Fall Healing Moon
Went to mussar yesterday for the first time in three weeks. Lots of hugs. Lots of obvious caring for Kate. One of the ironies of this whole situation is that three weeks ago yesterday Kate and I co-taught a mussar session on compassion, rachamim. The next morning at 6 a.m. she was in the E.R. at Swedish. She’s been gone from home ever since.
Yesterday’s mussar was a sort of going away party for Rabbi Jamie who starts a three-month sabbatical on Sunday. Lot of folks brought sweet thangs. My first buffet in memory with snickers bars on the table.
Since I’d had a tough day at CBE on Wednesday, I wondered how I’d react in this setting. At first I was uncomfortable, both with the attention and with the fact that it was Kate who was ailing, not me, yet I was the focus. That lasted awhile. Roughly until we got into the discussion about emet, truth.
It was not the content of the discussion, but its nature that finally lifted my stress. Considering the meaning of truth, identifying the Jewish take on it, relating the search for truth to loving-kindness all stimulated my thinking, made me go deep. And that was the solace. Leaving the squirrel-in-a-cage stressors behind for a while, I went into that realm of memory and creativity where old ideas and new conditions meet, changing each other.
Rabbi Jamie is a great interlocutor. I learn from him, but mostly with him.
There is, I’m coming to understand, a unique Jewish epistemology, one which places a possible truth on the table and passes it around to the many gathered in its presence. Each one comments, shares the part of the elephant that they can see. The process iterates since commentators will comment on others reactions. It does not mean that there is no truth, this is the key move, but that truth itself is multi-perspectival. It takes a village to know a truth.
This has similarities to pragmatism which recognizes that truth with a capital T is not within our grasp, but that our search for it can identify useful approximations, their usefulness identifying their degree of truth.
So now I know a great stress reducer for me. Challenge the mind. Make it work. Let go of the present troubles in a search for new ideas, new ways of grasping what it means to be human.
