It’s Just a Story

We are, worldwide, at the threshold of two dramatic seasons supercharged by climate change. Here on the Pacific Coast in the Northern Hemisphere, summer is soon to yield her tempestuous spells of heat and flooding to what is being widely touted as an incoming El Niño extravaganza. Meanwhile, the southern half of the globe has endured a Sturm und Drang winter and is praying for a serene spring and summer. Leave it to the Jewish People to mark the turn of our year at this high-stakes season. 

Rosh Hashana drops us into a whirlwind of emotional, psychic, and spiritual challenges, ranging from celebrating the birthday of the world—the spinning top we temporarily call home—to consciously taking stock of our lives, with special attention paid to our absolute worst moments. The tempest brewing, the scorched earth, and the warm winds blowing in or out are perfect metaphors for our annual psycho-spiritual journey. What have I done? Who am I now? And where might I go from here? These are among the many questions that the High Holy Days encourage us to ask.

And then answer. And answer again. And again. Year after year, we are adjured to examine the past, assess the present, and consider the future. And every year existential observations and questions entwine with answers and explanations that form the exquisite and passionate tangle of our life’s stories. 

Once upon a time, Chazzal, our teachers of blessed memory, were trying to sort their own existential angst: What dirt did God use to create the first human? What transpired during the first day of the first human’s life? What is “human nature”? 

אָמַר רַב יְהוּדָה אָמַר רַב: בְּשָׁעָה שֶׁבִּקֵּשׁ הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא לִבְראוֹת אֶת הָאָדָם, בָּרָא כַּת אַחַת שֶׁל מַלְאֲכֵי הַשָּׁרֵת. אָמַר לָהֶם: רְצוֹנְכֶם נַעֲשֶׂה אָדָם בְּצַלְמֵנוּ? אָמְרוּ לְפָנָיו: רִבּוֹנוֹ שֶׁל עוֹלָם, מָה מַעֲשָׂיו? אָמַר לָהֶן: כָּךְ וְכָךְ מַעֲשָׂיו.

Rav Yehuda says that Rav says: At the time that the Holy One, Blessed be He, sought to create a person, He created a special band of ministering angels. He said to them: Do you want us to fashion a person in our image? They said to Him: Master of the Universe, what are the deeds and actions of this creature? God said to them: Thus and so are Its deeds and actions.  It’s just gonna do what it’s gonna do.  

אָמְרוּ לְפָנָיו: רִבּוֹנוֹ שֶׁל עוֹלָם, ״מָה אֱנוֹשׁ כִּי תִזְכְּרֶנּוּ וּבֶן אָדָם כִּי תִפְקְדֶנּוּ״? הוֹשִׁיט אֶצְבָּעוֹ קְטַנָּה בֵּינֵיהֶן וּשְׂרָפָם. וְכֵן כַּת שְׁנִיָּה. כַּת שְׁלִישִׁית אָמְרוּ לְפָנָיו: רִבּוֹנוֹ שֶׁל עוֹלָם, רִאשׁוֹנִים שֶׁאָמְרוּ לְפָנֶיךָ מָה הוֹעִילוּ? כָּל הָעוֹלָם כּוּלּוֹ שֶׁלְּךָ הוּא. כּל מָה שֶׁאַתָּה רוֹצֶה לַעֲשׂוֹת בְּעוֹלָמְךָ – עֲשֵׂה.

The angels said before Him: Master of the Universe: “What is a person that You are mindful of it? And the child of humanity that You consider it?” (Psalms 8:5), i.e.,why do you care about such a wily creature? God outstretched His little finger at them and burned them with fire. And similarly with a second group of angels. Then a third group of angels said before Him: Master of the Universe, the first two groups who spoke before You, what did they accomplish? The entire world is Yours; whatever You wish to do in Your world, do.  I.e. Set yourself free, God. And thus, God created the first person. 

—BT Sanhedrin 38b

I love this vignette. It’s such a mirror. I don’t know how many times I’ve said something to my beloved like, “Hey Motek, do you think I should make such and such for dinner?” and she says, “Well we have a lot of leftovers, hon. Maybe we should use those up first.” And I get kind of pushy, snarky, and defensive, and then she says, “So, you weren’t really asking me, were you?” Because she knows me. And she knows what I’m really saying is, “I hope you’re in the mood for such and such, cuz that’s what I want to make, even though it will probably cost more and take longer to make than if we were to just heat up the leftovers.” It is an unattractive proclivity. But I take some comfort knowing that, at least according to the Rabbis, the Creator, in whose image I was created, did it too. This is one of humanity’s most identifiable traits: asking for advice that we have absolutely no interest in listening to. And in order to avoid listening, in deference to our impulses and drives, we tell ourselves stories.

