Divrei Shalom
P. 141-146
And when people say it is humiliating, they mean that it is comic. (G. K. Chesterton)
As a small child in the late 1950’s, like everyone else, from the bald-headed president who beamed at the American people like a happy fetus, to my classmates, short and stocky, prancing in the vestibules and aisles of the shuls like little leprechauns, I wore a hat on suitable occasions. When I went to Israel the hat was discarded, an unmourned relic of formal pre-Zionist stiffness, from which we were now redeemed. By the time I returned to New York for college the ‘60s had struck. John Kennedy’s hatless inauguration, we heard, had killed the hat business. For cultural conservatives, the hat’s rejection on that frigid, windy January morning in 1961 marked the beginning of the end of decency as we knew it. The drug culture and the sexual revolution, the disappearance of reserve and respect in social relations, the loss of inhibition in the hot pursuit of money and status, the reign of insolence and the shameless exhibition of shallow sentiment and carnal affairs, all seemed to happen along with, because of, the eclipse of the solemn, honorable headgear that topped and propped the old order. To me at the time, the demise of the hat was not experienced as the dawn of self-indulgence. Quite the contrary: it marked progress from unheroic, stagnant pomposity to a new, strenuous, vigorous life impatient for achievement. Whether it was the young American “can do” president I read about in Newsweek, leading the best and the brightest, ready to bear any burden, or the young open-shirted Israeli society I encountered that had already accomplished so much, it was the hatless who brimmed with resolution and earnestness, it was they who occupied the high moral ground.
Fifty winters pass and I find myself, hatless and tieless on a sparkling January morning, among the schoolchildren, high school honors students, an affable public intellectual whose writing they have been assigned, summoned by their teacher for Show and Tell. They are questioning me about the doctrine of divine providence. I am trying to explain why personal providence has little to do with miracles or astonishing coincidences and everything to do with the constant awareness of living in God’s presence. Midway through my response it occurs to me, as it sometimes occurs to philosophers, that my adolescent interlocutors are making a dubious assumption. Because Judaism teaches that whatever happens to us is part of our relationship with God, they have inferred that whatever happens to us is either reward or punishment, and that experiencing divine providence is therefore inexorably linked to keeping score of where we stand with God. We are taught to beware a life totally devoid of suffering. The school of R. Ishmael taught that if forty days pass without suffering, one has received his reward in this world and has thus forfeited the prospect of future reward. What qualifies as suffering? Even if he expected a hot drink and received a cold drink, or vice versa; even if his shirt was inside out and required adjustment, even if he reached into his pocket for three coins and grasped only two (Arakhin 16b).
Measured by the displays of irritation they evoke, and sometimes, where there is someone to blame, even outbursts of anger, such frustrations should indeed count as bona fide suffering. What, however, if such trivial events do not cause us vexation and pain, but instead change some humdrum day to comedy? G. K. Chesterton maintained that it was amusing to run after one’s hat, or to watch someone else running after their hat. Over a century ago, he longed for the day when fox-hunting, the barbaric pastime of the English upper classes, would give way to the humanitarian sport of hat-hunting:
There will be a meet of ladies and gentlemen on some high ground on a gusty morning. They will be told that the professional attendants have started a hat in such-and-such a thicket, or whatever be the technical term… The hunters would feel that they were not inflicting pain. Nay, they would feel that they were inflicting pleasure, rich, almost riotous pleasure, upon the people who were looking on.
When we stopped wearing hats we indeed lost a great opportunity for innocent merriment. Stalking the wild yarmulka on one’s way to Yeshiva University’s Belfer Hall of a blustery March morning does not compare, even when clutching a sheaf of loose papers in one hand and a briefcase in the other, running late to an appointment. Alas, especially on rainy days when unpredictable anarchy of wind is tempered by sogginess of water, the yarmulke comes up short in the sheer aerodynamic buoyancy, the spirited resourcefulness, the indomitable feral instinct for freedom characteristic of the thoroughbred hat at bay. What fool would prefer the filth on the Internet, or even the heady invective attacking when beckons the irresistible spectacle of respectable pillars of society, chasing rabbinical headgear in the outfield of a major league baseball stadium?
