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A Zoo with a View
In the 1920s, comedian Robert Benchley commented that there are two categories of people in the world: people who divide people into categories and people who don’t. He went on to remark that, “Both classes are extremely unpleasant to meet socially, leaving practically no one in the world whom one cares very much to know.”
Groucho Marx may have been thinking the same thing when he famously quipped that he wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have him as a member.
In all seriousness, it may be high time that we took these humorists and their absurdist observations a bit more seriously.
My first serious exposure to absurdism was back in my sophomore year at the University of California, when my English professor introduced our class to playwright Edward Albee. I was immediately fascinated by The Zoo Story, although I wasn’t quite worldly enough to appreciate the subtext of class warfare and social malaise.
Time would solve that problem. But I was still able to recognize the hidden threads of realism sewn together in a garment of tragicomic incongruity.
When Kindness is Cruelty
With a fury reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina, Typhoon Lionrock savaged northeast Asia two weeks ago, unleashing floods that left 100,000 North Koreans homeless and more than half a million without water. The devastation was so extraordinary that the North Korean government responded in a way equally unprecedented — by turning to the West for help.
I confess that my initial reaction was smug satisfaction. There’s something providential about a rogue nation responsible for instigating so much strife and apprehension around the world coming hat-in-hand to beg for international aid and succor.
However, after a moment’s reflection my feelings of moral superiority evaporated instantaneously. The victims here are not corrupt government nabobs; rather, they are the self-same people already victimized by the congenital corruption of their rulers. Even if the Orwellian tactics of the Kim dynasty have successfully hypnotized and lobotomized the people of North Korea into abject reverence, those hapless people hardly deserve the added suffering and indignation of a world denying them aid because of the sins of their overlords.
Divine justice will have to wait a bit longer.
To complicate matters further, just last week North Korea conducted yet another nuclear test in violation of its already-violated non-proliferation treaty. And so, with the UN blustering about increased sanctions and South Korea preparing for “the worst-case scenario,” humanitarian organizations are grappling with the logical and logistical problems of aiding the unfortunate citizens of a terrorist nation without helping the nation itself.
Of course, this is hardly a new dilemma.
No Re-entry
“I can only show you the door. You have to walk through it.”
~ Morpheus, The Matrix
Life is a series of doorways, each leading into the future. Fear and complacency try to convince us not to go through one; complacency and arrogance try to convince us that there’s no need to go through another.
Either way, once we go through, there’s no going back. All we can do is be careful which doors we choose to open, and learn from our mistakes so that we don’t repeat them.
Here’s a deeper look, excerpted from my book Proverbial Beauty:
Fortunate is the man who listens for me, attentively waiting at my doors day by day, keeping watch by the doorposts of my entryways (Proverbs 8:34).
In the language of Solomon, a doorway symbolizes a point of transition, a threshold of spiritual growth, and an opportunity not only to realize but to increase one’s personal potential. And so wisdom says, as it were: “None is more fortunate than those who listen to me, who learn my ways and commit themselves to my principles, who wait eagerly and attentively for every opportunity to rise to the challenges demanded by moral discipline, who do not rest on their laurels but follow every moral victory by hastening to the next ‘entranceway’ and waiting for the next ‘door’ of opportunity to open up for them.”
It sounds a simple formula, but although “change” may make an effective campaign slogan, human nature deplores change and yearns for the status quo. For many, nothing is more frightening than the unknown that lies on the other side of the next “door.” And human creativity knows no bounds in its efforts to avoid knocking at the doors life places in our path.
In the mythical town of Khelm, the synagogue beadle would rise at dawn each morning to go around the town, knocking on doors to rouse the parishioners for the morning prayer service.
Years went by, and as the beadle grew older it became increasingly difficult for him to make the rounds. One winter, after a particularly heavy snowfall, he told the synagogue elders that he would be unable to make it out the next morning to knock on doors.
The wise men of Khelm convened an emergency meeting. Without the beadle to knock on the doors of the townspeople, there was no way to ensure that they would have the requisite quorum of ten men for the morning service. But appointing a replacement also posed a problem. For one thing, the beadle had served the community loyally for decades, and it seemed unappreciative to unceremoniously remove him from his post. For another, it was difficult to think of a replacement as reliable and trustworthy as the beadle had been.
After lengthy consideration, the wise men finally devised a solution. No replacement would be necessary after all. Instead, they hired workers to remove the doors from all the homes in the town and line them up in the beadle’s house. The next morning, the beadle rose at his usual time, knocked on every door without having to leave the comfort of his home, and then went back to bed.
Even if we make it through one doorway, our problems are still not over. For just as fear and self-interest are eager to turn us back before we pass through any given door, arrogance and complacency are waiting to pounce upon us after we make it to the other side, urging us to be satisfied with what we have achieved and warning us not to risk what we have by trying to accomplish something more.
