​THE CASE FOR INTEGRITY -- Numbers 24:13

The Numbers:13 Project 
 
‘Though Balak were to give me his house full of silver and gold, I could not of my own accord do anything good or bad contrary to the LORD’s command. What the LORD says, that I must say.’     Numbers 24:13 
 
What constitutes integrity?  I try not to get too theological in these columns, but sometimes it is unavoidable, as you will see. 
 
I have always imagined integrity to be connected to integration, which is to say, the opposite of compartmentalization.  I think it is impossible to live life without some measure of cordoning off certain experiences from others.  I learned it as a rabbi a long time ago on the day I walked from one room in the synagogue where I conducted the naming for the first child and granddaughter of a multi-generational family to another room where I conducted a funeral after the sudden death of a young father of two toddlers.  The emotion in each room could not have been different, but I could not afford to be swept away by either joy or grief. 
 
The contrasts in our lives are not always that severe, of course.  Yet, some measure of separation between work and home, responsibility and indulgence, birth and death, reaping and sowing, embracing and refraining from embracing -- you know the list -- is the experience of everyone who has been around the block even just once. 
 
Still, the person who segments every experience and lives always and only in the moment seems (at least to me) to live without integrity.  Integration involves connecting the various aspects of any system (in our case, a life) into some kind of comprehensive and comprehensible whole. 
 
As a person of faith, I have one more criterion I think cannot be overlooked.  Lots of folks find a way to knit together the parts of their internal landscape as they process their sojourn through life.  Using the compass of conscience, however defined, or of self-interest (in its extreme expression known as narcissism), they mistake self-satisfaction for integrity.  People whose sense of integrity is limited to what happens inside themselves are guilty of compartmentalization writ large. 
 
The person of integrity is connected with something larger and external.  For me, that’s God.  I am not smug about that faith (nor even the version of it to which I adhere), but I believe deeply that anyone who answers to no standard but an internal standard is, in the end, a scoundrel. The reason: every decision, most especially those we like to call “moral,” is based on serving the self.  It is not necessarily the case that the self-serving moral decision is bad or wrong -- not everyone is completely selfish -- but it is not transferable to other people who do not share the same internal landscape.  Which, of course, is everyone else. 
 
We are living in times in which integrity is pretty easily compromised.  The parade of public figures who seem to have traded their principles for access to power or money (mostly to find themselves exposed and/or under a bus) is constant.  You do not need to subscribe to the external values to which an individual has pledged allegiance to feel the pain and disappointment when integrity has disintegrated.  Compulsively clinging to that external standard comes with its own set of problems, but letting it go entirely almost always leads to tragedy, whether it is misconduct, opprobrium or plain old loneliness. 
 
The oft-maligned Bilaam (aka Baalam) seems to appreciate this truth when he is offered a fortune to use his oracular talents to condemn the Israelites. He is, at least at this moment, a man of integrity, that is, answering both to his internal and external values.  It is a high point in his life (which precedes the low point -- being outsmarted by a talking donkey).  He is not an Israelite/Jew, which teaches the lesson that integrity is not tribe-dependent (and allows the Bible to make his fall less personal to Jewish readers). 
 
Maybe some other time I will muse about how to balance the internal compass and the external standards.  For the moment, I will stop with the suggestion that adage “no one is an island” should inspire us not only to intertwined relationships, but also to a life of integrity, 
 
 

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