Having, Doing, Being

 Because I believe public confession is good for the soul, I confess I have an addiction. I'm addicted to books. The shelves and bookcases in our home are full. You will also find piles on the floor. Periodically, I will look over some of the titles trying to discern if I can't get rid of them. Inevitably, what happens is, I discover books I'd forgotten I had, that need to get back in line to be read and digested. Downsizing books is a slow process, especially when you end up with two more for every one you relinquish. Reading them all would take at least another lifetime, maybe two. And just think how many new books there would be I would want to read!

I blame the addiction on our consumer society. We are bombarded with advertisements constantly. Even watching the "news" on television, we receive half news and half ads, and sometimes the "news" is actually an ad for the entity being described. But in my case, TV is not at fault. It's businesses like Amazon and Barnes and Noble. It's Brookings Books and the Brookings Library book sales.

Once in a while, there's even an AAUW sale. At the last one, on my third appearance and carting off a pile of reading material, the clerk suggested they would make me the poster boy for the next sale (which I took as a complement).

We're all tempted to have things, often more than we need. For me it's books. For others it might be fishing tackle or barbie dolls or clothes or cars. But in our heart of hearts we have to admit, the pleasure we derive from things is temporary. We are encouraged to trade in the wired phone for a flip top, the flip top for a smart phone; and they just keep getting smarter and smarter as the dumb ones are discarded.

We're also educated by our society not just to have but to produce. It's all in the doing! We all want to do something with our life. Maybe it's to make a lot of money. Maybe we would prefer fame with the fortune. Maybe it's simply to raise a family you can feed and shelter and enjoy. So we buckle down and work hard and keep our eyes on the prize.

In the fifties we were told with all the time saving inventions and appliances increasingly available; with a strong and growing economy; with women joining the work force; bread winners could work half time and enjoy a life of leisure the rest of the time. Something happened! Now both husband and wife are often bread winners working overtime, just to keep bread on the table. There is so much to do and so little time to do it.

The reality is, fortunes disappear. Sometimes overnight. Watching the ups and downs of the famous makes one wonder if celebrity life is all it's cracked up to be. Neither fame or fortune appear sustainable. Even family life changes. The kids move on. Doing seems as transient as having.

A friend of mine was a teacher his whole life. In retirement he once questioned in my presence what he had done with his life. He wondered if he had made a difference, even for one student. I assured him, I believed he had made an enormous difference. I knew him as a person of high integrity for his profession and enormous care for the persons in his classes. It occurred to me then, and stays with me now, that whatever we do is not always a lasting and satisfying assurance toward the end of our life. Our work, what we do, also seems transitory.

Paul Tillich, a renowned theologian of the last century, wrote about God as "the ground of being." Instead of existing somewhere in the heavens, God came down to earth. For Tillich, we are "grounded" in God. Our little being is grounded in Big Being. The challenge is to know who we are and whose we are. That discovery is not something temporary or prone to disappear. That discovery is permanent and fulfilling.

Unfortunately, in our culture, people seldom have time to discover who, or whose, they are. Having and doing don't leave much space for being. If we constructed a society and culture where the last comes first, where knowing who we are is primary, then the other two, doing and having, would fall into place. Answer the question of who am I, and you'll know what to do and what you need to do it.

Focusing on being who you are would also making dying easier. Since your focus is on being who you are, with nothing you need to do or get, letting go of life would be a whole lot easier.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German theologian who wrote Letters and Papers from Prison. Imprisoned for joining an assassination attempt on the life of Hitler, Bonhoeffer included a poem in his papers titled "Who Am I." It is worth reading in its entirety but the last lines are instructive. "Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine. Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine."

Carl Kline

To Build Connection in the Places of Our Common Vulnerability

     

As I said goodbye to a visitor, a question was left with me, and so it has lingered. In a voice both perplexed and pained, I was asked, “Why is there such a negative view of Esau in our tradition, so much more negative than the Torah itself would suggest?” Esau, of course, is the brother of Ya’akov, the one from whom Ya’akov wrests both the birthright and the blessing of the firstborn. Long through the shimmerings of time and history, Esau, as Edom, comes to be associated with Rome, fierce oppressor of Jacob’s descendants. As in regard to so much strife in Torah, particularly in B’reishit, beginning with Cain’s killing of Abel as the first murder, much of the interpersonal strife and violence we encounter plays out in the family context, among those who are siblings. The first murder is fratricide, as every killing of one human by another has been ever since. The allusion becomes clear, all humanity are siblings, all children of a common Creator in whose image we are created, whose tears dampen the soil wherever we live in conflict with each other on this earth.

