Mirrors and Windows

Hello again. I know it’s been a very long time since I last wrote. Much has happened, the most dramatic of course being the war. I’m wary of writing about it for many reasons, one definitely being that I have never liked controversy and another being that I am still digesting what happened here, and what has consequently happened (and is continuing to unfold) the whole world over in terms of the overt and widespread acts of anti-semitic hatred that make me feel oddly secure being in Israel as opposed to anywhere else.

Through this process of war and the world’s outcry against it, I have found Israel to be strong (albeit flawed, just as any country or people), and its people even stronger. It is not a strength of gun power or nuclear power, but of peoplehood, of resilience and bravery and hope. I was deeply afraid at times for many different reasons. During that war I had to come to terms with what it is that I believe about this world and who runs it, and I also had to contend with feelings of isolation from those at home who couldn’t be expected to understand my perspective and the Jewish people’s perspective. The deaths of the innocent on all sides were painful while the stories of miracles granted to soldiers and settlers uplifting. It was alienating, and it was unifying. It’s a perfect case study of what I learned in religious studies and in psychology, how the human mind not only loves to define itself as something, it also seeks to be “not” something. Not racist, not American, not Jewish, not Muslim, not one of ‘them,’ whoever ‘they’ may be. And many people all over the world have decided that the Jews are the people not to be. Ironically enough (or maybe not), through the same situation, my recognition and feeling of belonging with this people has increased, and my feelings of gratitude and faithfulness to God have also expanded beyond measure.

As a result, over the past few months I have done of reflecting on the concept of perspective, of what it means to be ‘global,’ or ‘objective,’ and the world’s apparent ability to simplify a situation that is anything but simple into clear-cut ideologies of good and evil, right and wrong.

A major tenant of Judaism is that even the most positive of actions has negative repercussions, and the most evil has positive ones. Ours is a world where every word, thought, and action is powerful, a mix of good and bad. When Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, they were putting into the world a force that was much harder to conceive of than clear true or false. They were adding a new element to the world. It has formerly been Good, ultimate and absolute, at all times. Everything was pure, unblemished, without discrepancies. And by eating of that fruit (not an apple, I’ll have you know), that simplicity left. Duality arrived, with it coming all of the issues of choice, including the knowledge that no choice is completely good or evil. Even the ‘right’ choice has bad side effects, even the ‘wrong’ one can bring us to the place we need to be or teaches us lessons we must learn. And thus, this world where we do our best to simplify, to categorize things or people into ‘good’ or ‘evil,’ ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ Everyone suddenly has a scale for deciding such things, a way of deducing who is better or worse through numbers of dead, years of suffering, types of suffering, numbers of missiles or rockets or dollars. We try to quantify what peace of mind is worth, what peace is worth through these inaccurate and flawed statistics. We see the humanity of one side at the expense of the dehumanization of the other side. We sympathize with one and therefore must demonize the other. And then we are left broken, hurt, and full of hate. And then we tell each other that we are ‘so much more civilized’ than the ones who we are ‘not.’ We nurse the wounds of our egos instead of those of our people and the world. We breed more hatred, we come up with more numbers to prove ourselves right, and we go on with our lives.

My Rabbi once asked me a question. When you read a book or hear an idea, do you want to see a mirror or a window? It is easiest for us to see mirrors. When someone agrees with us we feel vindicated, assured in our convictions. We see ourselves in them and feel comforted that we are smart, worthwhile, ‘Good.’ And then there are windows. We can only see windows when we can first be humble and say “I don’t know.” We don’t need to put our two cents in, to show ourselves how smart we are and then pat ourselves on the backs and call it a day. We see what is harder to see, because it is not ourselves. It’s not what we learned in school, what we heard on the news. It transcends ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ It is the human condition. A complex, intricate system of weighing positives and negatives, trying to devise systems of quality and quantity that will give us the final answer so that we may be ‘right’ and ‘good’ and ‘just,’ and then we can sleep well at night.

During the war I couldn’t sleep well some nights. I remember going to bed crying one night because I was recognizing how vulnerable we all are at every moment. And I am so grateful for that night. Because when you cry, when you give up on the numbers and the politics and the sides and you just cry for humanity and for your people and for yourself because there is nothing else to do, then you can truly appreciate life. And God. Because what is life if this world is all that there is? If we have no obligations except for the ones our small brains can create? And what is war if there is nothing True to fight for, to live for, and sometimes to die for? We all have our own Truths that more times than not come into serious conflict with everyone else’s, and I truly believe that we will all kill each other if we all live by those alone. If logic is all we have, if it is our academically proven, socially accepted, double-blind tested, FDA approved, scale that we use to measure right from wrong, we are JUST as fanatic as the most fundamentalist of Jews and Muslims and Christians.

So what do we do? I don’t know. What I have realized since starting to create a relationship with God is how truly egotistical we are. We think that we can reason and rationalize anything, that we can figure out Truth. My dad loves the quote that “If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t understand it.” It is the same with our world. We do our best to contain it with our minds. We devise equations and write treatises, make laws and conjure systems of morality. We define ‘Justice’ and if the God we or our parents subscribe to doesn’t live up to this system, we impose it for Him, or get rid of Him all together. Because we are Individuals, Existentialists, we are in control of our minds and our hearts and our actions and our destinies. And that’s all well and good until someone we love becomes sick, until our system of justice differs from that of another person or people, until the realities of the world come face to face with what we want the world to be. And then either we just say the world is cruel and we make our own rules to make meaning in our lives in any way we can, we give up and turn to the nihilists, or we recognize that maybe we don’t know everything. If we look at the world and we just see the realm of man, the mirror of ourselves, then I fear that there is not much that can be done. Our subjective theistic and non-theistic ‘Truths’ will always clash. But if we can shatter the mirror and create a window, if we can see that there is something beyond ourselves here, our existence has the capacity to be more than just a parenthesis in eternity. And I think there is great hope in that.