Of course, the most successful deceptions are the ones closest to the truth. There is always risk in aspiring to greatness, and reaching for the unattainable is as certain a recipe for failure as not attempting to reach at all.
This is why we find some doors closed to us. It is for our own benefit that fate may bar us from pursuing the most appealing pathways: those ways could lead to crippling failures if we tried to follow them, or else leave us giddy with pride and quash further opportunities for success.
No one ever said life was simple. Only through self-reflection, sincere introspection, and seeking counsel from the wise can we hope to choose rightly and wisely. If we make every effort to push ourselves to the limits of our potential without giving in to impulse or ego, more often than not we can expect to succeed in our endeavors. And if we find that some doors remain closed to us, with perseverance we will discover that other doors open to lead us toward the same, or better, destinations.
Going all Waze at once
‘Do you realize what ethics has cost us this year.’
Driving in any unfamiliar city can be daunting, disorienting, and disconcerting. Driving in a foreign country can be downright dyspeptic. Driving in Israel can be a flirtation with catastrophe.
In some ways it’s better than it used to be. Traffic has gotten so dense that drivers simply cannot indulge the reckless habits that once prevailed. It’s hard to bob and weave when your car is stuck in gridlock.
But when the traffic starts moving, the experience can be harrowing, made all the more stressful as you try to find your way along unfamiliar boulevards and position yourself to make quick turns with little notice.
Thank goodness for Waze.
Just plug in your destination, follow the directions, and voila! Oh, sure, we made a few wrong turns, but even then Waze got us right back on track.
Most of the time.
Click here to read the whole article.
Hat tip: Rabbi Yehoshua Binyamin Falk
My interview with Bill Martinez
Listen to my recent interview about faith and politics on Bill Martinez live.
The Perils of Social Grade Inflation
Here’s a no-brainer.
You want to improve your basketball game. Would you rather practice one-on-one with your older brother, who’s on the JV team, or with Kobe Bryant?
Unless you possess a serious streak of masochism, you did not choose Kobe Bryant — for reasons that should be obvious: while you will definitely improve playing with someone marginally better than yourself, you will accomplish nothing by playing with someone exponentially better than you are. Except, in all likelihood, the rapid deflation of your self-esteem.
Applying this principle more broadly, it’s easy to see how associating with peers slightly better than ourselves — whether academically, professionally, or morally — will push us to higher levels in our own conduct and performance. But the benefits of implied social pressure disappear when we perceive our peer group to be functioning on a higher level than it actually is.
Falling Skies
The death of any young person is tragic, and all the more tragic when unnecessary. In today’s world where sensory-gratification is king and accountability is unknown, few question the wisdom of jumping out of an airplane for kicks, especially when the chances of anything going awry are so small.
But those odds assert themselves eventually, as they did last month in Acampo, California. The two young men who lost their lives were jumping about an hour’s drive from where I jumped myself almost four decades ago. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But I’ve come to reconsider, as I explain in this essay from 1999, originally published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
“Middle age has finally arrived,” I said to myself as I confronted a life insurance application form for the first time ever. But as I filled in the blanks and checked off the boxes, I suddenly paused, suspended between youth and old age, as I read and reread one question midway through the form: Have you ever been skydiving?
I consider myself an honest person, so I found myself in the midst of a moral struggle as I contemplated how I should answer. The reasoning behind the question seemed obvious: why should any business gamble a quarter of a million dollars on the life of someone foolish enough to jump out of an airplane?
The way I figured it, however, there are three reasonable explanations why an otherwise sane person would do such a thing.
One, as in the case of former President George Bush, to save his life when his plane has been hit by enemy fire in WWII.
Two, also as in the case of George Bush celebrating his 75th birthday, when one is winding down his life and figures he hasn’t much of it left to lose anyway.
And three, as in my own case, when one is not yet sufficiently mature to appreciate that his life is far too precious a thing to be thrown casually out of an open hatch at 3000 feet.
Barring any of these three excuses, an insurer would be entirely justified in refusing coverage or inflating charges. But why, since I now regard jumping from an airplane as ample cause for mandatory psychiatric observation, should I be burdened with doubled insurance premiums because of a momentary lapse in good sense when I was half my present age?
As it turned out, I went with a different company, one whose application phrased the question this way: “Have you been skydiving in the last ten years?” That’s much more fair, I think.
Of course, insurance companies may just be looking for excuses to jack up their prices. After all, compared to BASE jumping, ice climbing, and other extreme sports, skydiving is positively run of the mill. Could George Bush, a former president of the United States, former director of the CIA, and former member of the NRA, be so completely off-the-wall? (Never mind that the poor former first lady could hardly bear to watch her husband’s escapades.)
