Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
There seems to be a limit to how much morality we can stand.    Susan Wolf
 
Is it possible to be too good a person?  As I used to say to my kids all the time, everything is possible, but not everything is likely.  And being “too good” falls into that category.
 
Susan Wolf is a moral philosophy who has a refreshingly realistic attitude.  I admit to being a second-hand consumer of her life’s work (taking me out of the “too good” metric immediately), yet even if I knew only this one pithy saying of hers, I would admire her. For those of us who read the Bible, it comes as no surprise that what distinguishes us as human beings is the value of our imperfections.
 
There is a lot of emphasis in this world about how much the same we are. Except for miniscule differences and infrequent anomalies, every human body is exactly the same in every measurable way. The very presumption of the United States is not only that we are all created equal (I acknowledge, not the same as “the same”), but that we have endowed rights – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness among them.  The three Abrahamic religions insist on definitive sameness.  In Judaism, there is one manner of law for all.  In Christianity, God loves every saint and sinner. In Islam, the Five Pillars are the aspiration of every person, Muslim or not.  Perfect law, perfect love, perfect submission – these idealized teachings give the impression that there is no such thing as “too good.”
 
But all those traditions (and all the others) are filled with stories of the failures of their greatest role models.  Even the Dalai Lama engaged with Keith Raniere! (And please, no diverting arguments about the nature of that engagement.)
 
Those flaws are, in my opinion, worth celebrating. And according to Susan Wolf, they are hard-wired at some level. The animal kingdom has no ethics; the behaviors we attribute to pets and wildlife, whether love, loyalty, suspicion, or evil, are all the reactions of instinctual proclivities to environmental circumstances. Dogs don’t sit around discussing the relative value of trees versus hydrants. We human beings, on the other hand, have systemic ways of addressing appropriate and inappropriate conduct. We share ideas, experiences, and imaginings not only on a one-to-one basis in the present, but across geography, culture, and generations. We speculate. And we aspire.
 
 
And we fail, a lot.  Perhaps it is why every one of those systems of definitive moral sameness has an embedded process for atonement. Being good all the time is virtually impossible. And those who set that standard for themselves (and therefore expect that others can as well) are mostly – sorry, not sorry – insufferable.  There seems to be a limit to how much morality we can stand, within ourselves and in other people.
 
I am not advocating for immoral behavior, nor excusing my ethical lapses or yours. I may see the value in some occasional mischief, and I will plead guilty to plenty of it myself (and mostly enjoying it).
 
I am suggesting, however, that the quest for moral perfection in ourselves or others is unnatural and even undesirable.  The big and obvious transgressions in our lives are like obstacles on the highway – avoidable and necessitating a change of course or a full stop.  But so many other things that call for judgment in the moment will get past us.  If they did not, we would never learn to be better than we already are. The moral limits Wolf imagines embedded in our beings are the inherent prompts that, ironically, are necessary to our moral growth.
 
Not so long ago, I reflected on an observation by Ernst Gombrich about delight residing between boredom and confusion.  Likewise, morality exists between external absolutism and internal self-indulgence.  Whew, that’s a lot of pretentious words. I guess what I mean to say is this: give yourself a break. 

 
Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
Based on what you know about him in history books, what do you think Abraham Lincoln would be doing if he were alive today? 1) Writing his memoirs of the Civil War. 2) Advising the president. 3) Desperately clawing at the inside of his coffin.      David Letterman
 
If nothing else, I know that more people will read this column than most of my other ones because of the title. So this better be good.
 
I have never met a person who does not believe he or she has a good sense of humor. Some of those folks are wrong, but I think laughter is so important in this world that I don’t want to tell them and risk taking away what little fun they can find.
 
I used to travel with a talk about humor in which I acknowledged that any time you had to explain it, it wasn’t funny anymore. That’s because humor relies on three things: surprise, injury, and a sense of superiority. Take away any of those three things and the listener/observer won’t laugh, at least honestly. The whole laughing-with-you/laughing-at-you cliché is just an aspect of those three things, especially the last one.
 
Take this classic Letterman joke. The surprise comes with the last option. The injury is, Lincoln is dead. The sense of superiority is a little more complicated: first, the listener is not dead, and second, the intellectual exercise Dave seems to be creating is punctured for its pretentiousness.  And…presto! Now the joke isn’t funny anymore.
 
