Stride Toward Freedom

On this weekend dedicated to the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I find myself reflecting on two interrelated dimensions of his lifetime achievements. The first is brevity. Felled by an assassin’s bullet on a Memphis balcony in 1968, King’s life was tragically cut short at the age of 39. Considering the enduring role King’s presence plays in shaping our national discourse, self-image, and priorities, it is nothing short of remarkable that his life ended at an age that most of us would consider young, his best years yet ahead of him. In remembering King, we are confronted with a throbbing “what if?” What if King had been granted length of years? In his last years, King’s agenda had begun to pivot beyond civil rights and into the anti-war movement and to addressing the systemic ills of economic inequality. In the year prior to his death, he had delivered a fiery and controversial speech against Vietnam at Riverside Church; he was in Memphis that fateful April day to support the rights of striking garbage collectors. Had he lived, who knows what impact King would have had. He might have entered politics. He might have become a polarizing figure. He might have leveraged his stature to train a next generation of leaders. He might have done all sorts of things. Martyred at 39, we will never know.

The second, somewhat connected dimension of King’s life that I found myself reflecting on was its intensity. It was just a dozen years from the bus boycott in Montgomery in 1956 to his death in Memphis in 1968. In just two years, King went from receiving his doctorate in systematic theology to being on the cover of Time magazine and meeting Eisenhower, Kennedy, and a host of world leaders. From Montgomery to Birmingham to Washington in 1963 and receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 – the sit-ins, the freedom rides, Bloody Sunday – all of it and so much more in less time than I have been rabbi at Park Avenue Synagogue. The clustered intensity of King’s public ministry is altogether remarkable. King’s legacy is worthy of reflection this weekend and every weekend for the substance of his efforts, for the moral clarity of his voice and vision, for the movement he set in motion and yes, for the journey yet to be travelled. But the brevity and intensity of King’s achievements – how much he accomplished in such a short time – is also instructive and inspirational. A case study on the impact an individual can have at any point in life. Like Theodore Herzl, who over the course of ten years, from Dreyfus to death, gave voice to political Zionism. Like Sylvia Plath, who by age 50 had forever changed the American literary canon. King’s legacy prompts us all to sit up and take notice no matter what stage of life we are in, no matter what aspect of human endeavor we labor in. Where are the peaks of human creativity, impact, and relevance to be found? How are they to be measured? Studying King’s life, we are motivated to study our own.

Over winter break, prompted by Malcom Gladwell’s new book on Paul Simon, I read a book by David Galenson called Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity. The book asks when people produce their greatest work. Galenson is an economist at my alma mater, the University of Chicago, and he tracks the relationship between the age of artists and their creative peak as measured by the auction prices of their paintings, the frequency with which they are exhibited in museums, or, in the case of poets, the number of anthologies in which their work appears. The metrics may differ by craft – painters, sculptors, authors, poets, musicians and otherwise – but the question is the same: When do people peak in their life work?

To make a long story short, as the book’s title signals, Galenson divides the world into two groups: old masters and young geniuses. The old masters category is filled with people like Cézanne, who did his best work after 65; Dostoyevsky, who wrote The Brothers Karamazov at 59; John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock, whose best films were produced in their late 50s and 60s; Ray Kroc, who had never heard of McDonald’s until he was 52; and Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed Fallingwater at 65. The other category, the young geniuses, are folks like Einstein, who published his four revolutionary papers in his mid-twenties; my predecessor Rabbi Milton Steinberg, who published As a Driven Leaf at 26; Picasso, whose age-price profile drops precipitously after the age of forty; and Orson Welles, who directed “Citizen Kane” at the age of 26. Reading the list of young geniuses, I am reminded of Tom Lehrer’s opening quip to a song: “When Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.” Some peak early, some late; Galenson’s fascinating book suggests a framework for understanding how creativity functions in the lives of the great masters. His thesis is a provocative one, one that prompts a bit of introspection for many of us, at the very least, and speaking personally, for middle-aged Jewish men. Please God, we should all be blessed with length of years. But when are our best years? The ones filled with creativity, productivity, and relevance. Are they ahead of us or behind? If ahead, how will we know and make it so? If behind, who is to say so and what do we do about it now?

For all the insight of the book, and there is much in it worthy of consideration, I find myself troubled by a variety of its shortcomings. First of all, to suggest a correlation between an artist’s creativity and whether their work is displayed in museums, fetches a high price at auction, or is included in an anthology strikes me as a form of pseudoscience. Posthumous judgements of value by the court of public opinion have little to do with whether the artist in question believes that work to reflect their best. To use a contemporary metric, there is no reason to believe that just because a certain song by a certain musician is downloaded on Spotify more than others, that the song reflects that musician’s estimation of their creative peak. And who gets to decide peak creativity? These judgements are so very subjective. One rabbi may like Springsteen’s early years and another rabbi his later stuff, never mind what Springsteen himself thinks. Moreover, drawing too tight a correlation between impact and age fails to account for the contextual forces that give rise to individual achievement. Would King have been King if he had lived ten years earlier or later? How much of any person’s success is due to the person and how much can be attributed to the time in which they lived? I am always struck by the thought of the countless “mute inglorious Miltons” who, due to context or circumstance, never had the opportunity to give voice to their talents – early or late. Finally, as Galenson himself notes, many people do not fit neatly into one category or another. T.S. Eliot wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” at 23 as a graduate student but did not publish what he believed to be his greatest work, “The Wasteland,” until years later. Philip Roth burst onto the literary scene with Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint in the late 1950s and ’60s, was thought to be washed up in the ’70s, and then went on to have the most prolific second act of twentieth century American literature. Likewise, Yeats, Pound, and, for that matter, Springsteen, Paul Simon, and Taylor Swift, a musical prodigy who, sixteen years after her first album, seems to show no sign of letting up.