Indeed, my diving instructor (whose name was also George) told us repeatedly: “Skydiving is no riskier than crossing the street!”
George isn’t alive any more. He wasn’t killed crossing the street, either.
As a 19-year-old undergraduate still looking for a major course of study, life seemed to have little to offer me except cheap thrills. If something would go wrong, and I would splatter against the plowed earth of the Sacramento valley, well, what was the point of being alive if I didn’t experience all life had to offer?It goes without saying that children of all ages will be drawn like moths to the fire of every kind of sensory stimuli. It is our job as responsible adults to shield them from the flames of both real danger or virtual thrills, to gently prod them along the road to wisdom by exposing them to more rewarding and enduring highs than those brought on by adrenaline rush.
In the same way that chomping on spearmint gum deadens the palate to the subtle complexities of fine food and wine, the instant gratification of putting one’s life at risk may, in the end, kill off any hope of ever savoring the subtle joys of maturity, even if those dangerous pastimes do not themselves prove fatal.
The Talmud offers the following insight into human nature: “If someone says, ‘I struggled but did not achieve,’ don’t believe him; if he says, ‘I achieved without struggle,’ don’t believe him; but if he says, ‘I struggled and achieved,’ believe him.”
The Talmud goes beyond the simple axiom that there is no sense of accomplishment without exertion. It tells us that exertion and effort will inevitably produce a sense of accomplishment. And unlike the transient high produced by LSD, PCP, or any contrived brush with danger, the sense of accomplishment produced by struggle will not vanish into nothingness, leaving behind an emotional void or the anguish of physical or psychological withdrawal. It will endure, and spur us on to greater struggles and greater accomplishments.
Without intellectual effort, we would never graduate from Dr. Seuss to Shakespeare, from Marvel Comics to Monet, or from music videos to Mozart. Without psychological effort we would never learn the practical skills to succeed professionally or the interpersonal skills to succeed as spouses and parents and friends and neighbors. Without effort we would never learn to appreciate the small, subtle pleasures life has to offer because we would be ever waiting impatiently for the next emotional quick-fix.
Acquired taste is accessible to the young. As parents, we must not shy away from the challenge of inculcating patience and prudence in our children. Through persistent effort we can teach them that cultivating a taste for the more refined pleasures of life is not so hard, no harder really than falling out of an airplane.
The Zen of Tom Harmon
Palmer: So what do I do?
Gibbs: Give her what she wants.
Palmer: But I have no idea what that is.
Gibbs: Say hello to the rest of your life, Jimmy.
Spiritual Impressionism
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My wife and I finished this 1000 piece jigsaw of Vincent Van Gogh’s “Cafe Terrace at Night,” providing an excuse to revisit this essay from 2011.
210 years as slaves in Egypt. 40 years wandering in the desert. 70 years of suffering in Babylon. 1,931 years scattered to the far ends of the earth… and counting.
Exile has defined most of the history of Jewish people, always as a response to our failure to value our relationship with the Almighty. When we turn our backs on Him (or on one another), He responds by allowing us to experience the consequences of separation through the loneliness of exile.
How remarkable, then, that at times extraordinarily pious have undertaken journeys of self-imposed exile, wandering anonymously from place to place, begging for bread and lodging, concealing their true character and brilliance, and never knowing what awaited them around the next corner. There was nothing remotely romantic about these adventures. They were intended to inure budding Torah leaders against attachment to material comforts, and also to teach them humility as a safeguard against the reverence and adulation showered upon the learned. During the days of the Chassidic masters of the 18th and 19th centuries, stories of the tribulations of exile abounded.
I knew nothing of this when I embarked upon the most foolhardy undertaking of my life and set off to hitchhike across the United States after I finished college. What I did know was that my existence had become too comfortable and too easy. I had never had to overcome serious obstacles or grapple with substantial challenges. I had spent five years acquiring a degree that prepared me for nothing, and I lacked even the faintest outline of a plan for the future.
As I had approached the culmination of my college career, I found myself disconcerted — not because I had no idea what I would do next, but because my lack of prospects didn’t seem to bother me at all. I had been carried by the current along the River of Least Resistance, without ever learning to navigate or deciding upon a destination. Now the river was about to empty into the Sea of Countless Possibilities, and my boat was not seaworthy.
So I slung a pack over my back and hit the road. I didn’t think of it as exile, but as escape. Escape from too much comfort and too much security; escape from too little responsibility and too little accountability. And as much as I tried to make it sound romantic, all such illusions were swept away my first night on the road clambering out into the cold to stake out my tent as it buckled before the November wind that swept out of a still evening sky.
I wasn’t Jack Kerouac — indeed, I was already old enough to see through Kerouac, whose revelations had lost their drama by the early eighties and who, when he ran out of money the first time out, caught a bus back home to his mother.
