Make Yourself At Home

Life consists not in holding good cards
but in playing those you hold well.
--Josh Billings
 

In our own lives the voice of God
speaks slowly, a syllable at a time.
Reaching the peak of years,
dispelling some of our intimate
illusions and learning how to
spell the meaning of life-experiences
backwards, some of us discover
how the scattered syllables
form a single phrase.
--Abraham Joshua Heschel

Harold Kushner came to San Francisco a few years ago. Someone I know was giving him a ride to his hotel afterward and dropped me off at home on the way. In the car, probably because I had been moved by Rabbi Kushner’s talk (which was on his book, Overcoming Life’s Disappointments), I told him the story of a betrayal by a teacher. The details don’t matter. What Rabbi Kushner said does. I have never forgotten it.

“Well,” he asked, “who would you rather be in that situation?”

If the transcendent may be defined as a step outside the ordinary, sometimes you can find a holy moment in a conversation in a car. At least, I did. I had spoken of the betrayal many times over the years—it changed the course of my life—but never had I or anyone else I spoke with considered the possibility of looking at things this way.

* * *

After the publication of his book, Making Loss Matter: Creating Meaning in Difficult Times, David Wolpe spoke here on the subtitle—the work of seeking out meaning in the events that can cause us such pain. He said that when bad things happen in our lives, we’re not required to find them good (Rabbi Kushner might well agree: he wrote When Bad Things Happen to Good People). We can say, of serious illness or injury or any other real heartbreak, “This is a terrible thing.” Rabbi Wolpe said, “We’re not supposed to say, ‘That’s good.’ No. It’s not good. It’s bad. But we have to find meaning in it.”

* * *

Both writers refuse to imprison us—in the land of regret and self-recrimination, for Rabbi Kushner, in the land of psychobabble, New Age-speak, or magical thinking for Rabbi Wolpe.

We all have dreams. And that's important. But sometimes, says Rabbi Kushner, the dream doesn’t come true and we find fault with ourselves, endlessly going back to it, measuring our present life by how closely our actual life matches the dream. Often it doesn’t, and we torture ourselves for not living up to the earlier vision of ourselves the dream represents.

Rabbi Kushner says there’s another way to live. It’s a simple, but profound prescription.

First, he says, you have to let go of the old dream.

Gee, thanks. Didn’t many of us get that message growing up?

Not the way Rabbi Kushner tells it, because there’s another step in the process. After we let go of the old dream (and yes, it hurts), he says, “plug in a new dream.”

* * *

Rabbi Wolpe meets us in the world of grief and loss. “Make yourself at home,” he says. Don’t misunderstand. He’s not saying you should be happy or comfortable in that world, but simply look around and make sense of where you are.

I once told a friend my theory that grief spins you around and around and then plants you back down deeper in your own life.

“If you come back down,” he said.

* * *

Rabbis Kushner and Wolpe give us the tools to come back down. In Rabbi Kushner’s case, that is achieved through plugging in a new dream—determining what you are passionate about now. Not yesterday, but now.
 

For Rabbi Wolpe, the question is, “How do you connect the dots? How do you grok what has happened in your life?”

John Bradshaw says, “In order to heal, you have to understand what happened to you.” Rabbis Kushner and Wolpe suggest we take the time to understand what has happened to us, and then choose what we want to do next.

One of my friends, a retired social worker who has done a lot of hospice work, weighs in. “You can’t say, ‘You have to find the meaning,'” she says. “Sometimes you can’t, or can’t right away. And maybe there’s not just one meaning.”

“It may not fit any box you can think of,” she continues, “and that’s okay. The quest for meaning has value, and it doesn’t have to have an end. Sometimes you just move on, plug in the new dream, and find the meaning later.”

A penny for your thoughts.

©2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 Laynie Tzena.