Artists' Audacity

Some of you may know I was in the Peace Corps in the late 90s in Cameroon.

As many lucky Peace Corps volunteers I had an adoptive family who would feed and love me and care for me when I was lonely.

In Cameroon families were quite large,

Many polygamists as well.

My family had one patriarch and 17 children and one of his grandchildren was named Mayramu,

Which is more or less the English or Hebrew name Miriam or Mary.

I learned the word tetut about Mayramu.

Tetut coming from probably the etymology of the head,

Headstrong one might say,

Stubborn,

Willful,

I like to think of her.

One time I was with her mother Habiba in her new house after she had been recently remarried and Mayramu was nowhere to be found.

We were talking,

Habiba and maybe her sister or a local friend,

For a good half hour to an hour and we realized that Mayramu was in the bedroom picking apart a foam mattress into bits.

Foam mattresses are quite a luxury item in Cameroon,

Very expensive.

And we could barely contain our laughter.

It was a terrible misfortune,

But that's who she was.

She was afraid of me for a long time as a white person whom she had never seen and I used to bring her candies until she felt comfortable with me.

And recently I found her on WhatsApp and we chatted again,

She's a full-grown woman.

But I think I knew I wanted to have a tetut child.

I wanted my children to be headstrong.

It matters.

It's easier to domesticate a horse than it is to find a good horse.

I know it's a terrible metaphor,

But it matters to have a strong will and a strong personality.

It's something I aspire to.

And then,

Of course,

The risk and the trick is finding the ways to integrate that into your daily life and into society,

To be a healthy and functioning member of a community.

In our tradition,

We call that chutzpah.

And some of you might have heard the word chutzpah.

It's actually a much older word than you'd think.

It exists even in the Talmud.

They talk about chutzpah klapay mala,

Chutzpah in the face of heaven.

Impudence,

One might call it tetutness,

Rebelliousness,

Strongheadedness,

Willfulness,

The ability to challenge received wisdom and authority.

I think it's a great trait.

It's certainly a Jewish trait and something we love in our children and in Colgate.

I once heard someone say to a child on the edge of a soccer field,

Things go better when you obey.

And I thought no Jewish parent has ever said that to their child.

That is not our experience.

Things do not go better when we obey,

And we challenge our received tradition at all times.

And that's the nature frequently of the Torah reading this week,

And it's certainly the nature of artists to challenge what is received,

To challenge what is a given,

What we accept without consequence or courage to debate.

Moses in Deuteronomy is reviewing the actions of his life and his experiences in wilderness with the Israelites and reviewing the times they made the molten calf and did other things against God's will,

And God threatened to destroy them,

And to which Moses responded with grappling.

Tradition says that there was not a corner of the heavens which Moses did not grapple with to attain God's forgiveness,

Sometimes through rhetoric,

Sometimes through logical argument in our tradition,

Sometimes through direct approach.

Even we see Abraham doing this with God when the people of Sodom and Gomorrah are threatened to be destroyed.

It is a positive trait to be chutzpah,

To be chutzpan,

I think you say that,

Someone of chutzpah,

Someone who is tetut,

Willful,

Headstrong.

And what's interesting is I think God feels like me as a parent.

God says,

As long as I have known you,

You have been defiant toward God.

Actually,

I should say Moses says that,

That the rebellious,

Mamrim,

Is the word in Hebrew,

Maybe rebellious,

Defiant.

But in the same Torah reading,

Short verses thereafter,

God has to admit that God cannot reject Israel,

Much like the book of Jonah.

Our misbehavior is not cause to abandon us.

There seems to be a sense in God's life that God is inwardly smiling when we rebel,

When we when we get the best of God,

When we do our best,

When we challenge God's authority.

God would like to crush us under God's boot,

So to speak,

But God is powerless to reject us.

We hear elsewhere in the Torah reading this week that God has heavens,

But God wants you.

God desires human participation.

God desires the artist's way.

God desires the heresy of creativity.

God desires the prophetic within each of us and the ways in which,

In my work,

That comes out in painting and song and narrative and essay.

So this is the challenge,

I think,

For a young girl like Maramu,

For my children,

For me as a child,

Honestly.

If you are a headstrong,

Tetut,

Chutzpah-filled person,

How do you live?

You can't just be a holy hermit.

You can't just always have your way.

That's the way seven-year-olds live,

And that acute sensitivity to independence and hypocrisy is something,

Ideally,

We leave behind with adolescents.

We learn to integrate those parts of ourselves.

