Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses Our Teacher

Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses our teacher, is the way he is known in the  Jewish tradition.  Like Joseph he lives among non-Jews, marries a non Jew; becomes famous,  defends Jews,  kills a man who is beating a Jew, runs far away, and talks to God through the fire.  He has three children that love him.  He is indeed lucky.  But there is a deep sadness about the man.

There is no one in the Jewish Bible closer to God than Moses.  They talk again and again.  Moses gets to ask all the questions we would like to ask.  He is not shy.  He persistently inquires.  He argues with God.  He learns what he needs to know but not much more.  He receives God’s teaching to the Jewish people, the Torah.  Yet, it is clear that Moses both respects, is aggravated and puzzled by God’s methodology. 

Since the beginning of Genesis God has promised to bring the Hebrews to a promised land.  Moses has questions and he is not afraid to ask.  Why this terribly circuitous route?  Why slavery?  Why so long?  Why the desert?  Why are there other people already living in the promised land?  Why wars to get the land promised?  Why can Moses, the closest friend God has, not go into the land?  Most important why the ongoing hatred for Jews?  His doubts and questions are overwhelming, generation after generation he watches, Jews being persecuted and murdered, the Holocaust; it is only with questions Moses is able to pray.

Moses has no choice but to accept and live with the nature of things.  He becomes a passionate teacher urging his students again and again and again to remember and not forget.  Sometimes they listen.  Sometimes they are too tired and bored to listen.  Sometimes they think they already know.  But Moses is tenacious.  He does not stop.  He tries and he tries harder and harder. He is obsessed, like most eccentric and committed teachers, with being heard.  He warns, sings, screams, intimidates, cajoles, nags, preaches, teaches, shows film after film, stands on tables and chairs, rhetoric upon rhetoric, he does what he can do, he is indeed Moshe Rabbeinu. 

Writing and Blogging are Strange

Writing and blogging are both strange processes. You struggle to find the right words to express what you are thinking.  You work, rework and rework your every word. You choose one word and thereby omit another.  Then you wonder if anything you are saying actually matters. And that wondering does not stop. You decide to finally post on the blog.  You agonize over the whole text again and again and still again.  You post.  Nothing happens.  Your wife tells you that what you wrote was very good.  One or two students write to say they liked it.  Then, nothing.  You do not hear much more from anyone.  The world goes on as if you had not written at all.  You may feel good having written but most everyone seems to be signaling that they would be just as fine if you did not write.  But go ahead, if you need to.

So, I am asking myself, why bother to write?  What are you hoping to achieve?  I really do not know.  I have struggled with these thoughts for so long that it seems right to put them down and share them with others.  My long departed friend, Fritz Rusch, used to say that he did not write because everything he was thinking was derivative anyway.  Fritz struggled a lot with depression. He might have felt better had he written his stuff down. I loved him and I miss him.

Blogging is strange because you write and people read through their own lenses and tell themselves that they get what you are saying.  But, there is none of the back and forth of the classroom that I love.  I can't see their eyes.  Maybe it has to do with effect.  Those of us who grew up in the sixties were arrogant enough to think that we could change the world.  So, we set about trying to do that.  Now, as we approach that terribly strange age of 70 ( a nod to Paul Simon), we see that the world remains much the same as it was and will get along quite well without us.  So much for effect.

So, why write?  I get up early every morning and write.  Why bother to have such a discipline?   Maybe to say in some way, “Hey listen, I was here for a brief while.  I tried to think through what we are all doing here.  I wrestle with God.  I wrestle with religions and religious questions.  I think that the truth lies in wrestling with the most difficult questions.  I think the questions are more important than the answers to the questions, especially when it comes to religion.  Can you see and hear me being here and trying to think this all through?  It seems to make me happy to get all these thoughts out of me and written down.  Maybe, it will help someone along the way.  But, I feel compelled to keep on with it and so I will.  I do hope that something I have written will help you to go on and remain sane.  More to come . . .

The Journey of Joseph to Himself

Joseph always feels different and strange.  He always feels alone, even when he is with friends.  His parents loved him but did not understand him.  His brothers were jealous of his brains and good looks.  He is the quintessential Jew, determined to be different and desperate to belong.  For all sorts of irrational reasons he wanders far away from home, feels lost much of the time, becomes a well respected man in a strange land but is never sure why. 

When he is forced to leave home, he keeps running and running, ends up minimizing his Jewishness.  He mingles with gentiles so much that eventually becomes one of them.  He forgets who he is for many many years.  He tries to pretend that he is one of them.  They accept and like him.  They think he is good looking and interesting to listen to.  But a strange thing happens.  Incrementally, gradually and cumulatively the longer he lives with gentiles the more Jewish he becomes.  Instinctively, deep in his soul, he remembers that he belongs to another tribe.  And when he meets his brothers, Joseph is Jewish again but it takes him a while to figure out how and why. 

Joseph has certainly had his share of dreams and adventures.  He remembers them all very well.  It has been quite a trip!  As he gets older he is, for the first time in his life, deeply in love, comfortable in his skin, sleeping at night, able to be who he is from the depths of his soul.  Despite everything, Joseph is profoundly Jewish, determined to be different and desperate to belong; some things do not and cannot change.

