Pieces in a Puzzle

We are all part of the big puzzle that makes up the world. Each one of us is a small piece doing our part to either build the world up or rip it down. The problem is that for many of us there doesn't seem to be a puzzle at all, everything seems to be random chance. Others have the opposite problem, everything seems to be part of a system. There is only the complete picture with no room for the individual self.

When a person looks out in the world there is room to see whatever a person wants to see. A person can choose to see the puzzle with all it's interconnecting pieces. A person can see the picture with everything put together in its proper place. A person can also choose to see the world as a random and chaotic place devoid of meaning. The nature of the world is the ability for individuals to take hugely diverse viewpoints and still live on the same planet as human beings.

In Yeshiva we are all taught that we are pieces in the grand puzzle. We have choices that we have to make, but these choices only can be made in the perspective of the being part of the greater puzzle. There is the good inclination that demands that we behave as part of the greater whole, there is the bad inclination that demands we follow the path of our individual piece doing what we want without thought of consequence. Looking at the big picture means following the will of God, looking at the small picture means listening to Satan, and the baser instinct.

The difficulty comes when a person enters the real world, outside Yeshiva. In the real world there are so many differing opinions about right and wrong it can make a person's head hurt. There are so many different ways to look at the world that don't include the puzzle at all. Every new view a person is exposed to begs the question, is this worthy of considering a part of the big picture that makes up a person's world? Eventually, a person is exposed to so many views that the idea of one big picture that he was brought up to believe in Yeshiva becomes a parable of hot air when it comes to choosing a way of life. With so many conflicting viewpoints, how can a person maintain a consistent whole in their mind's eye?

There are a few choices.

1. Ignore all outside information. Pretend as if the only view that exists is the one you were brought up believing.
   
2. Accept all the outside information and forever be a person in flux, without any real concreteness. Every new bit of information will change who you are and what you think.
3. Maintain that the truth is always changing. With every new bit of information uncovered a better truth is discovered.

All these choices involve a perspective on the whole that a person is choosing to take into account. These are choices that start with the puzzle, and only after work toward the individual pieces. There is however another choice:

• Start with the pieces and ignore the puzzle altogether.

This is what is known as the existential viewpoint. Instead of looking at the world full of conflicting views and seeking some sort of unified theory, a person looks for a singular theory that fits his own piece of the puzzle. The person doesn't look to the other pieces to find meaning in his own piece; he himself builds meaning for his own piece of the puzzle. There are many conflicting views out there in the world, but the only ones that matter are the ones that the person has made true for himself.

For the existentialist, the world can be random, or the world can be ordered. Many people have conflicting views on the subject. How does a person know what to believe? He chooses what he wants to believe. He doesn't close his mind to all new knowledge, nor does he open his mind to constant flux, nor is the absolute truth constantly changing. The person himself chooses what he wants to base his life on. He listens to new ideas, he wieghs them in his head, and he makes a choice whether to accept them as true or not. After the choice has been made, everything else is irrelevant. All that is needed is conviction, motivation, and self determination to stay on the path that the person has chosen.

We are all pieces in the great puzzle that makes up the world. Some people believe that all the pieces naturally fit together as ordained by God. Others believe that the all the pieces will never fit together because there is no God. It is the brave few that can say, "No matter what the deal with the other pieces happen to be, my piece will fit: shining bright".

I am working to become one of the brave few.

Reality after vacation

I was driving for 22 hours straight with only a little break. The caffeine was pumping through my veins. The headlights from all the cars behind me were blinding me, driving me insane. I wanted to go home, but I wanted to go back at the same time. The status quo was change, and all I dreamed about was being in status quo. Is this real? Did the trip just happen? Is the wheels of the car really moving at such a tremendous speed.

I was on my way home from an amazing trip, a week away from reality, a week full of fun and adventure in a place far from home. My mind was unwilling to accept the fact that reality would soon set in. The routines that make up the everyday life that I lead did not want to start up in my head. Why did I go? Why didn't I stay on vacation forever?

I eventually got home. I got into the shower and my whole body began to shake. Frustration was the feeling of the moment. Pain was the undertone. My body and mind felt as if they had been ripped from their mountings, tossed around for a week, then placed right back in their old place. Everything was the same, everything was different. Life would never be the same again.