        A parent struggling to be lovingly present for each of his children, whether in fact blind near the end of his days or only willfully so, we are told of Isaac’s horror upon realizing that he has blessed his

younger son with the blessing meant for the elder. Having returned from the hunt and having prepared a meal for his father, Esau weeps and cries out, the Torah telling of a broken soul, When Esau heard the words of his father, he cried out with an exceedingly loud and bitter cry, and then he said to his father: “Bless me also, O my father!”

(Gen. 27:34). Of bitter tears and the cry of a wounded heart, we have already encountered the same pain in the father’s generation, the divide then between Isaac and his brother Yishma’el.

As migrants cast out and wandering in the desert, the water carried by Hagar and her son is spent. The forlorn mother places her son in the shade of some desert brush. We are told that God heard the voice of the child and that an angel called out to his mother, saying, Do not be afraid, for God has already heard the voice of the child, there where he is/ba’asher hu sham (Gen. 21:17). Drawing on midrash, on the words there where he is, Rashi teaches that a person is to be judged by the deeds they do in the moment, v’lo l’fi mah she’hu atid la’asot/and not according to what they may do in the future. The place of that moment was and remains a place of human vulnerability, and therefore a place that offers the greatest potential for human connection. It is a place that reminds of the times when we are each in greatest need of human connection, times when we are parched in body and soul, times when we each thirst for love and compassion and can recognize such need in the other.

Holding up a mirror in which to see ourselves, the Torah now brings us to the Torah portion called Vayetze (Gen. 28:10-32:3), along with Yaakov, to encounter Lavan, uncle of Jacob. Having already witnessed human vulnerability, we are reminded of our own as we come to see it in those we meet in the turning of Torah. Yaakov has fled his brother’s anger, arriving in Charan, there among his mother’s family falling in love at first encounter with Rachel. He agrees to work for his uncle for seven years in order to marry Rachel. In the familiar story, on the wedding night Lavan presents the undoubtedly well-veiled bride, who in the morning Yaakov discovers is the elder sister, Leah. Yaakov confronts Lavan and says, What have you done to me…? Why have you deceived me…? Responding to the one who has also deceived, Lavan’s words drip with irony, It is not done in our place to give the younger before the elder. 

We wonder how Lavan’s words touch Yaakov, whether they do in the moment of his own vulnerability, when he is the one deceived. The uncle’s words become a mirror in which Yaakov can see himself if he is willing to look, to gaze and reflect in all of his pain and vulnerability. Lavan’s words can also become a mirror for us if we are willing to look, to bravely accept an opportunity in which to gaze at aspects of ourselves that we may prefer not to see.

Through the years, Yaakov has grown abundantly, with his two wives, both Leah and Rachel, and with their handmaids, Bilhah and Zilpah, becoming the father of eleven children, rich in herds and flocks. Twenty years having passed, he now seeks to return home to his family in Canaan. Well aware of Lavan’s jealousy and that of Lavan’s sons, Yaakov sets out a plan, coordinated with his wives in defiance of their father, to secretly flee. When the time comes and the great procession makes its way into the unknown, distance is put between them and the sure to follow retinue of Lavan. Eventually the distance is bridged, if not the hearts of fleer and pursuer, an encounter that is hard to imagine, wondering who would speak first and what to say to the other.

The Torah sets the stage for us, telling us of human vulnerability as the place of the encounter, a place beyond time and space, a place carried in each of our hearts. We are simply told, And Yaakov stole the heart of Lavan the Aramean in that he did not tell him, because he fled (Gen. 31:20). That is exactly what Lavan says just a few verses later, you have robbed my heart…; and you did not permit me to kiss my sons and daughters…! As with Yishma’el earlier, and then with Esav, the Torah brings us to a place of human encounter, holding before us emotions that we can understand because they are our own. In the context of Jewish law, beginning in the Talmud ((Tractate Chulin 94a), Jacob is wrong to deceive Lavan, however much we may understand his actions. 

    Such deception is called g'neivat da'at/stealing of mind, accomplished when outer actions and spoken words belie inner feeling and intent. We are meant to ask, to wonder, what else might he have done; how differently might he have responded to the situation; how might he have directly engaged with Lavan to open the possibility of understanding and a different way of departure?