That is especially true because, if you think about it for a minute, there is nothing funny about Lincoln being dead. He was, of course, assassinated. It was a tragedy on every level. Making sport of a murder victim is the height of insensitivity because it diminishes the condemnatory nature of the immoral act and seems to make it less shocking and more acceptable. Wow, now the joke REALLY isn’t funny.
 
There is so much more to humor than those three ingredients. Context is perhaps the most important.  This joke works more than 150 years after Lincoln’s death in a way it could not possibly have been received at his funeral.  I cannot even begin to define the elements of context. A comedy show sets the context of laughter – people come intending to laugh. A conference of Lincoln scholars, especially if they take themselves seriously, might not be primed to delight at the demise of their subject. But in between those two extremes? You kind of have to be there.
 
I admire the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints. They were faced with the unimaginable challenge of the hit musical comedy, “The Book of Mormon,” taking aim not only at their scripture, not only at their values, not only at their being overwhelmingly White, but at their commitment to abstinence from the coarser aspects of culture (and I do not mean only caffeine). In order to gauge a reaction, some devout Mormon had to deal with a script and lyrics that deployed the f-bomb more frequently than negative political ads during campaign season.  And how did the LDS Church respond? They took out ads in “Playbill” that said, “You’ve seen the play. Now read the book.” That is classy. And funny.
 
Would the world have been a better place if “The Book of Mormon” had celebrated the generosity and family-centric ethos of the church instead of the practices and hierarchical culture most people outside the church find off-putting? In a respect-for-the-First-Amendment’s-free-exercise-clause sense, absolutely. But those of us who were surprised, saw the injuries, and felt superior laughed, setting aside humorless outrage. The musical comedy was tasteless, inappropriate, offensive, disrespectful. And funny.
 
A dour rabbi I once knew once offered this critique of Mel Brooks’ “The Producers:” I don’t have to see it to know I don’t like it. (I replied, “Can I have your tickets?”) Humor is no more a get-out-of-jail-free card than the free speech clause of the First Amendment, but a good joke (and how much the more so a great joke) can help us see the absurdity of our obsessions with being serious, even when justified. What constitutes a good joke? Well, I can’t define your context. You kind of have to be there.
 
If Lincoln were alive today, he would be 213 years old, and likely not strong enough to do any of the things Letterman suggested. But I’d like to think that if he were alive, he would at least be chuckling.

 
Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
There is nothing noble about being superior to those around you. The true nobility is being superior to your previous self.    Hindu Proverb
 
Stick with me on this one. I have a point, I promise.
 
I have written before about what I have learned from Hindu friends and colleagues. I will admit that I did not have many of them for most of my life, partly for lack of opportunity, partly out of a shameful lack of curiosity, and partly because of an unenlightened understanding of what it meant to be a Hindu. On that last point, the multiplicity of expressions of the godhead and the symbols that represent those iterations struck me as…forgive me…pagan.
 
(Before my pagan readers get too upset over that label, I will unpack only one former prejudice at a time.  Your turn will come.)
 
My growing appreciation of Hindu wisdom has also increased my discomfort at what American society has appropriated from it. The practices of yoga, for example, have a devotional aspect that have been removed and replaced with chairs, goats, and heat, all of which may amplify the health and exercise benefits, but are the equivalent of reducing Christmas to candy canes and Santa Claus. See also karma, guru, kirtan and – if you dare – swastika.
 
However, just because I admire Hinduism does not mean I subscribe to it. And when it comes to the belief in reincarnation, I believe in it with the same skepticism as I believe in consciousness after death. So the proverb quoted above strikes me as a metaphorical piece of genius, though for a very different reason than “orthodox” Hindus would find it meaningful. Perhaps it makes me guilty of appropriation, but I count on the gentle affirmation of Hindus that every path of faith has value to rescue me from disrespect.
 
