would be right again.
 
The aspiration Darrow expresses in this piece of wisdom reflects a confidence in the moral arc of the universe (as he perceived its curvature). It is tinged with outrage and arrogance, which is not unusual for defense attorney’s summation. Because I agree with him in this circumstance, I include it as a bit of wisdom, worth inspiring every righteous cause.
 
But lots of people want the future to be like the past in any one or anther of its many iterations. They want to set a particular moment in concrete and put a boot on the wheels of progress. The past or its resultant present is on their side, and they want the future to be also.
 
So before taking too much inspiration from Darrow, it is worth asking yourself whether the right side of history on which you wish to be is one of progress or retreat. I know which side I hope I am on.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
The physicists may contemplate billions of self-consistent universes…but we should not neglect our own modest universe and the fact of our own existence.  Alan Lightman
 
I am continually stunned by the images from the James Webb Space Telescope. With this relatively small piece of hardware that we somehow managed to catapult into space, we have been able to see almost to the very beginning of the universe we inhabit.  The event or events that initiated the cosmos that we behold happened so long ago that we cannot imagine it. The faint fuzz of light that somehow has been identified as a remnant of the Big Bang is forever away.
 
According to people who study this stuff – and I am not among them – everything that exists in the physical universe began at that moment, which lasted a split second as we measure time. Look to any direction in the night sky with whatever device you can find, and you will see the results of that singular event. Stars and their (presumed) planets, galaxies, black holes, and even the ether that pervades the space among them (and, yikes, even the space in which the ether exists) all emerged from that combustible moment.
 
Now look in the mirror. You, too. Every part of you – every hair, fingernail, freckle – and the whole of your flesh emerged in that moment. It began a journey that happened so long ago you cannot imagine it, forever away. Just like everything else.
 
Alan Lightman, whom I have quoted before, is a remarkable person, a spiritual atheist. He completely rejects the very notion of an uber-being who reigns over the universe of its own creation. As a believer, I can forgive him this small detail because it has been a long time since anyone spoke to my sense of amazement so powerfully. (I think I have to go back to J. Allen Hynek, my astronomy professor at Northwestern University, who had a cameo in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” and who paced off the relative size of the universe in a lecture hall.) I recommend (again) Lightman’s book, Probable Impossibilities, as a master class in awe.
 
The simple fact of existence is wildly unlikely. As of this writing, there is no explanation of how the universe came into being. Yes, “God spoke, and it was,” if you like (and I do), but that affirmation only pushes the question back to that unlikely split-second when the notion of creation arose for an inexplicable reason. In our own universe, perhaps only one of many, there are motes of dust tinier than tiny, nuclear furnaces that dwarf our solar system, holes in the fabric of space that can swallow entire galaxies. On the third rock from the sun there lives a species of creatures that tossed an eye up beyond their atmosphere to bear witness to it all. What are the odds?
 
When you think of it that way, that human race is nothing special. Everything that we are existed a long time before it combined into us, and it will remain as long as there is our universe. We are one example of this phenomenon called life, which may or may not exist in any given precinct in this universe.
 
What makes us different? We each have the ability to look outside the collective of matter and energy that is our body and imbue it with meaning. Why do I thrill to images from the Webb Telescope that show clouds of space gunk birthing stars, or tandem galaxies dancing around the edge of a black hole? Don’t disparage my answer as glib: because I can. I do not have the ability to prove or disprove the notion that we-all/I-myself exist for a purpose or accidentally. But the very fact that I do exist is as completely unlikely as it is, with the right set of data, predictable.
 
I don’t deny the miracles in the Bible or anywhere else just because I can’t explain them. In that sense, they are no different than the Big Bang. It is not the fact of their occurrence or whether the reportage was exaggerated for effect that is any concern to me. It is the gift that Allan Lightman identifies that some of us humans use to good effect and others squander that is important: meaning. Without it, my existence would be, literally, un-remarkable.
 
I do not deny the miracle of me. And neither should you deny the miracle of you.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
Don’t be so humble. You’re not that great.    Golda Meir
 
The term “humble brag” is of very recent origin, but the behavior it describes has been around a long time.  Someone who makes a self-deprecating comment in order to draw attention to something they really want to boast about is humble bragging.  Imagine FDR saying, “I really didn’t deserve to win a record-breaking fourth consecutive term as president.” Or Simone Biles tweeting, “I am just too tiny to have beaten all those longer, stronger gymnasts.” Or Bill Gates proclaiming, “I’m really not that generous; it’s just that when you are the richest person in history you have to do something with all that money.”
 
