Values and Validation - Tikkun

I wrote this as part of a book/diatribe/project I was working on long ago...but lately, with my own inner thinking into what it means to live as a Ben Yisrael in Eretz Yisrael, it has come up again. Perhaps it isn't directly related to Aliyah, and perhaps it is; to me, these issues are, in essence, the very core of living within relationship with HaShem.

And there's nothing wrong with me

This is how I'm supposed to be

In a land of make believe

That don't believe in me

…Home is where your heart is

But what a shame

Cause everyone's heart

Doesn't beat the same

It's beating out of time…

I don't feel any shame

I won't apologize

When there ain't nowhere you can go

Running away from pain

When you've been victimized

Tales from another broken home[1]

These words, sung by one of the many American punk rock bands with a political message, have, to this author, always held a powerful grip on encapsulating the effects of Western culture on the psyche.

“Home” is a concept not easily put into words. It is our refuge, our sanctum, our institution for the whole. It evokes the pictures of the family around the fire, the yelling of children playing in security, and the nurturing environment in which people grow into themselves. It is the place you go back to, that you belong to.

When home is where your heart is, as arbitrary as that sounds, and the individuals comprising that home have no cohesive identity, then there is no belonging – and the “hearts beating out of time” learn their home is broken, and need to run away to the refuge of their castles in the air (of which their psychologists collect the rent).

Today’s times have a need for stable homes, in any form, more than any other. Teens at risk, high school pregnancies, disappearing morals, urban blight, the wonderful statistic that one in four American college students possess an STD, the “Jesus of Suburbia” culture, the rise of postmodernism and its moral irreverence (and irrelevance), the erosion of what is called “Judeo-Christian values”, the rise in cultural glorification of youthful promiscuous sex and violence…and as the song alludes to, the increasing feelings of victimization in a life that is usually seen as totally unconnected to the perceptions of those living it; they are little islands of consciousness, floating in a vast and tangled sea of confusion and pain. Even Orthodox Judaism, bastion of the ironclad conservatist safety net of being set in the stone of twenty years ago, has begun cracking at the seams from an internal pressure created by its teenagers and the external pressure of the society described.

Today’s feel good stories which populate the self help shelves in book stores all over the planet have one amazing quality to them worth noticing – a brilliant summation, in one moment, where everything comes together. We are inspired by these stories, taking solace in that perfect moment and its unspoken comfort that perhaps one day we will reach ours...and never think about where it may take us. We watch the poor family get their new house on Extreme Makeover, see their tearful reactions, and never see what happens when they can’t make the tax payments on the house, or simply get conceited and entitled with their newfound wealth/status symbol and wind up divorced. Or we see the athlete winning the gold medal, shedding tears in their accomplishment, but do not see them return home broken and lost as to what on earth they should do next now that the moment they have invested the last 4 years in has now passed.

Listening to mental health professionals and community workers[2] (as well as other opinionated blowhards) the fast paced life of the twenty first century has robbed us of our family values, and our lost and confused children are acting out because they need to feel valued and validated; as the family is intended to provide the value and validation of the children as the embark on their quest for self, when it does not, the children look elsewhere – with disastrous results.

This may or may not be true.

The psychological need to be validated, to be valued, is nothing new. Self-help books and parenting manuals (and other such tomes of fiction) all stress the need for validation. This, in and of itself, is harmless at worst. It might carry the strange threat of turning people into hollow shells of themselves because they objectify everything about their own self, but that doesn’t really affect people too badly, right?

Living in the age of scientific reason, in which (ridiculously) something being “unscientific” means it cannot possibly be true, we seek validation from what is outside of ourselves; this is perfectly acceptable for investigating worldly phenomena, but comes up woefully inadequate for validating our own existence, and its experiences.

The root that “value” and “validation” share comes from the old French valoir, meaning "be worthy," which itself is originally "be strong," from the Latin valere "be strong, be well, be worth, have power, be able". Notice the difference in the shades of the meaning, though. It went from something within you, an enabling force of Selfhood, to something outside of you that you need in order to be that very Self in the first place.