As we consider why such a negative view of Esau has developed in the tradition, so too with Lavan. We can surely draw negative inferences about both of them from the Torah text, but not at all to the extent of evil later ascribed to them. There is surely as much fault to find with Yaakov and others of our ancestors. My visitor’s question lingers, so why such a negative view as it plays out through time? Perhaps it emerges from our own vulnerability and pain, from our own experience as a people. That we might learn to break such destructive dynamics, Torah challenges us to think of our own lives and their contexts, of our own experiences with people. We are meant to ask what we might do to help foster reconciliation and the possibility of wholeness in all the varied ways of our own relationships with people as they occur in the living of our lives. The challenge for us then becomes how to avoid weaving new enmities and enemies from what are often scant threads of conflict as encountered in the texts of our lives.

The Torah is meant to be a context in which to wrestle with life and its encounters, and so we are meant to wrestle here, as indeed Jacob will soon do. As we encounter people at their most vulnerable, however much they may seem to us to be “other,” we are able to see ourselves reflected in their pain. The negative portrayal of the other emerges, perhaps, through our own inability to look at what is most difficult to behold in our selves. Torah offers a context in which to wrestle, a place in which to ask hard questions of our selves and of each other as we seek to understand the Esaus and Lavans whom we encounter along the way of our lives. We come to ask how and why we create enemies, why we foster images of the other that allow us to continue seeing them as an enemy.

While my visitor’s question still lingers, in considering the negative images ascribed to others, may we bravely seek to build connection in the places of our common vulnerability. From the place of shared human pain, may we come to know the heart that would be shattered if that which was most precious to it was stolen, and in protecting from such sorrow may know shared human joy. So the rabbis asked, who is a hero of heroes/aizehu gibor she’b’giborim? And they answered, one who makes of their enemy their friend (Avot d’Rabbi Natan 23).

 

Rabbi Victor H. Reinstein

2020 Vision?

    

Sitting here, looking out of the kitchen window, it is easy to settle into the illusion of a perfect and peaceful world.  In an orderly way, the November rains and winds have come.  The leaves have drifted down and heaped themselves into rake-defying corners around the cabin.  The skeletal trees offer a bony kind of beauty as ethereal branches lift toward the sky and lichens become more luminescent on oak bark.  No sun today, just November gray, soft, undemanding, comfortable.  But back in the reality of my kitchen, the ubiquitous masks rest on the kitchen table next to my wallet and keys - reminding me of the passage of a year like no other.   When the year began, I wondered how 2020 might be come a metaphor for clearer vision as we entered deepest winter, little realizing on January 1 that by the end of the month 2020 would become an apocalyptic year.  From the Greek, apocalypse means “uncovering” or disclosure or revelation of great knowledge.  

As the year unfolded television and phone screens around the world allowed us to witness the murder of George Floyd.  We watched as nonviolent protests in the nation's capitol were met with military presence and tear gas.  The daily report of positive Covid tests and then the mounting numbers of Covid deaths became a morning ritual on the daily news.  The statistics for illness and deaths among people of color and among the poor alarmingly surpassed the statistics for the general population.

We watched as the callous lack of concern and compassion, the ignorance and refusal to recognize the deadliness of the virus, the disdain for and rejection of the simplest, effective methods for protection paved the way for astronomical numbers of infections and deaths. 

White supremacy, food insecurity, economic instability, threatened elections, Black Lives Matter, poverty, homelessness, gross inequities in our health care delivery system,  job losses,  a stalled, contentious and uncooperative Congress - all have kept the country on edge as the pandemic has re-ordered our lives. 

2020 has been an apocalyptic year.  The veil is drawn back.  The revelations are undeniable. We can see much more clearly now, the inequities in our health care delivery systems.  We can see much more clearly now, how deeply white supremacy is ingrained in our culture. We can see more clearly the nature of police brutality towards people of color. We can see more clearly the results of our toxic political environment.  We can see more clearly the gross inequities in our health care system. This is the apocalypse we live with now - - the revelation - -  the disclosure - - the drawing back of the veil.  Clearer vision is deeply painful.  But through the centuries the notion of apocalypse has brought with it notions of hope for a new creation subverting and replacing the old.  So - here we stand, on the threshold of 2021 and now I am wondering how we will live into the coming year responsibly, given what we now see more clearly.      