According to Simcha Dinitz, who was a close aide to Golda Meir, this quotation was something she said many times. There is no authenticated recipient of this excruciating put-down, but it is delicious to imagine who the first victim might have been. If Golda were there, it might have been our father Jacob, who effaced himself before the Holy One (Genesis 32:11) by protesting, “I am a smaller person than deserves all the kindness and honesty that You have done for me…”
 
When I was in seminary, a fellow student was called upon to interpret a teaching in class by a notoriously tough professor. He began his remark with the Hebrew phrase, common among scholars, “According to my inadequate opinion,” at which moment the professor interjected, “That goes without saying.” It was Golda-worthy.
 
I must admit that I have my own history of humble bragging.  I am reminded of it every day that I sit behind my computer.  My ego wall, a well-known Washington practice, includes personal messages from three US Presidents, a governor, and a mayor.  And those are the ones I framed.  And lest you think that by closing them off in my office I am showing some restraint, I will also admit that it is the room we use for coats whenever we have guests. On my phone, ever at the ready, you can find pictures of me with actors, rockers, a country star or two, political figures, ambassadors, and an internationally-famous fashion designer with his arm around my wife. You can tell how humble I am about them because I did not mention any names.
 
What is the harm in a little braggadocio? Well, nothing really in and of itself.  I think it depends on the purpose. I think of the late civil rights hero John Lewis when I consider this dilemma. Here was a man who spent a lifetime using the example of his own life to inspire others to “get into good trouble.”  From his story of preaching to the chickens to his teenaged encounters with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ralph Abernathy to his subsequent long career as one of the most consequential political leaders in American history, Lewis had no sense of shyness about what he had done and whom he knew.  The walls of his office in the House Office Building were covered with pictures of him with presidents, politicos, and people of the various movements he supported. He would, if asked, tell you the story of any of them. Depending on why you came to see him, he would steer you to a photograph of someone he hoped would inspire you.
 
Is that why I have pictures of prominent people on my office wall and smartphone?  Sure, that’s the ticket.
 
The fact is, all of us have accomplished something worth a brag, and pretending otherwise is some combination of insecurity and arrogance. It is also true that all of us have epically failed at something worth being ashamed of, and pretending otherwise is likewise a combination of insecurity and arrogance. What we did is worth the telling – but it’s over. Investing effort in being coy about any of it is, I think, a waste of time. And that’s Golda Meir’s point.
 
Just own it. And don’t flaunt it. But use your encounters and experience to get into some good trouble, and to encourage others to do so, too.  Then you really will be that great.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
We can't save everybody, only the people we can reach.   Robbie Schaefer
 
The story is his to tell, but here is the spoiler. When Robbie Schaefer’s father was a little boy in Europe, he and his family were saved from transport to a concentration camp by a stranger. They never learned her name.
 
Schaefer is a multiple-award-winning musician best known as part of Eddie from Ohio. When he starts to tell the story, you already know the end because there he is, telling it. And if you keep listening, you come to understand the profound challenge he presents through the example of his own pre-history and personal life.
 
I understand why people have fallen away from reading a newspaper each morning and watching a reputable news broadcast at night. The global reach of reporting and immediate access afforded by electronic devices creates a bombardment of mostly bad news. If you can find out about a tornado or a disease or a mass shooting with a glance or video clip, why affix yourself to a chair and allow so much more disturbing information to pour out at you?
 
But I think it is worth spending time with that discomfort. The very fact that there are so many different kinds of endangerment in this world ought not to be a manifesto for fear. Instead, view it as the menu from which you can choose to affect a rescue of your own.
 
If you have read more than a handful of these columns, then you know my politics and social justice inclinations. But you don’t have to be like me to discover any given evening an opportunity to be a hero. All of those catastrophes leave victims in their wake, some of them just like you and others not at all. Even more so, like the example of Mr. Schaefer’s rescuer, some of them can be removed from harm’s way before the title of victim is bestowed upon them.
 
I admit to crying easily at the evidence of the generous acts of others – not always at risk of their own security, but always unnecessary for it. The television networks have figured out that the palliative for the diet of tragedy and outrage they serve for twenty-six minutes comes with feel-good stories at the end. Sometimes it is an unlikely rescue from a collapsed building or the surprise donation of a kidney. And look, if you can do that, then more power to you.
 
But more often it is arranging for a returning service member’s reunion with family, or a neighborhood celebration of a kid’s triumph over cancer. Perhaps it is a ride to the maternity hospital or a kind word from or to the delivery person. You can rescue someone’s heart from grief and despair with a lasagna. How great is that?
 
