Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
One thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child’s name and how old he or she is.  Erma Bombeck
 
I love my kids to pieces. I know their names and their birthdays, but I will admit that as I get farther away from the original event, when I have to call up their ages at the drop of a hat, I hope the hat dropped off the top of a very tall building.
 
When I was a congregational rabbi, I had a small sub-specialty in working with deaf students who wished to convert to Judaism. They were all very patient as I did not know more than a smattering of sign language. I knew nowhere near enough to communicate the specialized vocabulary about practice and faith. Occasionally I would have the luxury of an interpreter if there was someone in the student’s family or circle who would join us, but hiring someone was inordinately expensive, especially for the young people who were my partners in learning. We relied on a lot of writing and their lip-reading skills.
 
One student was a kind and gentle man who could not grasp the concept of mitzvah (divine commandment) no matter how I tried to express it. He had it stuck in his head that the obligations of Jewish law were punitive and heavy, concerned that if he took them on and could not fulfill every one of them, he would be entering some sort of spiritual purgatory. Eventually, this naturally calm and sweet man got furious with me and demanded to know how I managed to live with the constant expectation that I would do the right thing in God’s eyes.
 
As I explained to him how much the structure and meaning of fulfilling each mitzvah enriched my life and added a sense of purpose even to mundane actions, he began to relax. And when I told him I was less concerned about where I fell short than where I succeeded, the light of comprehension washed over him. His hands flew into expressive motion, and he voiced these words: happy burden.
 
Honestly, I had never heard a better explanation of the notion of mitzvah, and certainly not one so succinct. In fact, I have broadened his definition to include more than the specifics of religious observance. I think “happy burden” is a pretty good understanding of what it means to raise children.
 
I will acknowledge that when I was in the middle of that happy burden, I frequently felt more of the burden and less of the happy. I remember many Saturday afternoons, the time when my wife and I each desperately needed our shabbat naps, digging around for the strength and energy to keep my eyes open and my attention focused before she awoke. Each of our kids presented challenges to their parents by having the audacity to have complex feelings and an inadequate vocabulary to express them, especially in those pre-verbal years. And even today, they insist on making their own decisions, sometimes without consulting or even first informing us. The nerve.
 
But I have never been happier than when I bore that burden. Even those times when my heart broke for them or with them, the mitzvah of raising kids (and I am not making that up – you can look it up) is as energizing as it is exhausting, as thrilling as it is overwhelming. Sometimes the combination of those things makes it difficult to know their names and how old they are, at least without a hint.
 
On a smaller level, upholding each mitzvah is the same way – exhausting and energizing, especially if you are expected to remember that what you are doing is a sacred act, intimately connected with a tradition millennia-long and divinely connected. It’s a happy burden.
 
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to call one of my kids to ask how old another one is….

​Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
There are people in the world so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.  Mahatma Gandhi
 
When I was a kid, I developed an aversion to fasting. For me, the worst hours of being Jewish were the concluding hours of Yom Kippur when the last recitations of a year’s-worth of sins crawled like rush hour traffic on the Edens Expressway, and my stomach was furious and took it out on me with a walloping headache. Fasting was neither spiritual nor devotional. If I was going to be redeemed, it was going to be with carbohydrates.
 
I am much more conscious of the world around me now, and so I understand that my voluntary fast was a matter of privilege and personal choice. Gandhi was talking about the people described by Isaiah in the prophetic reading from the morning of Yom Kippur: those who know hunger, nakedness, and homelessness intimately and constantly. But that lesson was easily forgotten for the price of a bagel.
 
Gandhi was not wrong, but he was incomplete. His formulation of this theological claim was designed to call attention to the plight of the poorest of his people. If he were an oncologist, he might have said that there are people so sick that God cannot appear except as a cure. If he were an educator, he might have said that there are people so desperate to learn that God cannot appear except as a teacher. For the desperate and despairing, before they can rise above their suffering and believe, they must be given hope – the lonely, a lover; the freezing, a blanket; the lost, a map.
 
Believing in God has always been hard for those who suffer. Faith traditions have diverse ways to deal with the hard part, and to my disappointment the solution seems to be most often to blame the victim. Either the skeptic is not trying hard enough or continues to put distance between themself and the Divine (by another name: sin). The person committed to non-belief argues that if God is good and loving, why does anyone have to prove fidelity before benefiting from that goodness and love.
 
I cannot make the case for belief in God in less than 750 words, especially since I have already used more than half of them. But I will say this much: though it took me a long time, I eventually gave up on asking the question “what’s in it for me?” It doesn’t matter what kind of hunger overwhelms me, momentarily or continuously. If my belief is dependent on benefiting from a higher being, natural or supernatural, my faith is doomed to dissolve. And if I found comfort and meaning in the way my personal distress was assuaged, then I have a peculiar (I’d even say pathological) interest in maintaining that distress so as not to lose my connection to the divine.
 
