CAN I GET A WITNESS?

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
Haven’t you ever longed for a witness?     “Katrine Fonsmark”
 
I apologize for the explanation that must accompany this quotation.  It was spoken by a character in the Danish series “Borgen,” a version of “West Wing” set in Denmark (on Netflix).  The writer of the series, and therefore likely this remark, is Adam Price, who authored it in Danish and put it in the mouth of Birgitte Hjort Sørenson, the actress playing the role.  The plotline is powerful, but too long to recount.  The English words that begin this column are from a subtitle.  If you got this far, thank you.
 
This much you should know: it is spoken to someone who has hidden a secret from the woman he purports to love.  After he tries to win her back, she complains that he keeps secrets from her, clearly insecure that if she knew them, she would no longer love him back.  But without that honesty, she insists, she does not have confidence in his love.  He balks.  She says, “Haven’t you ever longed for a witness?”
 
And so, we have art imitating life.  From Biblical times to today, the desire we frantically pursue – to be loved – is challenged by our concern that if the object of our affections knew the truth about us, the love would disappear.  Cain tries to hide his fratricide from the God whose favor he seeks.  Jacob deceives his father to get a blessing.  Kings and queens, presidents and prime ministers, ordinary couples, best of friends hide essential beliefs, experiences, and identities for fear of losing love.
 
I’m not talking about mere embarrassment, like the time I discovered that my zipper was down throughout my first interview as a rabbinical student.  (I got the job.) I mean secrets that live inside a well-constructed artifice designed to present to the world the image of who I would like to be instead of who I am.
 
I cannot pretend to know what goes on in the heart of someone who holds such a secret.  I barely know my own. I have managed to rise above most of my self-inflicted insecurities and to pick myself up and stand again on those occasions that I have flopped.  But I would not have been able to do so if I had not taken a chance that the love directed my way was genuine and unshakeable. 
 
That’s the nature of real love.  It is not a favor bestowed on the recipient.  It is not an affection that must be earned, bought, or justified on a continual basis.  It is instead an affirmation that you are valued for the wholeness of who you are. 
 
As you read this, if you are like every human being (and you are), you imagine that there is some part of you that could break the love on which you have come to rely.  Perhaps it is some aspect of your identity that you imagine is anathema to friend, partner, or parent.  Perhaps it is a bad behavior in your past, distant or recent, you are striving to put behind you (not always successfully).  Perhaps it is something which befell you that presses on your heart though it is over and done.
 
The result is a place of loneliness to which you exile yourself when companionship is what you need the most.  The isolation you feel is something you would not wish on anyone else.  You hope, at the deepest level, that given the opportunity you would free anyone about whom you care from similar anguish.
 
And that’s why a failure of genuine love is a shortcoming of the person who withdraws it.  Love is not always approval.  Love is not always endorsement.  Love is a witness to the wholeness of another.  When we are blessed with it, the door to self-imposed solitary confinement is slammed shut before entry. 
 
I think it is no wonder that every religion – that is, every imagining of the human relationship with the divine – insists on the primacy of love.
 
I am not a therapist and I have no training in the sciences of behavior and emotion.  Please do not take these words as advice to suddenly bare your soul to someone who says they love you.  And, even more so, if you have no such love in your life at this moment, please do not consider radical self-disclosure to be the way to inspire it.
 
Rather, be the witness.  In doing so, you will fulfill the longing of the people whom you love to know they cannot break that connection. 
 

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