I do not minimize the extraordinary courage that the anonymous stranger exhibited by rescuing the Schaefers from certain death. Thank God those needs are not proximate to most of us; I am not certain I have the inner strength to put myself at risk as the mystery person did. But if I admire her – and I do – then it behooves me to stretch out my arm and discover just whom I can reach. The town decimated by the tornado, the family shattered by a shooter, the community struggling to find clean water to survive, the refugees fleeing oppression and plopped into a strange city by elected officials – you can reach one of them. The neighbor visited by sudden illness, the kid whose single mom can’t afford a necessary tutor, the housebound person who misses their friends in church or synagogue or community center – you can reach one of them.
 
Your solitary act will not protect the planet or make our schools safe again. I know that every tradition, my own included, insists that if you save a life, you save a world. Don’t be grandiose in your intentions. There is a straight line from the round-up of Jews on that fateful day to an orphaned little girl with a guitar, and that’s enough to make your tiny drop of courage worthwhile.
 
You are here because you or someone before you were reachable. Stretch out that arm and see whom you can save.
 

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.  Theodor Geisel
 
I think it is pretty much impossible to live for the moment.  I know that a lot of people offer that advice, especially after a tragedy, but my own experience tells me that the emotions and sensations of the moment are fleeting to the point that they are lost almost as soon as they are found.  It is the context of those moments, sort of the puff pastry that surrounds them, that gives them meaning.
 
On a summer night many years ago, in my wonderful childhood neighborhood, a bunch of us had gathered, parents and kids, in front of my family home. We had a basketball hoop over the garage and fathers and sons were shooting. (Yes, just the males of the species. It was about 1966.) The weather was perfect. The company more so. It began to get dusky, and I popped into our kitchen to get something to drink, and I remember saying out loud, “Please God, don’t let this night ever end.” It did.
 
Years later, I had the privilege of officiating at the wedding of one of the kids who had lived next door to me. Of course, he wasn’t a kid by then, and neither was I. I told the story of that evening, and suddenly it was there again. It may be that the neighbors in attendance did not remember it, and it is a certainty that the guests who were not there had never heard of it. But everyone smiled. Everyone was transported back to one perfect night, or afternoon, or weekend. At the heart of that experience was the core moment when, consciously or not, they each said, “Please God, don’t let it ever end.”
 
There will come a time when I lose that memory. Maybe it will be crowded out by other perfect moments when I no longer am the kid but rather the dad or the grandpa. Maybe the wealth of experiences of the two generations since that evening will bury it under a pile of moments to sort out, and I will just be too tired.  Maybe, God forbid, I will lose the capacity to retrieve my memories. And, of course, eventually I will die, taking my memories with me into eternal silence. But until that moment, the puff pastry will remain remarkably fresh, as it has for close to sixty years.
 
The author of the quotation is better known as Dr. Seuss. He has created more earworms than many, transforming moments like bedtime and reading circles into memories provoked by a lifetime of reminders (“I meant what I said, and I said what I meant…”). His observation that the value of a moment may only be in memory is likely more frequent than the impression he gives. As I began, the emotions and sensations of the moment are fleeting. Fortunately, few moments have the immediate power of 9/11/2001 or the Cubs finally winning the World Series (sorry Cleveland). I don’t think we have the capacity to live lives that make the demands of those moments on a regular basis. We need normal and forgettable, whatever that is for any one or group of us.
 
My mother used to tell me that when I was a toddler, I would stand by the front window of our apartment and cry inconsolably when my father went to work every morning. I have no recollection of it, yet I can picture the scene in my mind from her telling and my faint remembrance of that picture window. It is almost as clear as my memory of that perfect evening in June. At some point, in some way, the value of those moments was entrusted to memory long after the death of the moments themselves.
 
At our Passover seder this year, we discussed memory. My friend the neurologist agreed to let me interview him about how memory forms, why some things stick and others do not, and whether we can create memories of things we never experienced. (BTW, the answer to the last one is yes, and that is what the telling of the stories of the Exodus is all about.)
 
The collective memory of those individual moments can inform religion, culture, and identity. No one alive today was present at the Exodus, the Resurrection, or the ascent to heaven of the Prophet. Yet every adherent has a memory of the event “as if.”  The rockets’ red glare, four score and seven, the day that will live in infamy – they are moments preserved after being long gone.
 
If memory preserves moment, then we are rightfully afraid of losing our memories. They do more than remind us. They ground us They make it possible to know the value of a moment long after the moment has passed. Maybe that’s why we all hope to be remembered for a blessing.
 

