Analyze This!

A person with a tendency to analyze everything has a specific set of skills. Learning to see the puzzle in everything has its costs. They are everywhere, these puzzles and once you start looking at them, it’s impossible to stop. It just so happens that people and all the deceits and delusions that inform everything they do, tend to be the most fascinating puzzles of all. Of course, most people don’t appreciate being seen that way. It is a lonely way to live sometimes. It does have its costs.

At times, the puzzle seem impossible to solve and some in fact, are never solved. Some you must just move away from, give up, mark it down as unsolvable like an ill manufactured rubix cube; one that was accidentally made with no way to solve it, no way to line up all the little colored squares. Then there are others, simple to figure out, beautiful once solved and glorious in their simplicity.

We all wear costumes to hide our puzzles; clothes that on the outside say to the world “This is who I am”, “I am a professional”, “I am a surgeon”, “I am Jewish”, “I work for the electric company”; uniforms that hide who we really are on the inside, and project to the world a strong sense of who we want the world to believe we are. “I make life and death decisions every day”, “I am deeply religious”, “I can fix things” are all ideas of ourselves we want to project to the world. But when the uniform comes off, we are still that puzzle underneath it all; flawed and complicated, soft and hard, a mix of emotion and disengagement, happiness and sadness. We can all be hurt, and we can all do the hurting. It’s how you recover from it that matters; it’s how you solve your own puzzle that counts.  

Strong People Don't Settle

Strong people don’t compromise. We defy the odds, defeat death, strive for perfection, and are probably way harder on ourselves than anyone else is. We will go through hell and high water to achieve a good outcome, a good result, one that makes us and those around us happy, and confident in the knowledge that their faith in us is not misplaced. We can get the job done. We are strong. We are not built to fail but that doesn’t mean that sometimes we won’t. We don’t want to settle for imperfection, a failed relationship, we tell ourselves, it can be fixed, but sometimes, no matter how strong we are, no matter how hard we try, we have to listen to hearts and accept failure. Sometimes things just cannot be fixed. There are variables we cannot control but that doesn’t mean we just settle.

Sometimes what seems like settling is actually not. It’s actually choosing to move on, defying death, living to fight another day, putting distance between us and the event so we can learn from the mistake and strive for perfection in the next round, and come even closer to our “good result”. It takes strength to move on, to be on your own, and to not settle but it is necessary. It’s what we do, us strong people, it’s how we stay strong. Its how we keep faith to try again with a new person.   

When we follow our heart, move on, and choose not to settle, it’s funny isn’t it, that a huge weight lifts; the sun shines a little brighter; the color comes back into the world again; there is hope, hope that the next time we won’t fail, hope that the next time will be better and for a moment, however brief, we find peace.   

Time Heals All Wounds

Is it time that heals all wounds? I’ve heard this expression all my life and I always wondered why this was true. It became obvious to me early on that in fact it really was true but was it really the passing of time that healed wounds or was it actually something else? I learned a number of years ago that it is in fact, something else.

In the passing of time after a deep hurt, or “wound”, you experience other things in life. You meet new people; reconnect with old friends, family members, share stories and experiences, you go to work each day, and find new things that you enjoy, new people that you enjoy and you take comfort in the people you already know and the things you were already doing. In this process your perspective changes. You apply all of these new interactions to the wound like a salve, healing it a little at time. And as it scabs over, you know it’s there but it becomes less and less painful. Now if you dwell on this wound, it is like ripping the scab off over and over and it never seems to heal but if you leave it alone, don’t pick at it, in time you forget it’s there and it heals itself. In time, you find yourself looking back and thinking “Now what was I so upset about?” Ding ding ding! That is the sound of your perspective changing.

There is a life coach who says that you can heal yourself from these life wounds instantaneously. That it isn’t in fact time, but perspective that heals all wounds and that you can change your perspective in an instant simply by looking at the situation differently; looking at it like how you would after the passing of time only don’t wait, look at it that way now. I have found this to be true. Like that old saying, “The best way to get over an old love is to find a new one”. Why is this true? Because in the bright light of your new love, the old one is like a dim bulb, paling in comparison…always. This is the nature of new love. When you don’t really know your “new love” well, they are perfection in every way because you don’t know any better. You haven’t seen their flaws yet, and even if you have, you are so enveloped in the attraction; you find these flaws “cute”, “attractive”, “sexy” even.

