Life is Not Sinai

There is a famous scene in Moliere’s play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, shared between the main character, Monsieur Jourdain, and a professor of philosophy. Jourdain, though he grew up in a middle class background, has become wealthy owing to his father’s success as a merchant. Newly rich, Jourdain aspires to travel in the circles of French aristocracy. He buys new clothes; he takes up the genteel hobbies of the upper crust – fencing and dancing – and he dreams of rising above the modesty of his previous life. In an effort to become more refined, he hires a philosophy professor to tutor him. When Jourdain seeks help in writing a love letter, the professor teaches him the difference between poetry and prose. Jourdain is amazed and delighted to discover that whenever he has spoken up to that point, he has actually been speaking in prose. “Bless my soul! I have been talking prose for forty years without knowing it!”

It is neither a matter of great insight, nor for that matter, a signal of defeat, to discover that we have been speaking prose our whole life. Not only that prose is how we communicate, but as the play seems to indicate, that despite our aspirations, we do not transcend the circumstances of our prosaic existence. It would be nice, I suppose, to believe that our lives are the stuff of poetry, beautiful sunsets, dramatic love stories, high adventure and spiritual ecstasy. But whether we discover it at the age of forty, or a bit earlier or later, the narratives of our lives are more accurately described as a bit humdrum, a series of quotidian joys and struggles spread out over the course of a lifetime.

I will always recall a formative conversation I had with a mentor as I was debating careers. My advisor asked me: “Elliot, what is it that you enjoy doing, that you are received well doing, and that can pay the bills?” And before I could answer, he went on to say: “I ask you this, because most of us, if we are lucky – whether one is a teacher teaching classes, a doctor seeing patients, a rabbi giving sermons, or a cantor davening musaf – find ourselves doing the same thing again and again and again over the course of a career. That being the case,” he continued, “just make sure that whatever that thing is you do – that you love it, you are good at it, and it enables you to support a family.” In retrospect, it may not have been the sexiest advice, but it has, for the most part turned out to be true. As sure as I am that as Rabbi of this synagogue, I am presented everyday with new challenges and opportunities, I am doubly sure that, chairman willing, over the next 30 years, I am looking forward to a lifetime of sermons, brises, funerals, bulletins, budgets, b’nei mitzvah, classes and so on.

Such an awareness, for me, for anyone, of the commonplace nature of our lives can indeed be a difficult pill to swallow. Our world doesn’t really allow for a commonplace humanity. We seek the big moment, the high intensity and the otherworldly. We think, like Monsieur Jourdain, that a well-lived life is measured in our ability to transcend our circumstances and follow our passions wherever they may lead. We try to live life as if it were TIVO, fast-forwarding over the commercials, the parts that don’t thrill. We are so wired to look for the next big thing, we fail to appreciate the quiet victories and struggles and duties and loves along the way. As John Lennon reminded us, “Life is what happens…while you are busy making other plans.” Our lives depend physiologically and psychologically on the steady diastole and systole of existence. It is only natural to want the poetry, but it is in prose, not poetry, that the bulk of our lives take place. “All men,” wrote Emerson, “have wandering impulses… the characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency.”

This week we have reached what is, without a doubt, the most curious part of the entire Torah. Four parshiyot, a full third of the book of Exodus, devoted to the planning and construction of the mishkan, the mobile tabernacle that accompanied the Children of Israel throughout their wilderness wanderings. It is repetitive, it is complex, it is at times dull and it begs the question: Why? Why so much literary real estate given up for this one topic? The thirteenth-century Spanish commentator Nachmanides suggests an answer, explaining that the significance of these chapters may be their placement immediately after God’s revelation at Mount Sinai. God’s presence, displayed in full radiance at Sinai, could neither move, nor last forever. In order for the children of Israel to march forward in their journey, they needed a structure beyond Sinai’s glory, they needed the mishkan in order to experience God, even during, if not precisely because of, the unpoetic desert years to follow.