 
Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
One purpose of a liberal arts education is to make your head space a more interesting place to live inside of for the rest of your life.   Mary Pat McPherson
 
Not everyone needs to go to college. I can make that statement now that my kids are finished and their tuition is paid off, but I would believe it if they were younger. While it is true what the slogan used to be (“To get a good job, get a good education.”), if the purpose of an education is to qualify for gainful employment, then there are all sorts of ways to build your first resumé that do not include college or university.
 
Except that isn’t the purpose. Yes, work is important, and a job is essential to earn the money you need to live on. The purpose of education, however, is to give you access to the world beyond your immediate experience. You may be interested in space exploration, glassblowing, macroeconomics, video gaming or merchandising, but if all you learn in whatever education you pursue is how to swap out a carburetor or analyze 18th-century European literature, you have dug yourself a hole from which you will never escape.
 
Education is not about imparting information. It is about developing the ability to think. Task-oriented training, no matter how sophisticated, is mechanical. Sooner or later the component parts of any task can and will be replicated without you. My math skills were atrocious in high school, but most of what I could not assimilate wound up contained in a Texas Instruments calculator when my math-savvy daughter took calculus. Today, that original hand-held unit is as relevant as a protractor, even if both still work.
 
But the ability to think, and to think critically, is essential to a life of meaning. And the premium that we have put on an education that extends beyond the practical is really what distinguishes us from other forms of life. I know, you thought it was the opposable thumb, or language, or symbolic acts, but it’s not. We human beings are the only creatures who can communicate things beyond our own experience. History, literature, representational art, poetry, liturgical music, philosophy, anthropology, sociology – all those things your parents wondered what was worth tens of thousands of dollars in tuition and fees – are the stuff that makes us unique among the species.
 
Chimps can make tools, penguins mate for life, bees give directions. Yes, yes, and yes. But no chimp can learn to make the tool last made by his great-grandfather. No penguin can tell the story of her grandmother’s crossing of the Arctic Ocean. No bee knows the way to San Jose unless it lives there already. But I bet that as you read these last few sentences you could imagine them all – as well as the absurdity of it (except in a cartoon created by someone with a liberal arts education).
 
Our minds yearn to be occupied. That’s different than distracted. We want to be interested, not bored. We want flights of fancy, not only cold, hard facts. We want to consider things that are wrong, wrong, wrong and figure out if, how, and why. That’s what a liberal arts education does for you.
 
There are some folks in every generation, including ours, who consider those things dispensable or even a waste of time. They don’t want others to consider what makes one man believe he is a woman and another be convinced he is a man.  They don’t want children to admire the human form as sculpted by a long-dead artist because it displays the same body parts they see each night in the bathtub. They don’t want libraries that carry books about changing norms, or lyrics that reflect uncomfortable cultural ideas, or honest reappraisals of accepted ideas that are holding back the continued progress those ideas initiated. Ask them if they are opposed to thinking, and they will laugh. But, the fact is, they are just opposed to thinking about certain things they don’t want to think about.
 
But those are the things that make the world a more interesting place to live, and your head a place worth living inside for the rest of your life.
 
You don’t have to go to college to get a liberal arts education. But neither should you go there to avoid one. Feed your head.

 
Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
The word I spoke in anger weighs less than a parsley seed, but a road runs through it that leads to my grave     Stanley Kunitz
 
I am afraid of poetry. I was never bitten by an iambic pentameter or terrorized by a sonnet. However, I am as bad at identifying good poetry as I am at filling out my brackets for March Madness (this year I was out of teams before the Sweet Sixteen), so I mostly wait for someone else to recommend something to me. There are exceptions.  I discovered Rilke on my own. I stumbled into Dan Pagis, Yehudah Amichai, and Abba Kovner. And Stanley Kunitz.
 
I really like Kunitz’s poems, especially those from later in his life. The verse above begins his poem “The Quarrel,” and I will admit to spending a long time unpacking it before I even got to the rest of this very short work. The images are exquisite, yet they do not fit together. A word has no weight. A road cannot run through a seed, which is a container for life, but somehow leads to death. Here, then, is an illustration of why I am afraid of poetry. So little of it begins with the easily understood Man from Nantucket.
 
Kunitz’s quarrel is with his beloved. He picked the fight as an old man, frightened of his approaching death and too old to cry. I feel him trying to muster the strength to rage against the dying of the light, but instead exploiting the nearest person to him, body and soul, because it is a known and reliable target.
 
Is his lament unique to old age? Those people long-lived enough to see their social circle contract and their mobility slow to a crawl likely feel his pain more acutely than the young. Yet when I think about it – a long way (I hope) from the poet’s circumstance – I know the power of that word spoken in anger to disorient me as it hurts someone else. If I am going to be honest, I probably always have.
 
