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As I listened recently to a podcast I like, Ear Hustle, on the lives of the men who are inmates at San Quentin prison is Northern California, one of the incarcerated men made an interesting statement that gave me pause. His sentence carries with it a great degree of solitary time - more so than the normal prison sentence even - and he was explaining to the interviewer that he was a part of an existentialist group. He and a group of other men wrote notes to each other on the nature of existence and the passage of time. This group has an existence that is very short on meaningful activity. In general, men at San Quentin have a lot of time to think about the life they aren’t living or the things they aren’t doing. It leaves them with a need to to ask the larger questions. Questions like ‘if I’m not accomplishing a task or living in relation to the needs of another person, what, exactly, am I here for?’
The tradeoff, of course, is that these men have all the time in the world to contemplate, because their actions have led to society revoking their right to free will. They have lost their freedom, and so their ability to create meaning is severly (and rightfully) limited. By contrast, a person with a job and family and activities has immense freedom. But they also spend a lot of their time in motion, and have a lot less time for contemplation on existence. It takes a significant amount of brain capacity to think about what activities come next and how to do them and who to see and what to talk about. In the absence of all of that required stimulation is occasional stillness. The stillness is when we busy people occasionally have time to stop and say ‘what is all this?’ The incarcerated person has no activity, and only contemplation. A person in slavery, on the other hand, has only activity, and no time for contemplation. Passover comes for both of these individuals - the incarcerated and the enslaved. It comes once a year to stop us in our tracks and compel us to reflect, if we are not in the habit of it, or to appreciate our freedom, if we have not noticed it. We live lives of relative ease in comparison to many; without deprivation or suffering, and complete with community, connection, activity, and rest time. Passover was invented at a time when none of those things was regular or common. In stopping to reflect, within the context of the busy activity of a seder, we remember the day we became free many centuries ago, and we pledge to appreciate how precious it is to live lives of meaning that belong to us and us alone. - Rabbi Mark Asher Goodman
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There's this cool grammatical thing that the Rastafarian religion practices. When a Rastafari uses a sentence that addresses both the first person and the second person, they use the same word for both. So instead of saying 'You and I', a rastafari would say 'I and I'. The idea is: concern for the other is my principal concern. I was reminded of this when I got to this neat little commentary on the Torah. We learned last month in the book of Exodus that perched over the ark sat two 'cherubs'. In one place in Torah, we are told that they stand face to face. But in another place, we are told they face away from each other and towards the Temple. How can this be? The Talmud tells us 'One is at a time when Israel does God's will. The other is at a time when Israel does not do God's will.' The great Hasidic master the Pardes Yosef clarified that God's will, in this case, is in looking to the needs of the other - just as the cherubs look at each other, so too should Israel look to the concerns of their fellow humans before their own. This is a hard thing to do, but I can't think of a more essential teaching to what it is to lead a spiritual life. A spiritual life is a life lived by relocating the locus of concern outside of oneself, and instead centering in around somebody else. It's not 'you and I' - it's 'I and I'. - Rabbi Mark Asher Goodman The first of the ten commandments, 'I am the Lord your God' begins with the word 'ANoKchiY', a strange construction of the word 'I'. The rabbis of the Talmud tell us that this funky word may contain a secret - it hints at an acronym: 'Amirah Naima Ketivah Yehiva' - 'Pleasant words were written and given'. The Torah, who's 'ways are ways of pleasantness', is what they are talking about. The hasidic master Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev added to that this idea: "A thing that is said does not persist, but a thing that is written will persist forever." In our own lives, we spend our days in constant conversation, some of it good and important, and some of it idle or thoughtless. What if our speech were constantly written down? It seems certain to me that we would be more circumspect about what we say. We would we say less, and think more. We would speak with words of pleasantness more and words of anger and frustration less. In other words, we would make our spoken words more worthy of being written down if we consider them more carefully, and model them after the great written work that instructs us in the ways of pleasantness: the Torah itself. Let us make our lives and our words more like Torah - worthy of being recounted for many years to come. - Rabbi Mark Asher Goodman |
Rabbi's BlogRabbi Mark Asher Goodman is the spiritual leader of Brith Sholom Jewish Center in Erie, PA. These are a collection of thoughts and writings since he joined the community in Erie. For more of his past writings, click here. Archives
October 2020
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