Happiness is a choice we each make each and every day. Even if we don’t realize we have the choice, we do. Ever wonder why certain people who have been given nothing in life, who have had to scape and claw their way to achieving the smallest of goals and yet these people live in absolute bliss, happy just to be alive, happy to have the opportunity to love and be loved, share and be shared with? Every day “above ground” is a good day for them. Then there are others in the world that seem to have everything, a good job, a nice family, a nice home and close friends and yet they are miserable, they see the wrong in everything and are completely unhappy. They turn to drugs or alcohol to try and change their state of mind but in the end, they sober up and they are still unhappy and so they do it all over again. These people end up on a downward trajectory, and sometimes, they never climb out of it. Yet the person who has been given nothing yet is happy to be alive manages to find a way to go to college, get a degree, a job they love and live a happy life. It all boils down to perspective. The happy person wakes up every day excited about making his/her life better. The unhappy person wakes up every day thinking “Oh God another day of being miserable”.

This is true with wounds as well. The happy person is able to look at things differently and change their perspective instantaneously which helps them heal and get over things faster than the unhappy person. The unhappy person picks and picks at the scab and it never seems to heal all the while making them more and more miserable with each passing day. They go through their lives as a ghost, walking wounded through every experience never really appreciating it or the people around them, expecting things to just change automatically. Happiness is a thought process that for some is easier than it is for others. For others it takes some work, but it can be done. You can choose to change your perspective and be happy, be grateful for all the things you have whether big or small, appreciate the people in your life, and forgive those who wound you because more than likely, those people are living quiet lives of desperation, the shell of a person while inside, suffering and not knowing how to change that feeling of “Oh God, another miserable day”.

Every single thing in life happens for a reason. I believe it is usually to teach us something that we need to know. If you can ingrain this idea into your perspective, you are well on your way to being a happy person. Yes, sometimes the things we need to learn are painful, sometimes life isn’t pretty and certainly relationships with people can get pretty ugly and messy but if you can tell yourself on a consistent basis that what you experience is not you, it is an experience and it’s meant to teach a lesson. If you can search and find what that lesson is, take it to heart and appreciate it for what it is, forgive yourself when you make a mistake and celebrate your achievements, know that life is short and we are given a finite amount of time on this earth so don’t waste it being unhappy and miserable especially about things you cannot change, be grateful, truly grateful for the smallest of things because often times, the smallest of things are the greatest gifts, you will find that living is easier, more fulfilling and gratifying. Love with all that you have, give all that you can, help wherever you see the need. The rest will take care of itself.  Shabbat Shalom everyone.    

Israel = "God Prevails"

In its strictest form, “atheism” is defined as a rejection in the belief that there is “a” God. According to a report released in 2009 by the American Religious Identification Survey, Atheists make up approximately 2.3% of the world’s population.  In 2009 the world’s population was about 6.8 billion people which would mean that in 2009 6.6 billion people in the world believed in some form of God or Gods.

Since I was a small child, old enough to speak and put ideas together in my brain, I had an interest in religion, particularly ones that were not my own. For most of my life I identified with Christians because really, there was no other identity for me because I was adopted into a Christian (Catholic) family and my birth mother never told the adoption agency about her Jewish background. However, even though I identified my self as a Christian, I never believed the very basic tenants of Christianity, one being that Jesus was God sent to earth to save humanity. It always seemed like a fairy tale, a myth laden with symbols and a story not to be taken literally but a story told to teach people about kindness to your fellow man, the love our creator had for us and importance of having faith that all will turn out OK in the end. I’m reminded of a line from a movie called “The Most Exotic Marigold Hotel” in which the main character says “It will all be alright in the end, and if it is not yet alright, it is not yet the end”. This has become my mantra.

In Christianity I found that a man, a human being, no different than me, was given special powers. Priests could absolve me of my sins; the Pope could make rules about how I was supposed to live my life, as a woman, as a person, all powers given to them by God supposedly. The prayers in Catholicism had lines like “I believe in one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church” and “He was born of the Virgin Mary, was crucified, died and was buried and on the third day he rose from the dead and is seated at the right hand of God” and the ever famous, “He will come again to judge the living and dead”. When you go to confession in the Catholic church, the culmination of being forgiven, and the measure of how great your sins are, is by how many “Our Father”s and “Hail Mary”s the priest that you can’t see or have eye contact with, gives you to say when he excuses you from the dark little booth with the sliding door where on the other side lies the priest’s face. I always wondered whenever I left confessional, was that meant to be a counseling session and if so, why can’t I see his face, why is the little sliding door closed?

My spiritual path has led me down many roads. I studied and in some cases practiced many different religions along the way but the one path I never went down previously was Judaism. I now believe that in the creator’s master plan, he was saving the best for last for me. I had to see and know about all the other religions to be able measure, understand and appreciate Judaism for what it is. It is first of all, the very first mono-theistic religion, born over five thousand years ago. Meaning, it was the first religion to ever believe that there was one God. It was the religion of Jesus which most Christians don’t even realize but all of their teachings, the teachings of Jesus Christ, were based in Judaism. Every good idea in Christianity came originally from a Jewish idea. And it would have had to be wouldn’t it, since Jesus was himself a Jew. Judaism is about the individual and about the world at large. Yes, there are sects of Judaism who believe in the good only for other Jews (Orthodox) and Jews who believe in the good for all of mankind (Reform). My sect, Conservative, believes in both. I prefer this idea because of everything I have learned in the last couple of years, Judaism in its original form, stripped down of all the “man-made” ideas, is in fact about both. It is about striving to be the best person you can be and helping to make the world a better place for all who live on this planet.

