Silence, the “I” and the Other

By Yaakov Mascetti*

I have to confess that there are many moments, in my life here in Israel as a parent, a university lecturer, a citizen, and a member of a congregation, in which I feel both part of the collective, while a painfully acute little voice keeps reminding me how disconnected I also feel from those contexts, from those circles I live in. This week it happened in a meeting at my son’s school, a well-known boys high-school here in Jerusalem, during which parents were presented with the pedagogical priorities by the new teacher. Among the main points, both the teacher and some of the parents expressed their concern for the high percentage of the school’s alumni and students who are either weekly connected to religious orthopraxis, or completely disconnected from it. “What can we do?” asked, worried, one of the mothers, “These boys finish school and often give up all or part of their religious praxis!” And while the teacher and others expressed their concern, I sat there thinking what exactly they were so worried about.

So how are we to behave with our adolescent children who, as they acquire a stronger and more compelling (and rebellious) sense of who they are, dismiss what we expect from them, what we would like them to do with their lives? When presented with a behavioral framework, ready-made and quite ancient, complex and well-structured, are we to accept it blindly, are we to educate our children to accept it and apply it and pass it on to future generations, or are we to empower them with the tools to make a compelling decision of their own? And if their choice does not reflect our expectations, and actually frustrates our projections vis-a-vis their lives and how they really “should be,” is that good or bad? Does deviation from the framework call for intervention?

I am asking these questions four days before the Day of Repentance, “Yom Kippur”, kicks in, with its long prayers, caffeine withdrawal and an intense congregational experience of introspection. So I will take a theological detour and then come back to my beloved, rebellious son, and to more generic pedagogical and religious conclusions.

Deviation is a hard word. There are times in a person’s life when she or he deviates from the right path, going off into dark forests of unknown behaviors, looking for points of reference, leading figures who will tell them how to walk out of the chaos of confusion. Sin is even a harder word – it carries with it centuries of negative connotations, a disturbing sense of impurity and dirt, and a stigmatizing stain of shame. These are the problematic points of intersection between the individual and the public spheres, where one’s actions meet those of the collective, fashioning how she sees herself vis-a-vis others, while others define her being, her role, her value according to those very “negative” acts, those deviations and sins.

When Rabbi Elazar ben Dordia in the Avodah Zara 17a finds himself stuck in the mud of sinful actions and years for the purifying sense of expiation, he looks for the intervention of hills and mountains, earth and heaven, sun and moon, stars and constellations – but despite his good intentions, every time he addresses these external agents and asks for their help, he finds himself thrust back to his starting point. This leads him to one life-changing conclusion: my redemption, my expiation, depends on nothing else and no one else but me. This means, in my humble opinion, that those deviations and sins really are insurmountable obstacles, like earth and heaven, like the sun and the moon, unless we reach the conclusion that it is only by a clear and self-aware acceptance of our responsibilities that we can actually expiate our wrong-doings. But, I ask, what does it really mean to expiate? How do we come out of this moment of self-purification? Are we to consider ourselves new beings? How are we to see ourselves when we step out of the ritual waters of introspection and expiation?

My answer is quite simple – we are the same person as before. The same dirt that stained our candid soul before stepping into this mikveh of teshuvah still stains it after we walk out of it. Does that mean that nothing can redeem a person who sinned? No – that means that we change our attitude towards those actions, we contextualize them, we stop avoiding them with irrational fear and disgust and we start understanding them with a more rational and mature approach. What changes is the methodology – the subject stays the same.

I know… I skipped a phase – that’s me avoiding things that hurt. Ok, breathe in, breathe out. The really difficult part is facing yourself, with respect to a God that is unconditionally silent. This means that, as the Maimonides, Rav Soloveitchik, Rav Kook and others have argued, the process of expiation starts with a painful and unconditional confession of all the things one has done “in front of God” (Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Teshuvah 1:1-4). This outpouring of dirt, of thoughts and actions, this liberating moment in which we get it all out, is not followed, as in a corny American movie (they’re all pretty much corny…) by a choir of angels or a deep voice from Heaven announcing the full redemption of that person and her acceptance into the pantheon of the righteous. No, not at all. What follows is exactly what preceded it – and that is a disturbing, crushing, mind-splitting silence. We face that Levinassian Other, that God who listens and redeems, and yet we remain alone in that silence where the I is captured in the golden cage of his self-consciousness. Does something actually change with teshuvah? No, nothing objective changes – what does change, I guess, is how I as an individual see myself. How I consider myself vis-a-vis those things I did, and my capacity to improve myself.

So: silence. Now: let me take you back to the initial subjects – adolescents, young adults, behavior, secularism, refusal of parental life-styles, and the frustration of expectations. How are we to behave while educating our children within the framework of a religious school, and within the cozy and enveloping four walls of a congregation? We have the duty to prepare them to face that silence, not the noise of frustrated parents or appalled social contexts. What we have to empower them with is the capacity to undertake a life-long search, what will at times become an exhausting and useless odyssey, which will take them away, pull them afar off the beaten path, into dark forests of unknown things (I’m not sure if this is Dante Inferno I’m getting ready to teach or Dr Seuss… but anyways…), away from themselves to actions and thoughts they never heard of or studied in school. And when that will happen to them, they will have to know how to face the “silence,” that uncompromising point of simple truth which will gut their consciences and force them to ask impossible questions.

Choices are not to be imposed – because that entails a quasi-pagan, idolatrous adoration of things (or behaviors) outside of us infused with our own personal qualities. No. Choices are an individual matter, and that’s that. But we must empower ourselves and our beloved to know how and when to make those choices, and how to accept their consequences. That is what a mature and healthy attitude to life is about – and learning / passing on this simple truth is what we as parents, as religious and secular individuals, are here for.

*Yaakov Mascetti holds a Ph.D. and teaches at the Department of Comparative Literature, Bar Ilan University.