Staying Power

"Style… ain’t nothing but keeping the same idea from beginning to end.” So said the great Pulitzer Prize-winning Pittsburgh playwright August Wilson. It is within our capacity to see and sustain a thought, from its origins into unseen future horizons; that is the measure of who we are. If this is the litmus test we have set, both in terms of style and substance, then our world, our society – we ourselves – fall altogether short.

We live in an age of diminished staying power, a time of short, intense, and fleeting bursts of information. We click on and click off world events at a dizzying pace. The top news stories are no longer the ones that actually matter; rather, they are the ones that are most emailed from one co-worker to another. In this world the sex scandal of a professional athlete can derail relief efforts in the third world, the passage of legislation of generational import is contingent on our ability to shoehorn it into our attention span. Darfur, Haiti, Katrina, Tsunamis – who remembers any of these anymore? Our world, flattened by technology, has taken on a Teflon quality. An issue emerges, it eclipses everything, we lose sight of everything else and then it is gone like the wind. It is not a matter of setting a hierarchy because every moment and every crisis is important. What has changed is the manner by which we receive, process, and then dismiss the events of our lives. We have become consumers of instant information, instant response, snap judgments, and fast dismissal. As a culture, we have – to use Wilson’s term – no “style.”

You may recall Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink. It’s a great book and a quick read, which is appropriate, because it is all about rapid cognition. The book is about the kind of thinking that happens in the blink of an eye; Gladwell calls it “thinslicing.” He explains that when you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Blink is a book about those two seconds, the powerful and instant conclusions that we reach, sometimes spot on and sometimes off-base, with horrific consequences. For example, Gladwell describes an experiment where a psychologist gave college students three 10-second soundless videotapes of a professor lecturing. The students were then asked to rate that professor. Their ratings matched the ratings from students who had taken the professor’s course for an entire semester. On the other hand, the powers of rapid cognition can have ghastly consequences. In a chapter called “Seven Seconds in the Bronx,” Gladwell describes the horrendous series of snap judgments made by the New York City police officers who shot and killed Amadou Diallo. From love at first sight to racial profiling, our minds are calibrated to a point where judgments are collapsed into a hairbreadth of space. Gladwell explains that “we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments. We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that – sometimes – we’re better off that way.” (Blink, p.52)

Gladwell may be right. I am no neurobiologist, so I can hardly speak to the science of human cognition. It may indeed be human nature to be able to process a million bits of information in an instant. It may be the case that the outward pace by which society moves is merely a reflection of our internal human abilities. But I have to believe that whether or not it is intrinsic to the nature of humanity, it is decidedly not the nature of being Jewish. It is not an indication of maturity, and it is certainly not the nature of our task on Passover. If there is one message of today, one lesson to be learned, it is that as important as the present moment may be, for us as Jews it must be couched between past and future. Passover insists that we never lose sight of the broader context, the grand arc in which we function and exist. Put simply, Passover is the “Anti-Blink holiday.” It is a day which acknowledges that it may indeed be human to thin-slice, it may be who we are to work and react on impulse, but it is not who we should aspire to be – it is not what being Jewish is all about.

Think about the Haggadah that we read last night and that we will read again this evening. The power of the seder is found in two deeply embedded operating principles. First of all, and I encourage you to think about this tonight, the Exodus from Egypt is never read merely as an isolated moment. The Exodus is the fulfillment of a promise made long before the redemption from Egypt. Barukh shomer havtahato l’yisrael, “Blessed be the One who keeps His promise to Israel,” a promise made to Abraham, to Isaac, and Jacob, that sustained our forefathers in their bondage. Secondly, the redemptive message of Exodus is never limited to that single historical event, but serves as a standing promise and recurring opportunity for every generation. In every generation, when we sit at the seder table, we are asked to enter a mystical temporal matrix whereby we are both recalling an ancient past and anticipating a redeemed future at the same time. Every year we begin by remembering our slavery, every year we end by promising “Next year in Jerusalem.” Every year we recall our wandering ancestor, every year we tell of our rise to freedom. If you stop to think about it, the whole business is incredibly countercultural. It doesn’t matter what is going on in the news, how the markets are doing, what Oprah’s book of the month is, or whether Tiger Woods is or isn’t making a comeback. The whole point seems to be that the story you told last night is the same story you are going to tell tonight, and exactly the same one that you told last year, the one that was told to you when you were a child, that was shared generations ago, and that will, please God, be told in generations to come. The story is relevant not because it changes with the times, it is ever relevant because it is a story that exists in the substratum of our souls and speaks to us year after year, no matter where we are.

Our age is deficient in terms of stamina of vision, we lack an enduring attention span. We treat everything like a stock that is bought and sold, forgetting that identity occurs over the long term. There is nothing wrong with being attentive and responsive, it can be altogether commendable, but there are consequences to living solely in the instant. When you live solely in the moment, the relationships that mean the most to you can be obscured through lack of perspective. Be it a sibling, a spouse, or Israel, to lack perspective means that the totality of a relationship can be eclipsed by any single news cycle. To live solely in the moment means that every scene of our lives is of equal weight, that the promises and commitments of the past are effortlessly and carelessly trumped by our fickle hearts and minds.

The Passover Haggadah is significant, not only because of its content, but because it teaches us how to be Jews, it teaches us how to be human beings. We, like God, seek to keep our promises through thick and thin. We, like ancient Israel, seek to persevere and hold tight to our principles even when they are inconvenient or appear passé. Passover reminds us that we are part of a bigger story, a story that began long before any of us and will continue long after. We remember where we came from, we stand committed to our destiny, and that gives balance to our present. We never allow the isolated moment to dominate because who we are is so rooted in our past and our future.

Menachem Mendel of Lubavitch once described the natural spiritual posture of a Jew as existing in Hoveh tamid, “the Eternal Present.” More than any other people, as Jews we are taught that the intense “nowness” of our present is always linked both to our past and to our future. In a very different context, Paul Ricoeur, the late great philosopher of the University of Chicago, observed that the Jewish conception of time has no sense of an “isolated punctual instant,” rather the present is “always directed toward the past though memory and toward the future through expectation.” If I were to rephrase Ricoeur in Wilson’s language, I would say: “Being Jewish ain’t nothing but keeping the same idea from beginning to end.” If I were to rephrase Ricoeur and Wilson in Jewish coin, I would quote the Haggadah, Lo et avoteinu bilvad ga’al ha-kadosh barukh hu, eleh af otanu ga’al imahem, “Not only our forefathers alone did the Holy One redeem, but He redeemed us too with them.” This year, let us see our families, ourselves, and our lives for what they are, part of the grandest story of all – ever present, ever past and ever future – the eternal present of our Jewish existence.