I’ve had many discussions with a person very close to me regarding the “marks” of a “good Jew”. He and I have known many people who identify themselves as “Jews” but question whether they are in fact “real Jews”. He is a Christian (Church of England actually) and has not had good experiences with the people he has known who identified themselves as “Jews”. Though I’ve explained it to him many times, and will probably need to explain it many more times, there are many facets to “being Jewish”. It is probably the hardest concept to get across to Christians because they think of being Jewish as only a religious identification. I understand this difficulty because for much of my life I thought the same way so I understand how hard it is to shift the paradigm of belief of only a religious identification to being Jewish is a religion but it is also an ethnicity, a culture, a people with specific DNA markers all originating from a specific place on this earth, the middle east, and specifically, Israel.

Israel is all of Jewish humanity’s home. The original Jews were in fact called “Israelites”. This is why the state of Israel has a right to exist, and should exist, just like Greek people have Greece as their homeland, Russian people have Russia, Spanish people…well, OK, so Spanish people have many homelands depending on where their ancestors were from but every Jew’s ancestor going back to the beginning was from Israel is my point. 

 Though the actual length of time the Jews spent in Egypt as slaves is still being deliberated by scholars, the fact is that we as a people were captured and taken into slavery for at least 350 years and the Bible says 400 years. This was our first departure from our homeland and the reason that people give as to why Israel should not exist as the “Jewish” country. In that time, our homeland was overrun by other peoples. They made homes, had families, generations were born and died in our homeland. This doesn’t make it any less ours. It is where we came from, it is our country. When you look at other country’s histories, we don’t say that England doesn’t belong to the English because they were occupied for a certain amount of time in history by the Romans. 

And speaking of the English, at one point they had one of the largest empires in the world, but we don’t today call any of the countries they occupied “England”. By 1922, the British Empire controlled more than one fifth of the world’s population and was spread across one quarter of the earth’s total land mass, and yet, India is still known as India, the homeland for East Indian peoples, Africa is still known as Africa, the home of the African peoples. It is ironic to me then, to a certain degree, that since 1948, due in large part to British intervention, Israel has become in modern times the “official” homeland of the Jews.

The literal translation of “Israel” from Hebrew to English is “God Prevails”. It makes sense to me then that the homeland of the people who were the first to believe in one God, and one God only, would be called “God Prevails” and so far, for now, he…or she…does.  Shabbat Shalom everyone!

 

It’s the Time of the Season

Since I was a young child I could always tell when fall was arriving. It wasn’t in looking at a calendar that was the signal for me. It was that first color turn of leaves falling to the ground enveloping my world with the smell of musty wet leaves. It was the crisp air filled night sky which seemed to make the stars more visible and plentiful. It was the site of pumpkins every where, on people’s porches, in all the aisles at the grocery store and the site of them piled high at all the roadside farmer’s markets.

In those days my mother had her summer wardrobe and her winter wardrobe and now was the time of year when the switch happened. These days my closet is filled with winter and summer clothes all mixed together and I wear whatever the day and the weather calls for.

While the old signals still hold true for me that fall is coming or has already arrived, today I have new signals. Rosh Hashanna, Yom Kippur, Sukkot. I have my own house now so when the tree in the front yard starts shedding its leaves, I know its time to get the rake out and turn the air conditioner off. I know it’s time to clean the filter in the heating system and mow and weed the front and back yards one last time before winter sets in. Towards the end of October, I know it’s time to bring in the plants that have been outdoors since spring and have grown exponentially while being outside in the direct sunshine and humidity that is so prevalent in the Washington DC area.

Fall is for me a time for the ending of things that don’t work any more and the start of bright new beautiful beginnings. For the last few years, the traumas that I had endured through the year, ended around this time. And this year, well, this year is no different, except for one thing. This year, I know who I am. This year I won’t grieve over those endings like I have in the past. This year, I learned something very important; I learned that I am worthy. This year I learned that I’m a normal woman with the same desires as everyone else, to love and be loved in return and that love takes work, input, face time and open honest communication. I felt the lesson this year that everything really does happen for a reason and that there is a plan underneath it all. We may not know what it is, but its there and it’s set up this way so that we will learn and seek out knowledge, of ourselves, our families, of our creator and of the community we live in.

Love will get us there, on a wing and a prayer. I don’t know where we’re going but I know we’ll get there.