May we anticipate a saner, more hospitable, more compassionate, more generous, less violent expression of our collective humanity as we prepare once again as the holiday season unfolds.  The light of the Hanukkah candles signify hope in a deeply suffering world.  

The Advent candles invite the contemplation of renewed peace and joy in the count-down to the Christmas celebrations as Christians prepare to welcome  the most truly Human One into our lives once again.  May the loving and compassionate wisdom of the Holy One invade our lives on the breath of a New Born, sweet and captivating.   May the blessings of complete healing, joyful reconciliation, peace of mind, adequate income, food in the fridge, outrageous laughter, meaningful work, and loving relationships be abundant for all in the coming year. 

Vicky Hanjian

"...to any who stood in need"

I've been thinking about the description of an event in the New Testament lately. One finds it in the book of Acts. It's probably the best description we have of the nature of the early Christian community. In the fifth chapter one reads, "The whole body of believers was united in heart and soul. Not a man of them claimed any of his possessions as his own,  but everything was held in common … they had never a needy person among them, because all who had property in land or houses sold it, brought the

proceeds of the sale, and laid the money at the feet of the apostles; it was then distributed to any who stood in need."    This is about as radical an idea, in a culture operating according to the tenets and values of vampire capitalism, as one can find. And like many of the other Biblical stories that counsel a priority for the common good, you don't hear much about this passage in Acts, except for those who label it as communism, and immediately dismiss it.

Unfortunately, the impulse in capitalism is for accumulation rather than distribution; for selfishness rather than generosity. That's not to say that there aren't generous people among the well off. It's the culture of our economy that makes the passage in Acts seem far fetched and other-worldly, fit for an ancient text but not the modern reality.

The passage should be a challenge to those who are throwing socialism around as a dirty word. What, may I ask, is so wrong about making the common good a priority. What is the drawback to emphasizing the social good at least as much as the individual good. It seems as if we should have learned by this time that if I am a better person and more generous, everyone is better off. If I am other centered rather than self centered, there is a ripple effect that changes human relationships. Generosity and compassion are contagious and help create the common good.

Might I remind folks that we do lots of things in common, as it's much more practical, efficient and effective. Consider the public library, the fire department, our utility department. Social security has been a game changer in our society giving millions of seniors stability in their elder years. These and so many other examples are what democratic socialism is all about.

Now the passage in Acts includes a radical and tragic outcome for those who continue to grasp some of their possessions. They drop dead. I read that part of the passage metaphorically. After all, you can't take your possessions with you, only who you have been. People my age gradually get desperate to downsize and de-clutter anyway. So although the Acts passage is unforgiving, I'm not suggesting coercion or punishment for having and holding on to possessions. Rather, we often ignore or dismiss opportunities to invite generosity for the sake of the common good.

Some years ago, on one of my trips to India, I had an opportunity to participate as an observer in the Bhoodan Movement. Started by Vinoba Bhave in 1951 after the death of Mahatma Gandhi, this movement was an attempt to redistribute land from those who had more than they needed to those who had none. Two of Vinobas' disciples, Krishnamal and Jaganathan, traveled the country asking the landed to contribute a tenth of their acreage for the landless. I was able, with other folks from the U.S., to accompany them on one of their calls. 

 

This landlord was notorious for his treatment of the poor. Once when the landless planted a far removed field never plowed by the owner, he plowed it under just  as it was ready to harvest. He regularly sent his workers to beat and burn the near-by squatter settlements. On this occasion he was approached by Krishnamal and Jaganathan on the basis of the state of his soul. He finally agreed to sell some land to the landless at a price they could afford. He made the announcement from his palace as the poor cowered outside his gated and walled home; then celebrated with us in their settlement afterward.

In all, those in the land gift movement collected more than four million acres for redistribution to the landless, not because of any government program; there was no mandate; but because of a human capacity for generosity too seldom tested.

Especially in this part of the country there is a heritage of mutual aid. Flood or famine, draught, danger, disease and death,, one has always been able to count on the neighbor. When we consider the distance from another living soul suffered by so many of our forebears, it was often a matter of simple survival, or not.

In a time of pandemic, a sign of things to come; in a time of fire and flood we've not experienced before; in a time of new phrases like "polar vortex" and "derecho;" in a time when islands are being evacuated and polar bears are found wanting a floe of ice; we must encourage generosity and a spirit of social good. We won't be able to survive alone and generous neighbors can make all the difference.

 

Carl Kline