So the Torah,

The Hebrew Bible of the week,

Describes this as sort of a balancing act,

An act of paradox,

An act of understanding both sides.

So in one place,

We're told a danger of the Israelite experience in wilderness and conquering the land is that you might think that it was your own might and your own power and your own hand that created all this for you,

Whereas the next verse,

8.

18,

Says that God gave you the power for wealth,

Right?

We can see our own strength and our own willpower and our own capacity,

Yes,

But we should also recognize that it is God-given.

As Schwarzenegger said,

In contrast to Mitt Romney in 2012,

Schwarzenegger recently said he doesn't like to be described as a self-made man,

That no person is self-made.

We arrive with gifts,

We arrive with a community of support,

We arrive with generational wealth,

We arrive with all these capacities that are at best barely our own and we are lucky to possess.

And we can be proud of the hard work,

But generous in our sense of the good fortune we have.

But,

Says the Torah,

You have to have strength to enter the land and take possession of it.

So it's a gentle and delicate balancing act between believing,

As one of our Hasidic teachers says,

That on one hand the world was created on our behalf and on the other hand we are just dust and ash,

Quoting two separate religious texts.

We're constantly balancing,

We're constantly balancing this effort of being our best selves without thinking we deserve it.

Torah says that it's not for our virtue that we receive all these gifts that God is bestowing on us in the land and wilderness,

Things like the mana,

That we are required elsewhere,

It says,

To do what is good and right.

Action matters more than personality.

The world doesn't owe us a thing.

The world was not created to answer our needs,

Says the psychiatrist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

The world was not made to answer our needs.

And so we must live in a way that balances this delicate and tender rebellion against things as they are with an acceptance that we don't truly deserve anymore,

That we're doing it for the sake of a healed and better world and our own part,

Small part,

In making it.

We are at risk of becoming calcified,

Determined,

Too much,

Over-determined,

A sense of entitlement,

The ugly entitlement and self-pity and grievance,

Really become the ugly phenomena of our age.

So in addition to prescribing for all Jewish boys circumcision of the penis,

We are also told to circumcise our hearts.

The heart itself has a,

Without being too graphic,

A foreskin,

A blockage and a covering,

Say some of our sages,

That we must,

Unlike surgical procedures,

Do it again and again,

Revise and review our actions and ourself such that we do not become entitled,

But at the same time recognize our capacity to make change,

To force the issue,

To be bold,

To be daring,

To be willful,

To rebel against things as they are in the hope of things as they might be.

I forget what King said exactly,

But we aren't where we should be,

We aren't where we want to be,

But at least we're not where we were,

Something to that effect.

So this idea of re-circumcising or continually circumcising the heart is known elsewhere in our tradition as cheshbon nefesh,

Which is soul accounting,

Which more or less correlates to the accounting one does in 12-step or tikkuni nefesh,

Fixing the spirit,

Fixing the soul.

And these are challenging,

Strenuous,

And not always joyful labors,

But they are required even on the Sabbath,

We're told.

At all moments,

We have the capacity to review our actions and selves and behaviors and misdeeds and proclivities and decide what is best,

When to put on the armor,

When to put the armor down,

When to push,

When to pull,

When to stand still.

It's not easy,

There's no consistent idea.

And for my artists with whom I work and who are out there,

Yes,

Art should always be transgressive and subversive,

But not exclusively transgressive and subversive.

It also has to be intimate and empathetic.

I've been doing a deep dive on James Baldwin,

Who is transgressive,

Subversive,

Intellectual,

And deeply empathetic and compassionate,

And it is a phenomenal recipe.

I can't recommend his essays enough.

So I'll leave you with one of my favorite lines in Bible.

You may hear echoes of it in the book of Micah,

Walking humbly with God.

Now,

O Israel,

What does God,

Your God,

Ask from you?

To revere God,

To walk in all God's paths,

To love God,

And serve God with all your heart and spirit.

That is the task I place ahead of us,

The Torah places ahead of us,

In front of us,

For us.

That balance of love and awe,

Action,

Reverence,

And service,

Giving and taking,

Pushing and pulling,

Being still and being determined.

Tricky balance.

As with most things I tell you,

I'm saying it to myself because it's not easy to do,

And I want to acknowledge that for everyone.

The things we are asked to do by our faith traditions are not intended to be easy reaches.

They are intended to be a stretch.

We assert the implausible to arrive at the possible,

And that's,

I think,

The nature of a good faith tradition.

So go forth in reverence,

Love,

Progress,

And service.