So, metaphorically speaking, every self is a previous self. It is easy to see the difference in who I am today from who I was at age 13, 25, 37 and 50 (significant ages in my personal life). Am I a more noble person, by whatever definition? I most certainly hope so. I have tried to follow a progression, guided by my evolving understanding of my values, but only with the passage of time can I begin to understand how my temperament, for example, or my desire to be generous, for another example, has evolved. I can’t deny that part of what has impelled me is the example of others around me. Some of those role models are people I love. Some of them are people I admire from afar. Some of them are people I consider bad examples. If my goal has been to contrast with my bad examples and outdo my good examples, this proverb instructs me that there is nothing noble about imitating others or, worse, correcting their shortcomings.
 
The only growth that matters is in comparison to my previous self. And if I am intentional about it, then I need to grow every day, even every hour, not merely every dozen years or so. If I were a literalist about reincarnation (I am not), there might be more hope for me in subsequent iterations of Jack Moline, by whatever name. But since I am not, the inspiration of this wisdom must motivate me to become superior to myself in this one wild and precious life.
 
Here is the point that I promised. Every day is an opportunity to be truly noble. That quality may not be easily quantifiable or even measurable in a tick of the clock or turn of a calendar page, but every day offers an opportunity to do just a little better than your previous self. The great Moses Maimonides encouraged Jews to do so, and others by extension. So, too, teachers in every generation and every tradition from Plato to Rumi to Merton to Freud. Don’t try to clamber over others. Get over your self.
 

 
Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
He didn’t tell me how to live; he lived and let me watch him do it. 
 Clarence Budington Kelland
 
Advice on raising a child is easy to come by, but not when you need it.  Any wisdom I might have on the subject comes from the results, not the practice, and children themselves are maddeningly unique, frustrating the kind of mathematical precision that formulae for parenting seem to recommend.
 
But now that my kids are launched, I am in that position of evaluating how my wife and I did in imparting the values and practices we were intentional about. The answer is mixed.  Lest you misunderstand, we are enormously satisfied with the kinds of adults our children have become.  I could not ask for better offspring.  In fact, I admire them each, starting with the choices they made about life partners. 
 
But I have come to terms with the disappointment I felt that they did not follow the program I laid out in my imagination. However, here’s the fact: I was wrong to imagine them as anything other than they are. And I should have known better. After all, I did not follow the path my parents laid out in their imaginations. On some level, I know they were disappointed (they certainly wanted me to be living near them in Chicago).  On another level, they were pleasantly surprised (I had early declared my refusal to consider studying to be a rabbi). On every level, their love for me was greater than their intentions for me.
 
I would like to think that if I had turned out to be a reprobate, their love would have persisted, but I have known a lot of people who have dealt with awful behavior in their families (themselves, their parents, and/or their kids) whose devotion to each other has remained intact. I have also known a few who have never managed to rise above their expectations for others. That’s tragic, in my opinion.
 
Our children turned out great. And by observing them, I can see which of our values they embraced, which they modified, and which they rejected.  In turn, I can see which of my values I represented well enough and positively enough.  They were not always the ones I tried to articulate.
 
Not so many years ago, I received a Father’s Day card from the three of them that had this quotation from Clarence Budington Kelland on the front.  It landed in my collection of cards I have saved for a long time.  It may be my favorite (from them) because it liberated me from being a pedagogue and affirmed me as a parent.  Long after my day-to-day responsibilities as responsible party had ended, I learned this as the first rule of child-rearing.
 
The other rule came to me earlier, but not early enough. We were determined to provide our kids with a Jewish day school education and did so for each of them through sixth grade. But when it came time to choose a middle school and high school, it was clear that the talents and needs of one of our kids would be better addressed in the public school system. Doing what was right for our child was more important than doing what we had decided was in our child’s best interests. It is a fine distinction, but an important one. The better answer begins with the talents and needs of the child. The other answer begins with the values and presumptions of the parents.
 
My wife and I each had loving and devoted parents.  When they raised us, they had the examples of their own parents and no practical experience on which to base their parenting styles. We were in the same boat, and I am sure we made plenty of decisions in imitation of our parents and plenty in reaction to our parents. It is no different for anyone who first beholds that hungry, bawling, loving bundle of effluence and delight and, if so blessed, the subsequent versions who always manage to be totally different than the one before. Given all of the possible variables, and my complete lack of background in medicine or psychology, I am reluctant to offer anything more specific than two things I wish I knew when I needed them more.
 
The first: live your best life in full view of your kids.
 
The second: do what is right for your child.
 
The rest is commentary. Also, carpools.