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.
[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
