MY JOB
MY JOB
My job as an adult - as it is for all adults - has always been this: to live and die well as I can as an example to my children and all children.
Has our modern culture taught any of us how to do this? No.
I was not even taught to believe I could ever become an adult who would make love to a woman, and have children.
Looking back, I was infantilised by our culture and our pseudo-religions. I used modern medicine as a kind of secula saviour Madonna in a pseudo-religion to run to if any sign of disease reared its little head. Modern medicine would save me from disease and death. Of course it wouldn't in the long term, but the long term was never part of the game we were taught.
The scholars and scientists would save us from ignorance. The ultimate ignorance - The Cloud of Unknowing and The Dark Night of the Soul -was never part of the game.
Ars vivendi bene and ars moriendi bene are lost to us.
And here the Chasidic tradition helps me: each of us unique, and must do our job in our own unique way. No more heroes to copy, but instead, examples of how each of us can do our job in our own unique way.
And as with the dancing Chasidim, there is here a great and mysterious joy, and even if the dancing is often not too spectacular, it is our own dancing. Like the Mbuti who danced alone in the night in the forest with his G-d, “The Forest” (Colin Turnbull describes this in The Forest People.)