Thought-provoking as Galenson’s thesis may be on a descriptive level, as a heuristic to make sense of the cycles of human creativity, prescriptively, Galenson’s thesis runs contrary to all we know about leading a purposeful life. The very suggestion that there are certain windows set aside for achievement smacks of a top-down determinism that abdicates our role in taking agency for the terms of our existence. Are we meant to say, “Oh, I’ve written my poems, raised my kids, led my committees, done this, that, or the other; my glory days behind me, I’m now left dispirited and dangling, set adrift to watch my hairline recede, my metabolism slow, and the contents of my pillbox grow.” Galenson’s thesis is problematic because it betrays a rather unidimensional and rather gendered definition of “value,” which you and I both know gives short shrift to the varieties of human creativity. If a journalist chooses to retire from journalism and teach the next generation of journalists, are they less productive or more productive? If one parent decides to go back to work once the kids have left the nest, and another leaves work in order to raise kids, who is the more productive one? If a person has spent the previous decades of their life working professionally but spends the next decades giving back to the community, which chapter will be remembered more? If a grandparent leverages the wisdom accumulated in their lifetime toward enriching the lives of others, shall we not consider those years more valuable, not less? Creativity, productivity, relevance, impact, and meaning in life are not reserved for a single chapter. Meaning in life is situated on the belief that every age and every stage bring new opportunities and new expressions of vitality, expressions different than the ones before and different from the ones yet to come.

Today’s Torah reading teaches us many things, but at its core it is a story that teaches us that who we are today need not be who we are tomorrow. Yes, Moses had to stand before Pharaoh, bring the plagues, and split the sea. But the real miracle was Moses convincing the Israelites that there was an unrealized future awaiting them beyond the horizon of their vision. The enslavement of the Israelites was not just physical – living under the thumb of Pharaoh’s oppression – it was also spiritual. The only reality the Israelites believed possible was the one into which they were born; they had no concept that they could take agency in shaping their destiny. The drama comes to a head at the pivotal moment of this morning’s Torah reading. Standing on the shoreline with the sea in front of them and Pharaoh’s rapidly approaching chariots behind them, the people cry out to Moses, wanting to turn back, wishing they had never left Egypt. In one of my favorite exchanges of the entire Torah, Moses in turn cries out to God, who replies: Mah titz’ak eilai? Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to go forward. And they do, and the waters split, and the Israelites stride toward freedom, leaving one chapter behind and entering another. Our story, we know, is not done. Again and again and again and again, the Israelites will need to be convinced that there is yet another chapter ahead, different from the old one and that turning back is not an option. The Israelites may have stood at the sea just once, but the courage and fortitude they had to muster in order to stride forward toward freedom – that was a quality they had to find time and again.

And it is a quality that each one of us in our own day, in our own way, need to find as well. That is the calling of this Shabbat. Like it or not, each one of us, one way or another, is standing on the shores of the sea. It could be increasing age, a change in professional status, health, or relationship – it could be anything. In a combination of fear and inertia, we cry out not knowing what to do – it is the human thing to do. There are so many unknowns ahead, the past has its comforts, and the future comes with no promises. For some, the change is dramatic – in geography, in vocation, in relationship status. For some, it is the daring possibility that we can reinvent ourselves in our present station, job, marriage, or otherwise, finding passion, creativity, and purpose in a familiar structure. I am reminded of the famed psychotherapist Ester Perel’s comment that “Most people are going to have two or three marriages or committed relationships in their adult life. Some of us will have them with the same person.” Remember, the liberation of the Israelites was not just of body, but of spirit, an attitudinal revolution, a stride toward freedom that can be taken without ever leaving home.

A few years ago, I finally made the pilgrimage to Montgomery and paid a visit to the home, now a museum, where King lived when he first served as minister at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Rosa Parks had just refused to move her seat, the bus boycott had begun, and King, the appointed leader of the boycott, was subjected to an onslaught of death threats against himself and his family. I wanted to see the kitchen table where, as King described it, he sat by himself on that cold January evening, coffee cup at his side, exhausted and scared, ready to give it all up. Head in hands, King bowed over the table and prayed to God. “It seemed,” King later wrote, “as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying, ‘Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.’” Almost at once, King explained, my fear began to go, my uncertainty disappeared, and I was ready to face anything.” (Stride Toward Freedom). It was a pivotal moment in King’s life, King’s step forward that gave rise to so many others striding forward. History would never be the same.

No different than our predecessors, we stand at the shores of the sea. There are no promises; we may never get to the Promised Land; and human though the desire may be, going backward is not an option. We must listen to that small voice – from God, from within – set our fears aside, and take our stride toward freedom, closing one chapter and opening a new one – the most creative, productive, relevant, and vital pages of our lives – about to be written.

References:

Galenson, David. Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Gladwell, Malcolm. Miracles and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon. Audiobook. Pushkin Industries, 2021.

King, Martin Luther. Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. New York: Harper & Row, 1958.