Motivational Speakers and Mussar Speakers: A Compare and Contrast

If you have ever gone to a speech given by many of the various Rabbis in our communities you will undoubtedly notice something interesting. For the most part these speeches consist of ideas geared toward helping you in your goal of serving God. The focus is usually on doing the mitzvos the right way, on learning more Torah, on things you should be more careful in, and on all sorts of other things that are important when it comes to being an Orthodox Jew. The focus is not necessarily on a person's own self improvement, though that can be a byproduct of living a life free of internal conflicts; the focus is always on something that the speaker feels is important and worthy of being focused on.

A motivational speaker's goal is just the opposite. He doesn't care what you choose, just so long as you are the one choosing. He doesn't have any goals in mind when he defines success. For the motivational speaker the job is not to tell you what to do, you already know what it is you have to do, he just wants to bring out what is already there. A good motivational speaker will get you fired up with a passion to go out there and do what ever it is that you do with more passion than you did before. The goal can sometimes be internal change, but for the most part the goal is to bring out the choices that a person really wants to make themselves.

It is true that there are many Rebbeim that mix the roles, they motivate as well as give mussar. There are some Rebbeim out there that bring a person's self confidence up. They show how a person can make themselves into who they really want to be; they motivate, inspire, and they enlighten all at the same time. The problem is at the end of the day they mix the speech with things a person doesn't want to hear. They mix in their own preaching, what they feel you should be doing at the end of the day. This ends up poisoning the waters and ruining anything a person could have taken away from the speech.

The reality is that the job of a Rabbi is different from the job of the motivational speaker. The Rabbi is after all a servant of God first and foremost. His first duty is to do what he believes is the will of the almighty. If you choose to sit in the chair and listen to what he has to say that means that you subscribe to his view of what the almighty wants, you are willing to accept what the Rabbi has to say on the subject. All his motivation has the focus of trying to get you to do what in his view is the will of God. Your own personal goals, as long as they don't fall in line with what he believes is the will of God, are discountable.

Motivational speakers on the other hand have a totally different goal in mind. Their goal is to help you do better what ever it is you happen to want to be better at. If you want to be better at serving God, he can help you be better at that. If you want to be a better thief, he can even help you get better in that too. His whole job is to bring out internal potential, the direction of that potential is all your own.

This past week I listened to the amazing motivational speaker, Ben Newman, give a presentation in front of a large crowd of salespeople. His job was to inspire each of us to be better at our trade. The point of the whole thing, however, was not focused on the fact that he was speaking to sales people. It would have worked for any group of people whose goal was to be better at what they were doing. The one thing I took away from the whole speech was this line, "You have got to find your internal WHY." The idea is that you have to find in yourself what makes you get up in the morning and gets the fire in your belly going. How else can you be successful unless you recognize your own internal sense of purpose.

This whole concept is totally alien to a Mussar Shmooze. The "WHY" is all external, why you want to do what you want to do is irrelevant, internalizing the external "why" is the most important. Internalizing the goals of the Torah is considered more important than externalizing your own personal dreams and aspirations. You should be learning more, you should be talking less in Shul about the guy with the funny nose, you should be looking at thing that give you lustful thoughts less often. You should, you should, you should. And all I do is tune it all out. Because WHY SHOULD I? It's all good and well you telling me what I should and shouldn't do, but in the end of the day it is my life to live and not yours. I have to live everyday with the choices that I make, not you. I have to wake up every morning and look myself in the mirror and be glad that I was born, not saying, "It was worthy of man not to have been created" but saying "Thank God I was born, this is the only life I have to live. Let's make it the best I can!"

When everything is considered all that really counts is living with the choices you make. There is nothing more important than going home with the feeling of contentment. God doesn't strike people down with lightening. The consequences for religiously "BAD" actions are hidden in the cause and effect of everyday events. Sometimes we see the hand of God, sometimes the hand is hidden so far we don't even think it is there at all. The reward and punishment so far in the future and so far from the concrete world of everyday life can not be the compass that makes for living our lives. The compass has to be ourselves, our motivations, our hopes and our dreams. It can not be something we only half-heatedly accept as our own, it can't be something we only do on weekends or one time of year. It can not be something that comes from a speech the Rabbi gives every other week on Shabbos. It must come from an internal sense of rightness that is born from living itself. The only thing a speech can do is motivate what is already inside, and the measure of a speech is how well it does that job.