            Anyone who is a student of the Western zeitgeist’s evolution, or was simply alive at the right time, has seen this shift in meaning accelerate in the last fifty years. We live in a society in which people see this need for validation as a fact of life. Were this to be a fact of Western life, that would be fine. But it has crept into Jewish life in insidious ways, and this has in turn corrupted our life beyond recognition.[3]

            Of course, values are what we ourselves hold to be important, where as validation is what gives us our worth. This is because the definition we give to ourselves (our “values”) is what creates our sense of validation for being so.

In the West, the objectifying that people do of themselves is conceptual based – I am a[4] doctor, a slut, a religious man of faith, or any other such idea. This is who I am, it is what I think is important, and because it is what I hold dear and significant I, too, am significant for being this way.

The problem is when Torah observant Jews, such as many of those today, define themselves as those who do the XYZ of mitzvos. Because the definition is action based, the value is doing these things (eating the properly baked crackers on Passover, only carrying on Saturdays within a proper string enclosure) – and the validation is their being done. Which has nothing to do with you at all.

Now, I bet you those who already have the answers are jumping out of their chairs they were strapped to after the introduction and screaming “of course it’s about you doing it – you go to Olam Haba for it!”

And I will answer you that if that is your motivation, you are no different than the four year old who needs a cookie to clean their room (or go to the toilet). It isn’t the cookie that is important, even if it is the reason the four year old is doing it.[5]

But if that four year old ritualizes cleaning his room for the sake of the cookie, he will never come to value a clean room. Nor will he develop feelings of self worth by having a clean room, because THERE IS NO SELF – only what needs to be done. And so we have adults who treat their marriages as rituals (“but honey, I bought you a nice new dress! See, I love you!” “But you haven’t paid any attention to me at all, you do not share your dreams, emotions, your experience of Life with me…”)

            And this is why the hearts beat out of time, why there is no Home, and why people are broken. Because we naively think that the reasons for doing mitzvos that we learn when we are four years old hold water when we are 16, or 60…and the consequences of this is the systematic destruction of any way of self-validation that is predicated on a healthy sense of self, instead of its negation.

            It is here, in that ridiculous, unintended, vicious, self negating definition of value that Torah Observant Jewry finds itself. What is important is the prescribed actions and properly prescribing the proper actions. A self, a “me” with dreams and ambitions, goals and relationships, fears and loves, is at best extraneous and at worst a problem to overcome in the pursuit of perfectly prescribed perfect actions.

            This world? Why bother? It’s only a stage – we do our actions and play our parts. Knowledge? What for? It only takes time away from prescribing perfect actions, and doing them. Worldview? Philosophy? Perspective? What do you need any of that for? It’s all simple – do whatever you can while you can for the biggest and best reward in the Next World.

            In short, our vision of the ultimate human being we are trying to become is a well informed, perfectly efficient action machine with the worldview of a four year old.[6]

            Perhaps the greatest area this has become true is with learning itself. People spend more time learning today than ever before, yet asking them WHAT they learned usually yields a parroting of arcane subjects at best and a puzzled look as they simply say the name of the Masechta or Sefer. Learning has become an action, something you DO, instead of the acquiring of new information to fit into a worldview.

            Of course, we make allowances and exceptions for those who (chaval) want to do things like work. The actions remain paramount, only the focus changes. Instead of learning being the action one should focus on, we have others – tzedaka, for example.[7] But regardless of the prescribed action, it remains the DOING that is important, and importance granting. People’s growth, their self discovery, their level of understanding of the world and of He Who is behind it, their depth, their humanity – it isn’t important.

            Small wonder our children are off seeking validation from pop psychology and faceless strangers on internet chatrooms (that they are turning to under their covers on shabbos, perhaps). Its more than family that creates validation, it is Home. And the Bayit that was supposed to be there to validate and value the world itself is now a golden onion filled with those who find value in submission and in death, and we console ourselves with some parable about a flask in the sky that collects tears[8].

            This worldview has serious historical underpinnings – it did not arise by accident.

            Following the Holocaust, people came to the shores of a strange land (whichever strange land that was – America or Israel) to rebuild. As most people react in times of horrible loss, they hunker down defensively and seek to recreate what they had before. In this case it was the Europe of old, with its simple shtetl folk and overall educationless masses.