Sometimes our inner dialogue escapes our private chambers and finds its way out, into the world of action and deeds. The Hebrew word מעשה/ma’aseh (deed or action) derives from the root עשה/asah whose meanings include: to do, make, fashion, labor, deal, work, accomplish, cause, yield, perform or act. But over several centuries, Hebrew morphs into Yiddish, and מעשה/ma’aseh, a deed or action, becomes מייסע/mayseh, a story. 

We live in multiple scripts, play various parts, and manifest myriad energies in our lifetimes. Most of us humans are anything but static. And having said that, most of us also possess some kind of through line. The beauty of Rosh Hashanah is its upbeat approach to baring our souls, its celebratory vibe in which failure, injury, and death are perfectly acceptable topics of liturgical conversation. Rosh Hashana ushers us into the new year with a full throated invitation to own the worst bits of our tendency to כָּךְ וְכָךְ מַעֲשָׂיו/Kakh v’khahh ma’asav, to do this and that—heal and wound, speak truth to one person and lie like a rug to another, destroy and create, charm and insult, strive and surrender—basically, within our power, we, like our creator, do as we wish. The challenge is: how do we hold it all? How do we embrace the totality of who we are, what we’ve done, and how we’ve behaved, who we’ve wounded and who we’ve nursed, where we showed up and where we disappeared?

I think the Rabbis are hinting that we are כָּךְ וְכָךְ, thus and thus, full of contradictions and paradoxes, a constellation of fractured parts. And the High Holy Days come along asking us to inquire: How do I find integration? How do I make peace with the manifold cycles of my life? How do I tell my tale? Is there a neat and tidy story, with all the loose ends tied up in a satisfying and unifying message? Unlikely, because we are כָּךְ וְכָךְ—a mess. And Rosh Hashanah sets aside time for us to take a bath in it. 

If we were writing our spiritual novel, Rosh Hashanah would be the time when we grab last year’s rough draft, plop on the couch and give it a full read-through. Wow! That narrative arc that I was so chuffed about this time last year just kind of trailed off into nowhere, didn’t it? And those characters that I obsessed about a few chapters ago didn’t really need to be there at all, come to think of it… Who lived? Who has died and what will I do without them? In hindsight, it is easier to spot the radical shifts in fame, fortune, and fortitude. Sifting through it all, we start shaping concurrent stories of who we are.

As I was trying to clear some space on my desk so I could have room to write this piece, I straightened up a pile of random, smallish bits of paper. A tiny brown envelope, about the size of an old fashioned business card, floated to the top of the jumblemound, with my name hand written in silver ink. I recognized the style and hand. It was a long lost note from my beloved friend, colleague, teacher, student, fellow Jewish mischief maker, and all around amazing person, Rachel Brodie, z”l. Rachel died unexpectedly some years ago, so how the heck this petite missive turned up in this particular heap of paper chaos was an utter mystery. 

Early in our friendship Rachel and I bonded by tending to a member of the community, a young mother I’ll call Abby, who was in a losing battle with breast cancer. The disease was the sinister trickster foil in the story that Abby had been trying to live. She ate clean and organic food, was deeply spiritual, followed holistic health practices, did affirmations, didn’t partake in nicotine, alcohol, etc. In short, Abby did all the right things to make her an unlikely candidate for getting metastatic cancer in her early 40s. But she did, and it killed her. 

I opened the envelope from Brodie and read on the tiny card inside, “Jhos, when Abby died and everyone was worrying about her kids you said, ‘It will be part of their story.’ The word “just” wasn’t in there explicitly but the way you said it made me feel a kind of *שלמות in the moment, that I had previously only been able to attain by forcing the idea of radical acceptance onto my “fighting” feelings….” 

Right. Everything eventually can become just another part of our story. The things that compel us in one chapter might soften and drift away in another. The events that broadside us—the deaths, break ups, firings—can sting forever or fade to a faint tingle. It all depends on how we live into those crashes. What story do we tell ourselves about those experiences and what story do we tell the world? What story do we want to tell, and what story must we tell?  

It was a perfect reminder from my dearly departed friend, whose own children now have the same devastating plot twist in their story. And as much as I love and miss Rachel, and all of my dearly departed, including my own mom, of blessed memory—those losses are also, in fact, just a part of my story. The loves that didn’t make it, the stupid things I’ve believed, said, and done. Just part of my ever shifting, evolving, and revealing story. My moments of survival, courage, insight, and valor—yeah, just another part of my story. Some of those experiences are a whole chapter. Or even a novella. Perhaps a travelogue or a great book. Still, in the end, we creatures whose actions are thus and thus, doing what we want or need to do, regardless of the ministering angels who tell us otherwise—our only legacy will be found in the stories that contain us. 

As 5786 yields to 5787, let us consider the following alt-pop song wisdom: 

“May our stories catch fire and burn bright enough to catch God’s eye”
—Sleeping at Last

Shana Tova U’mtukah–blessin’s to y’all for a satisfying, sweet, and story-filled entrance into the new year.

*[shleimut/wholeness]