An Angelic story

Once upon a time, in a little corner of heaven, an angel found happiness. He looked down on the earth and he pitied all of the miserable people who live unfulfilled lives. He decided to cover up his wings and come down to earth and give some advice to humanity. He went into the local department store and asked the salesman if they sold angel cloths to cover up his angel wings. The salesman thought he was joking and pointed him to the angel-food cake. After frustratingly trying to wear angel-food on his wings he realized that the salesman had been pulling his leg and he borrowed a trench coat from the local undercover CIA agent.

For weeks he walked around the world in search of a good publicist to get his message out. Every agency would laugh in his face when he told them what he wanted to do. Even the world's religions were not receptive to his message. Either people were skeptical or they thought they had found happiness already. Everywhere he turned his voice was ignored.

Three weeks of walking the earth with no results is a very disheartening prospect even for an angel. The angel took off his borrowed CIA jacket and went back to have a conversation with God. He had a heart to heart with God and asked God for advice about how to get things rolling. At first God was not very receptive to his idea. "Do you think the world needs more complications. Every time I try to intervene in worldly affairs things end up worse than they started. Every revelation is ignored, every given law is trampled on, and people end up doing whatever they want anyway. The world I have created is flawed, the people I have created are only human" God said to the angel.

"It's no wonder I can not get my message across. You have hidden your face to the point that even you do not see it. I just want to bring a little hope to the world, a little light. You have let the world sink into the oblivion of uncertainty. You have let the people cry out for so long in search of you. You have let the world go dark to your presence. Give me a chance to show them were true happiness can be found. Give me a chance to open their eyes again. People will come back to you. People will return to the call of your voice", the angel pleaded with God.

The Master of the Universe looked down on his creation. He looked down on the polluted world, a world that was only a shadow of what it once was, and shook his head. "There doesn't seem like there is much hope for them. Each year they cry out, each day they cry out, but they don't even know what they are crying for. They wouldn't know happiness if it was sitting right in front of them."

The angel looked at God. He stared into the the face of God and he said, "You know. You Know." He put his CIA trench-coat back over his wings and descended back down to earth. For even when God told him that there was no hope, he knew deep down that he had to try. Even the life of an angel means to struggle or else he dies.

Cutting corners

You can't cut corners. Everything must be done in the proper order. Do things out of order and you end up in a situation that is not optimal. You don't want to eat right before you go for a run. You don't want to jump into something head first without knowing what you are getting into. You definitely don't want to do important things halfhearted.

In my head there is always the temptation to not listen to my own advice. I always want to do two steps at a time, skipping things that can turn out to be very important. However, deep down I realize that this is wrong. Everything must be done in it's own time.

A few things recently have brought this idea to the forefront of my mind. I started a new career in investment sales. Instead of selling tangible things I am selling ideas. My job is to show people what they have and where there is a need for something more. To do this job it is necessary to go through all the steps. Skip one step and the person who you are trying to help will get the wrong ideas, ending in possibly making the wrong decision in the long run. It took one experience to teach me this valuable lesson.

The only reason I cut corners was because of lack of confidence. I didn't feel that the way things were supposed to work would actually work in reality. I think this is why people generally cut corners, well... That and inpatients. But then, isn't inpatients a sign of lacking confidence?

Every mistake I make builds experience, every experience builds confidence, and in the end of the day I will feel confident enough not to need to cut corners.

May you all learn from my vaguely described mistakes.

A freilichen un aGuten Moyed

As many of you may or may not be aware, today is the first day of Chol Hamoed Sukkos. It is a day of extreme significance in the KaBallistic world. Today a few hundred years ago, a Rebbe said to his chossid, "Get me some Shmaltz Herring, I'm hungry." From that day forward, Jews all over the world have a minhag to go out on long Chol Hamoed trips to tourist destinations all over their own city's. For one time of the year Jews would know what it means to be annoying in a touristy way.

This Rebbe in our story is now wondering why he could have died on some regular day of the year. If only people would just eat herring in his name and not go to all the free zoos in his memory. Unfortunately for him, there already is no Tachanun in the month of Elul; something else besides a shorter davening would have to be done in memory of him demanding some herring of his loyal Chossid.

For many of us gentlemen who get up late and shake some leaves and fruit, the last thing the rebbe who wanted herring wants of you is to have you get a stomach ache eating your esrog before davening. So just remember to save it for after davening when you are really hungry. After all, you don't have a chossid to get you some herring and vodka.