            Judaism is a tradition based movement. Precedent and tradition are the two pillars of all Halachic debate as well as Friday night conversations. It is no surprise that the ideals of the old world were imported as the pinnacles of achievement to strive for. The model person would be one motivated by faith, not reason, and action, not perspective; their identity would be one set and defined by a marked distance from intellectualism – after all, wasn’t that the problem with those Reformniks in Berlin who brought the Holocaust on us in the first place? Oh, no, never. Who needs questions – can anyone answer where G-d was during the Holocaust? So of what use are questions? Better to do what G-d told us to do and leave the questions alone.

            This idea is said to have appeared in Europe around the time of the Chasam Sofer, who himself was battling those Reformers in their infancy. In an effort to combat their growing appeal and allure to the typical (unlearned) Jew on the street, he created the single most destructive pun in all of history - “haChadash assur min haTorah”[9]. From this nobly intended idea, a branch of arch-conservatism in Halacha was born. Or so goes the narrative.

            It isn’t true.

            Ashkenazi Jewry had this streak in it from the time of the early Acharonim. It is the tendency of exiled people to absorb influences from their host cultures (one only needs to look at our calendar; the names for the months in the Jewish calendar are Babylonian (!)  in origin, and so were pretty much half the names of the amoraim living in Bavel[10]). The predominant influence in the lands of Ashkenaz was the Church. Looking through the Mussar/machshava seforim written in Europe, we find themes of needing to be saved from sin (albeit those of our own doing instead of some original flavor), emphasis on faith as the guiding principle of worship, a philosophical/ontological worldview based on the soul and a world in which its actions or beliefs are meaningful that is not perceivable, a break from science (as the world they were interested in was not the one they were living in), a religious worldview predicated on the personal (it is YOU and your being righteous or wicked which counts, as opposed to the Klal), among other examples.

            (For those who are going to point to the split between the Vilna Gaon and the Chassidim and say that innovation in Jewish life was alive and well, it is fairly argued that both camps were conservatively based. The Chassidic camp quickly ritualized everything in their way of life, venerating the simple unlearned faith of the farmer and wagon driver as the GOAL of Torah life. The stories passed down to each generation focused on a mystical happiness that could be experienced by those who believed, and denigrated those who learned but did not live their learning. The Litvish camp, while stressing the need to learn and know, valued a disconnected knowledge base that was not tied into experience – learn, but keep it in pilpul which is intellectually dazzling and completely utterly useless for answering a simple question of what to do. Both sides refused to engage the world around them, or even each other; both approaches preached the “hold on tight and do what you need to do” that we are calling attention to. Their namesakes and descendants still do.)

            This cross-evolution is best referenced by the “Judeo-Christian values” (and there’s that word again) the western world continues to use as its moral compass. It isn’t just that the Christian ones are based on the Jewish morals of the Old Testament (though that is true as well) – they work in tandem, are perceived to be the same thing. It is no accident that the support for Israel that is still present in the West is based on ethics, on shared morals, on shared beliefs in the primacy of the “Old Testament G-d”, a Messiah that will redeem the chosen ones from the Ishmaelite, etc.[11]

            This is why Western civilization exerts such a strong pull on Jews – it isn’t just that we are absorbing modern culture from them (hence the black hats, suits, and white shirts from the 1950s, for example) – we subconsciously see ourselves as one of their kind. The typical Ashkenazi looks at himself as a Westerner – not a Middle Easterner! And eventually, the need to be different and distinct begins to fade as the need to be echad min ha’amim[12] takes over. As “enlightened humans”, who are “logical, rational, scientific” beings, why would it matter if I watch some pornography? Or eat only properly slaughtered chickens? Or not use my phone on Saturdays?

            Why are we different? Why is G-d setting us apart – to do the proper rituals? What’s the difference. Who wants to believe in an arbitrary G-d who Desires Burger Delights instead of Big Macs?? I want to be a person, not an action/ritual machine. A human being.

            This, sadly, is what Rav Shimon bar Yochai was alluding to with his drasha of “ki adam atem – atem k’ruyim adam[13]” – what Judaism IS is simply the way to be a human, Adam, the pinnacle of Creation. We all want to be something real, something valuable. And that is what it means to be Adam. To be Man, primal Man. Not a belief machine, not a ritual doer – Man.

            And so, in a terrible way, our children are NOT turning to the outside for validation. They are, in their eyes, REturning to what is truly valuable, and valued, in the only way they know how.