It seems to me that faith is a decision influenced by many factors. It is choice that is no more dependent on logic than on illogic, no more on benefit than on need. When the question of God’s existence and presence is answered before it is asked, then the answer is unreliable.
 
Maybe you consider these things to be peculiar coming from a rabbi, especially one who professes belief.  It raises all sorts of issues about revelation, scripture, and, most of all, religion. Our collective and individual attachment to those expressions of the divine are extremely important, but, in the end, not definitive. My desperation for a loaf of bread is no more relevant than my need for love, wisdom, or justice. Or, for that matter, reassurance about the eternal disposition of my soul.
 
I know a guy whose story of faith begins with something remarkably insignificant. Let’s say it involved a terrifying noise during severe weather (not the truth, but it will do). Unaccustomed to prayer, this person nonetheless petitioned the God in whom they claimed not to believe to be a protection from whatever was causing that noise. The sound stopped. That person became immediately devout.
 
I am skeptical of that experience. But over the years, I have seen how that decision to believe has influenced the individual. They have lived into their faith in the best conceivable way. (It is not my way, as it happens, but to stretch the analogy, that’s like arguing that if the hungry person got a loaf of bread, if it wasn’t pumpernickel it didn’t count.)
 
I seek no gain in converting non-believers. The choice of faith informs the way I live that stands in contrast to what kind of person I would be if I did not believe. It tells me that if Gandhi is correct, if I am true to my faith, then somehow I must be that loaf, not to persuade the hungry person to a place of belief, rather to affirm my own.

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
There is a predatory nature to aging.    Marc Fitzerman
 
I am fortunate to have friends of all ages. The ones who are younger than I am (an increasing percentage at this point in my life!) seem to fret as they approach “significant” birthdays. I am happy to report that my own experience has been that every time of life has been better than those past. It’s not to say that I can run as fast, drink caffeine in the same quantities, or stay up as late as I used to, but the benefits of being older have (so far) outweighed the deficits of what falls away.
 
I have written before about living longer than parents and grandparents. I have quite a way to go to outlive my mother (who made it almost to 93), but I am well past two grandparents who died in their fifties. At this point, I have nothing to prove in my life, so I can live into my values first and address my needs second – a very pleasant reversal.
 
But I cannot deny what my friend and colleague Rabbi Marc Fitzerman says: there is a predatory nature to aging. I feel like I am being stalked. And that’s not (only) paranoia speaking. Old age is out to get me.
 
Of course, it always has been. We are born to die, yet all but a few of us (philosophers, health care providers or the chronically morose) mostly push away the consciousness of it. As younger people we believe ourselves invincible, as young adults we see a perpetual vista, in middle age we discern a horizon. But individually and collectively, there comes a moment when we realize that the faint shadow on the margins of our sunny day has come into focus, wearing a hooded robe and carrying a scythe. And once seen, it cannot be unseen.
 
I pause for a moment in the midst of this cynical observation to note that death visits plenty of people much earlier than that, unfortunately. Too many younger people succumb to disease, violence or tragedy, and the people who love them are injured by that shadow with a perpetual ache that cannot be relieved. They all wish they could go back to constructive denial.
 
But collectively we understand that as our eyes grow dim, our hearing fades, our feet are no longer fleet, the one thing that we seem to be more acutely conscious of is the sign we dismissed when some disheveled guy waving it on the street was mistaken for a religious kook: The End Is Near. Or, at least, nearer.
 
At this point, all I can say is, “Oh.” I look back and recognize how blessed I have been (or, if you prefer, lucky) that I have escaped almost all of the ways the quality and length of my life might have been frustrated.  Two of my best friends from high school died young – one before forty and the other in his fifties. One of the best people I ever knew saw his life fall away in pieces before he was robbed of the consciousness to recognize it. And not just others; I see the mistakes and bad judgments that have derailed the respect for and success of people who mostly don’t deserve to be crushed, called out by people no more righteous or accomplished than they are, and I know I dodged a similar fate. I work hard to understand that I am a random beneficiary of this late-life blessing.
 
I am a long way from welcoming the end of my run, but I am past being sanguine about it. When Marc Fitzerman offered his observation, I am fairly sure he was talking about “aging” as being “getting old,” but there is a predatory nature to aging no matter your age. It’s on public display in child actors, 35-year-old athletes, corporation board members, and the success of pharmacological and technological ways we try to restore our pursuit of beauty and virility.
 
I don’t consider myself to be a particularly insightful example of human being. I know what seems to work for me. Since I retired, I make a point of smiling every morning before I get out of bed. It is an expression of gratitude. My thankfulness mostly does not last all day, but at least I begin on the right foot. Old age may be out to get me. But it hasn’t gotten me yet.