Sinai moments are not sustainable; not for God and not for us. Nobody stays at the mountain for long. Life is not Sinai. Honeymoons don’t last forever – thus the name; eventually the rhythmic nature of married life sets in. A life is not found in flights of fancy or in sprints from one moment of spiritual ecstasy to another. Rather, it is our ability to live spiritually attuned to God’s ongoing and steady presence – a worldly consciousness of God in our lives – that is the stuff and substance of Jewish spirituality.

As Jews, we have our fair share of saints and holy men. From the Prophet Ezekiel to Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai to the Ba’al Shem Tov, there is certainly a stream of other-worldly figures within our tradition. And yet I think our faith is better described as one that seeks not so much to put our heads into heaven, as to pull the heavens down to earth. The great scholar of Judaism Max Kadushin coined the term “Normal Mysticism” to characterize the nature of Jewish spirituality. As Jews, we do not seek to escape our obligations and responsibilities in this world; we do not seek the episodic, rather we seek to find the holy in the habitual. The reason that so much of Jewish law has to do with basic human functions – eating, drinking, conception, illness and death – is because it is a religion that is meant to be lived in this world. Think about it. Every time you say Barukh Ata Adonai, Blessed are You Lord our God – over a piece of bread, over a cup of wine, over anything – you are taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary, you are bringing God into the everyday. Jewish prayer and Jewish law are not meant to transport us to another world. They are meant to engender an appreciation of the sacred in the mundane, routine and yes, sometimes dull, banalities of existence. As the poet Blake wrote:
To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

I have always thought it altogether significant that a wedding is consecrated with the exchange of a ring, really a tiny gesture given the enormity of the moment. But a dozen or so years into a marriage, it makes perfect sense. The substance of those relationships that matter most – between husband and wife, between a human being and God – are more likely to be found in quiet acts of kindness and piety than in dramatic deeds for all to witness. “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun…when she walks she treads on the ground.” Likewise my faith – and my hope for yours – is altogether of this world. Shul attendance on Yom Kippur is a poor measure of religiosity. Rather, religiosity is best measured once we have left the base of the mountain. A shiva call, a hospital visit, a spirit of volunteerism, a gracious act of tzedakah, a Shema said at the bedside of your child, raising your voices alongside that of the Cantor, the unpretentious observance of mitzvot, regular attendance at adult learning and daily minyan. These are the prosaic deeds that are the measure of religious vitality. This is the normal mysticism that makes for a dynamic Jewish community.

Our lives are a patchwork, a jumbled quilt of experiences: drop offs and pick ups, runny noses, cups of coffee and other markers of the commonplace. These limitations are neither good nor bad; they are just inevitable. “There is no use,” wrote Montaigne, “our mounting on stilts. For on stilts we must still walk on our own legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump.” And yet it is in the very limitations of our lives that each of us is granted the opportunity to lead a life of great consequence. “In the eyes of the world,” wrote Heschel, “I am an average man. But in my heart I am not an average man. To my heart I am of great moment. The challenge I face is how to actualize, how to concretize the quiet eminence of my being.”

My grandfather, z”l, was a congregational rabbi his entire life, in fact right up to the day of his death. His obituary read that he spent the last twenty-four hours of his life basically doing what he had been doing for the prior 30 years. He officiated at a funeral that morning, he attended a community meeting, he visited some people in the hospital and he wrote a sermon for Shabbat. My dad told me my grandfather actually died pen in hand, note paper on stomach. Given the choice, when the ticket taker in the sky comes for me, I may request that that my final hours include a nice kosher steak, but basically I would gladly accept the terms my grandfather was granted. The most beautiful lives, in my mind, are those that are aware of, and striving to concretize, the quiet eminence of our being without miracle, and without eccentricity – an awareness that seeks to feel the steady presence of God in our lives, in whose Divine image, all of us, in all our prosaic humanity, were created.