Parsley seeds are everywhere these days, cast to the wind with careless abandon. Anger is so usual in public discourse that I worry we feel compelled to practice it gratuitously in private. I understand it, sort of. The power of anger can pierce through the callouses we have developed over our more vulnerable and gentler (and more satisfying) emotions. Better to feel the sting of anger than to feel nothing at all.
 
Any time a contemporary poet uses the image of a road in a poem it is a shout out to Robert Frost. (Okay, I read him a little bit, too.) If you ever wondered where the road more traveled from that point of divergence went, you can get some sense of it from Kunitz. It runs through a parsley seed thrown off by anger. It leads to your grave, though perhaps not as quickly. But it certainly feels that way.
 
The other road also leads to your grave, I am sorry to say. There’s no avoiding it. However (and now I am about to exhaust my supply of literary references), at least it is not a hell of other people of your own making. It is the choice instead to find heaven in each other.
 
Technically, no word weighs more than a parsley seed, whether spoken in anger, love, or indifference. But I have tried harder in my advancing years to reflect on the symbolic weight my words carry before I deploy them.  I have been on this journey for a while, and I am not looking to arrive at the destination too soon.
 
Meanwhile, I will continue my tentative admiration of poetry. I just noticed that roses are red.
 

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
Whether all is really lost or not depends entirely on whether or not I am lost.     Václav Havel
 
This is the time of the year when lots of faith traditions have significant observances. We have just passed Nowruz, the Persian New Year, and anchor holiday for a number of traditions. This year (2023), Ramadan occurs during this month and next, sacred time to Muslims. The essential holiday to Christian faiths of all stripes is Easter. And for Jews like me, there is Passover, known indigenously as Pesach.
 
Ask an outside observer about the common thread for each of them and the answer is likely to point to the vernal equinox. It is true enough, but not entirely true. While all these holy seasons connect to some astronomical and/or agricultural phenomena, too much effort has been put into crafting these observances when a simple bonfire or festive meal would have sufficed. Like most religious observances, no matter the label, all these springtime devotions are about finding a sense of place in the world.
 
I learned a long time ago neither to speak for nor interpret religions that are not my own. (I barely get away with presenting the one I allegedly know first-hand!) Looking at the Passover story, I am surprised to discover that the notion of being lost is not more prominent. The exodus from Egypt begins with a story of a lost home in Canaan, continues with lost freedom, proceeds to lost children (and one particular lost child), emphasizes the lost reliability of nature through the plagues, descends into the lost first-born on the night of departure and leaves us lost in the wilderness for forty years. So much is lost!
 
I encourage you to imagine what it is that “lost” means in the defining stories of the other traditions that celebrate now (and at other times). The back-stories may conveniently place themselves in the context of natural phenomena – spring renewal, phases of the moon, harvest of the winter – but more profound is their teaching about what it takes to be oriented in this world, how I once was lost, but now I’m found.
 
Václav Havel introduced the notion of being lost in his poem entitled “It is I Who Must Begin.” It is this last verse that carries the burden of meditation this poet/politician expresses: how do I know the path ahead. It is not just the famous and powerful who must contend with the need for orientation and direction. As faith communities also know, it is a challenge that faces each and all of us as well.
 
The absence of direction, that is, the sense of being lost, is probably one of most usual and inescapable fears in human life. For something so common, it is surprising that it has the power to persuade each of us that we are alone in our struggle with it. Along come the religions we embrace – those human constructs to communicate spiritual values – to let us know that there are directions, external and internal, to point the way. Whether it is Haft-Seen, five pillars, a miraculous resurrection, or a tower of fire by night and smoke by day, the voices and experiences of our ancestors resound in the rituals of the season to let us know that all the direction we need is embedded within. The road ahead may sometimes lead to nowhere known, but it never leads to nowhere.
 
Let me add that a close reading of Havel’s wisdom is important. He talks about whether all is lost, and even in translation, the play on the word “lost” and the nuance of what it can mean is important. Of course a person can be lost. Try driving in Boston, finding your way around the Phoenix airport, or figuring out the quadrants of Washington, DC. Try sitting through unfamiliar religious services. Try raising a child. Like Waze, crowdsourcing can help.
 
But the direction that comes from the faith and cultural traditions that inform our lives is the data that activates our existential GPS, giving us (I hope!) confidence that all is not lost because others have been here already.
 
At the beginning of Passover, I sit with family and friends for hours at a table. Yes, we eat and drink and chat and sing, but we are really there to figure out where we are going by rehearsing where we have been and how we got to where we are. You will do it, too, whichever sacred season you embrace, even if it is March Madness. If I am not lost, then all is not lost, and if all is not lost, then neither am I. And all is not lost.