The Secret to Marriage

The late Erma Bombeck wrote in one of her many columns, “Marriage is what happens after you get out of bed.”  Now, I am all for romance and love, but after being married over forty years, all be it, to two different women, I think marriage has less to do with being in love than being committed to working at marriage.  In the Bible, one of the first commands from God is to get married.  The text asserts, “It is not good for man to be alone.” 

Let’s try and be honest.  People who are married can certainly be loving, considerate and caring. Many times they are just so. But they can also be exasperating, annoying, uncaring, thoughtless, mean, and selfish.  Such is the nature of the human being.  We are inconsistent, ambiguous, unreliable and complicated.  And we don’t always listen well. 

Love can be a deep, passionate soul to soul feeling;  marriage is an adventure.  The goal of marriage is to work and play at making the marriage work.  Easy to say and hard to do.  Marriage is not for the faint of heart.  The person you marry will change and change and then change back.  It can be wonderfully passionate and terribly difficult.  There are moments when you feel exhausted and have reached your limits.  You keep on anyway.

And, sad to say, sometimes you do need to stop. Sometimes you have done everything that you can do and  the marriage is over. It is sad but necessary.  I never thought I would get there.  I always thought that I would keep on anyway, that I was tenacious, that I was determined to make it work, that I could and would fix what was wrong. But I could not do it and it shocked me more that I can tell you.  For years I refused to admit it.  Divorce was very sad and akin to dying.  It was also the end of a chapter and the freedom and sanity to try again.

I love marriage.  I married again.  We love and care for each other.  More importantly, we are diligently working at it.  But our marriage does not depend on whether we love each other.  It depends on whether we are working at caring about each other.  It requires intentional listening, doing, and a new thing.  I have realized that it is not my job to fix everything that is wrong.  It is our job to work at it and to learn to live with and for each other in the midst of all our quirks, eccentricities, imperfections and flaws.  By the way, that is real love.

If you are thinking of getting married, ask yourself, not if you are in love, but can you work with this person when they are not lovely; are you willing to work on being married?  Marriage has less to do with being in love than being mindful that you are married, delicately caring for the marriage after you get out of bed, and enjoying the crazy, rigorous, fascinating adventure of caring so much for another person that their soulful health is your greatest concern.  Go for it and enjoy!

Three Secrets to Staying Sane

My oldest son told me that one thing I have been right about in life has been sleep.  When he was younger, I belabored and nagged him about getting seven to nine hours of sleep a night. 

In the Bible one of the first things God does is put Adam to sleep.  And in those stories even God rested after all of the creating. 

Sleep is imperative and next in line is staring.  Take time to stare into space.  Staring can be restorative and inspirational.  When I stare I feel like am keeping myself open for the muses to enter my brain. And they do, helping me to write, teach and think.

Finally, take time to sing out loud.  For years, I have been singing old and new songs, religious songs, the Israeli and the Russian national anthem, songs from the sixties, songs where I can’t remember the words so I make some words up, Christian hymns, Jewish liturgical songs and whatever songs come through my brain.  Singing is medicinal and sanity producing.  Try it.

So, sleeping, staring and singing.  These three will make the day better and saner.

The Mystery and Necessity of God

The mystery and the necessity of God is a puzzlement that will never go away.  There is something inside us that needs to worship or believe in something outside us to remain sane.  Even those who do not believe in a God find that they have to defend to themselves if not to others, why they do not believe.  So, why do people believe in God or Gods or Religion?  First, it is a matter of control and sanity.  We live in a world that is and seems terribly random.  Everyday things happen to us and within us that seem completely without meaning.  Some of these things can be nice and happy things; others can be difficult and painful, still others could be aggravating and exasperating.  Do any of these things that happen to us matter?  The contingency and absurdity of these events would seem less crazy if we thought and trusted that somehow there is a purposeful God at heart of the universe that is for us and not against us.  This God could be a force, an energy, a personal God, or a law of nature.  In any event meaning is vital to keeping us sane. 

Even if a person says there is no God and no force, that it is all in our minds, that we invented God and have forgotten that we did so, this person has to meet the day and stay sane.  So, suppose, when something bad happens, this person says, ‘That’s life!  Even that saying is an explanation that he or she believes in, that life is like that.  That is the meaning, that is the God. A person trusts that life is like that and this explanation provides all the meaning that is needed to meet the day. 

By the way, any God worth his, her or its salt is not worried about whether you or I believe their existance.  If the Biblical stories are true, God is more interested in our caring for the neighbor in pain and living a humane life.  The rest is just commentary.

A Word about Messiahs

People seem to love messiahs.  The thought of a Superman showing up to do away with evil and keep us all from any danger or harm is seductive and enticing.  The belief in apocalyptic expectations began over 2000 years ago and to this day still holds many people in its messianic claws.  I know some people become tired, fearful and angry.  They become convinced that the evil we are experiencing is so great that God must soon be convinced to act and end it all.  Maybe this hope keeps many such people sane.  But, think about it, in so many ways it is too late for messiahs.  Too many children have been murdered beyond what any Jewish, Christian or Muslim messiah could redeem.  Too much craziness and innocent suffering has occurred to be part of any messianic salvation.  But, people love the idea of a messiah and that hope will never die. So it goes . . .The real messiah is here when any one of us bends down to help a neighbor, when any one of us stands with some one who is hurting, whenever we resist the terrible temptation to be indifferent.