I wasn’t Christopher McCandless, who walked away from his prospects and possessions to go off into the wild. After all, I had $500 in traveler’s checks, carried two credit cards, and I was never far from a phone in case of emergency. On the other hand, I didn’t die of exposure after eating poison berries.
And I certainly wasn’t Rabbi Zusia of Annipoli, whose secret acts of piety in the face of astonishing adversity have become legend.
But I did learn to look at myself and at the world around me through different eyes. And one of the most powerful lessons came, albeit inadvertently, from a most unlikely teacher.
I met Steve at a youth hostel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, from where he agreed to drive me as far as Fort Worth, Texas. I remember the blue desert sky and dazzling sun that morning, and I remember going out in shirt sleeves as I would have in California, only to be driven back inside by an air temperature ten degrees below freezing. I was already starting to learn.
Steve was in no hurry. He was taking the two weeks before starting a new job to see the country, but he was on a budget and insisted upon driving 50 miles per hour to save on gas. Having begged my ride I was in no position to argue. I certainly wasn’t in a hurry myself, except to keep pace with the advancing cold front as I headed south.
Nevertheless, I gritted my teeth in frustration as we crawled along the highway. Cars, trucks, and trailers sped past us, each a blur of motion, as did birds and tumbleweeds — or so I imagined. But it was going to be a long trip, and as I forced myself to make peace with the inevitable, I began to notice something completely unexpected:
Detail.
By slowing down a mere fifteen miles per hour, the world beyond the roadside changed from a blur into a sharply defined landscape; trees and shrubs transformed from shapeless, green masses into a nuanced tapestries of leaves reflecting sunlight in infinite combinations as they rippled softly in the breeze; every lonely farmhouse acquired a unique character, whether from weathered paint or strewn tractor parts or kitschy statuary or slung hammocks and yard swings. Even the gray asphalt of the highway and the painted white lines took on texture and depth.
Stripped completely of any control over our rate of progress, I relaxed enough to recognize the view beyond my window not as a continuously rolling panorama but as a carefully fashioned composition of myriad parts and variegated pieces. Like an impressionist masterpiece, the apparent randomness of details up close belied the order of design revealed by distance, and the holism achieved at a distance belied the attention to detail that only became recognizable up close.
The wise man’s eyes are in his head, says King Solomon. Well, where else would they be? As the wisest of all men, Solomon never wasted time stating the obvious. Rather, he was commenting on the Creator’s placement of the eyes, upon which we rely most for sensory input, adjacent to the brain, which enables us to process and interpret the information we acquire.
A wise may does not merely look, nor does he merely see. He perceives. And he understands that perception requires looking at the world in many different ways, from different directions, and in different environments. As the great impressionists demonstrated through an innovative style that was originally derided by traditionalists, the appearance of any object or phenomenon can change dramatically depending on how we view them. Things do not look the same at morning as they do in the afternoon, or in the afternoon as they do at evening. Light, shadow, angle, context — these are the elements that create perspective, which is the key to genuine understanding.
It might seem logical to race through the exile of this world in order to more quickly escape its travails and come out on the other side. But only by paying attention to where we are can we chart a course toward where we need to go. As we race through our lives, too busy to notice the subtleties that make our world a place of limitless fascination, too preoccupied to take revel in the development of our own children and the maturing of our own relationships, too distracted by the blur of ephemeral attractions to contemplate the eternal complexion of our souls, we cheat ourselves of the opportunity to learn the lessons of exile. And it is only by learning those lessons that we can truly shorten the road that leads us home.
The Search for Nothing
Of course, you know all about it. It has overshadowed all other headline news. It has become everyone’s passion. There’s no escaping it.
No, I’m not talking about the presidential elections, climate change, or global terror. I’m talking about something really important:
Pokemon Go.
If you haven’t heard of it, you probably live in a cave and won’t be reading this anyway. If you don’t understand what it is… well, that’s a different story.
For people of a certain age — not to mention a certain level of maturity and common sense — the latest tech-fad is barely comprehensible. Countless denizens of the virtual world have crawled out of the darkness and into the sunlight to search for animated characters that can only be seen on their cell phone screens in undisclosed locations. By wandering about pointing their phones hither and thither, players find cartoon critters, then take aim and “shoot” to catch their pixilated prey.
As inane as it may sound, the game seems relatively harmless. It also has the benefit of drawing participants off their couches and encouraging them to put their atrophying appendages back into use, sometimes by walking miles in pursuit of quarry. Guided by an all-knowing, all-seeing cosmic GPS mastermind, Pokemon creatures may crop up anywhere, leading players on quests of “augmented reality.”
But is it really harmless?
Yonason Goldson 