            Until we understand that, there is nothing we can do. For them, and for ourselves.

           

And so we have a generation where ALL are lost, confused, adrift…off course.

Those who follow after their hearts and eyes sometimes do not come back to the fold. Some do. Others die inside, leaving the passion and dreams of their youth behind in a maze of socially acceptable ways to numb their pain and disbelief. Some find consolation in highly personal relationships with the Divine, trying to navigate the slippery precipice of insanity and religious devotion.

And all suffer from a broken values system, crying out for G-d to validate their lives, their selves, their souls.

Now, we all know what you’re going to say next. “Is the rest of the world any better? Do they, too, not have this problem of a lack of self value in their lives? Does the rise in teen pregnancies, drug usage, gang participation, crime, and other markers of social deviancy not speak of this problem being present, and much worse, in the outside world?”

You are a hundred percent right.

And that doesn’t change a thing about what I said. Just because someone else has a broken arm doesn’t mean yours isn’t broken too, or that broken arms are normal, or right. And if we are to reconnect with what it truly means to be a ben Yisrael, a Jew, a Semite, call it Larry if you wish – but if we are to take steps to reach for Tikkun, then we must acknowledge what is broken, regardless of how it compares to others.

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[1] Green Day, “Jesus of Suburbia (Tales of Another Broken Home)”, American Idiot. 2004

[2] Of which I am technically one.

[3] What once set the Jewish people apart from all others was its Life, its “joie de vivre” for lack of a better way to put it. Jewish people had a cheekiness, a sense of self, an Existential Chein that both proclaimed that Jews were distinct, yet open to all possibilities. “We are not you, but we could be anything…” The youthful abandon of “Lechteich acharai baMidbar”, mixed with the seriousness and self-definition of “Naaseh v’nishma”, is the perfect snapshot of the genetic personality of those descended from Yaakov/Yisrael.

                Instead, it is seen today to be a need to be removed from all possibilities, to run away from fundamental science and knowledge, to build fences to keep the world away; we glorify Heaven at the expense of Earth, creating castles in the air of minute distinctions between super-kosher and supersuper­-kosher so as to say we are better Jews than the person next door (who nebach eats that hechsher). We venerate the Gedolim and denigrate ourselves, questioning whether we have a right to our perceptions on the parsha  or pshat in the Gemara. Who are we, after all? They are men, and we are donkeys, and donkeys don’t have the right to have pshat in Gemara…

[4] See Reddit’s IAMA section to see this in action.

[5] Much like the apocryphal story (attributed to Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill, and Groucho Marx among others) about a man who asks a girl if she will sleep with him for a million dollars. Of course, she says yes. He then offers her two dollars and she slaps his face, saying, ‘What do you think I am?’ He answers, ‘I know what you are. We are just haggling over the price.’

So there are those who will only put on black boxes if the price is Heaven (“a million dollars”).

[6] Do what Tatte tells you for a reward! Never lose sight of this, and ignore everything else. Now go clean your room. Or say the magical incantation over a glass of water. It’s all the same, after all.

[7] Insert denigrating comment about the ba’al habus from the Rebbe here.

[8] The famous medrash (which I do not know its source) about how G-d collects all of our tears and when the flaskis filled, the Messiah will come. Besides the obvious point that this implies that the L-rd is a sadist, it’s also completely ridiculous in the context it is placed in.

[9] Taken from the Halachos of grain harvested before and after the Omer, the pun reads to mean “all things new are prohibited by Torah law”.

[10] Abaye, Rava, Pappa, Huna, Rabbah, Rami, Rafram, Geviha, to name a few.

[11] And therefore, in an insane reversal of decades of political action, American Jews now vote Republican, precisely because of these shared values and morals (from when the Republican Party itself embraced the “Evangelical Right”, in the mid-1980s). Elections are framed around questions of abortion and gay marriage, even on the most local level in Jewish communities. What a far cry from the days of Jews being the most vociferous Democrats of all (though the estranged children of these people continue to trumpet the liberalism of the Left as their (woefully wrong) understanding of “tikkun olam”…).

[12] Paraphrase of Devarim 17:14 and Shmuel 1 8:20, among other places.

[13] …v’heim lo k’ruyim adam”. Yevamos 61a