II
Let not these imaginings tempt us from our solemn theological meditation. Do I diminish my share in the world to come because, contrary to earnest reason, instead of suffering I find it an interesting change of pace to get a cold drink instead of the hot one I ordered, or when the demure green pepper in the soup turns out to be a jalapeno? Is it shortsighted to fritter away in laughter this divinely provided, much needed chance to enhance my spiritual portfolio through a modicum of suffering? According to the Malbim, something like this dilemma came up in the debate between Bildad the Shuhite and Job. Following in the footsteps of Maimonides and Gersonides, Malbim held that Bildad’s first speech (chapter 8) was intended to console him with the theory that the sufferings of the righteous are a kind of spiritual investment leading to greater corresponding reward later on. Malbim reads Job’s response in chapter 9 as a series of arguments against Bildad’s philosophy. Job’s lament (9:27-28) can be roughly translated: “If I say, let me forget my complaint, abandon my angry countenance and take comfort, I am afraid of all my sorrows, knowing that You will not find me clean.” Malbim interprets his words as follows: If [Bildad] says… that God will compensate him well according to the degree of his pain in proper measure… Job responds that Bildad is contradicting himself in advising him to forget his pain and fortify himself against the affliction and not to despair because they are for the best, because the benefit he will get is proportionate to the pain and aggravation that he suffers, and the degree of pain is set by God without surplus or deficiency, then if he overcomes his afflictions and does not feel the pain, his time of affliction will necessarily increase until it reaches the right measure.
Neither Job nor his friends have a sense of humor. Given the extremity of his plight and their distinctive brand of earnestness, it is inconceivable to think of them adopting Chesterton’s philosophy of hat-hunting. Any pretense to such an attitude would be an exercise in phony piety or (almost as bad) a show of forced cheerfulness. It might well breed or reflect an indifference to evil, an insouciance about suffering, and an unwillingness to confront reality, which Chesterton hated yet sometimes succumbed to. Surely it would be difficult for Job to set aside his pain and sense of grievance. His afflictions go far beyond the annoyance of scrambling after his hat or fumbling for change or eating a dish not seasoned to his taste. He has lost his possessions, his children, his health. To expect Job to make light of his pain, as his friends occasionally call upon him to do, is a form of verbal oppression (ona’at devarim). Logically, however, the argument Malbim gives Job against Bildad does not depend on the triviality or intensity of the afflictions, or on the psychological outlook of the debaters. The argument confronts all of us. If feeling pain in the here and now yields dividends when it counts, then the more we can suffer the better. To take comfort, through philosophical reasoning, theological doctrine, or in any other way, is thus counter-productive. It is a sorry waste to treat affliction, even our own, as humorous. What, then, can the afflicted person, or the put upon person, who persists in seeing the comical dimension of his or her predicament, say in justification?
One response is that such an approach has one great religious-ethical virtue: it deflates one’s self-importance. Frustration, even adversity, need not always be humiliating; yet it is always potentially humbling. In the chapters on evil and Providence in the Guide to the Perplexed, Maimonides argued vigorously that the human species is not the purpose of the universe, let alone the individual man or woman. Nothing better translates this doctrine into a vibrant, living experience, and in a manner that enhances human existence and sustains human dignity rather than demeaning us, than the ability to laugh heartily at our finitude and ridiculousness. God testified that Job was a righteous man, fearing God and turning from sin. Maimonides noted that Job is not called a wise man. He might have added that Job was not a humble man. However severe his tribulations, by his own testimony in the long speeches of self-justification, one of his greatest tribulations was the contrast between his self-conscious eminence before catastrophe struck, when his “feet were washed in butter” (29:6), when the young hid at his approach and the venerable stood up (29:8), and his reduced social standing afterwards, when, he imagines, his inferiors look down on him.
Without in any way impugning Job’s righteousness, it might have been better for him if, in times of prosperity, he had forgotten his eminence when his authoritative discourse was interrupted by the need to reclaim a fugitive fedora, with the melted butter a bit slippery beneath his feet, or if one of those cowering youngsters had become a security guard at the bank and stopped him for ID, or if, just once, a snootful of snuff or a pinch of pollen had infiltrated his silver spice box at a public havdala ceremony. The gain, perhaps, would be worth giving up a few merit-points of suffering.
But there may be a more radical response, and this brings me back to my teenage honors students waiting for my words to drizzle like rain into their open mouths, as Job would phrase it (29:22-23). How am I to know whether battling to retrieve an escaped hat is a punishment or a good joke? There are events, like drought, that Halakha defines as disasters, for which fasting and similar behavior is enjoined; there are events, like the end of a drought, that engender an obligation of thanksgiving. Most events are neither, yet these are no less significant episodes in our life with God than the ones that are labeled good or bad. Their religious significance is determined by what we make of them. It is possible that when the enjoyment of running after one’s hat presents itself, or when one notices bemusedly that the coins he has produced from his pocket are not the ones he intended, the religious individual doesn’t care whether he is being punished or rewarded. Is it possible he or she simply isn’t keeping score?
III
The days when I was still a good boy who wore a hat on suitable occasions coincided with the heyday of “The Honeymooners” on Saturday evenings. I recall the time that Alice shamed Ralph into taking her ice skating, against his better judgment, because she wanted them to do together the things they had enjoyed together in their youth. Predictably enough, while fetching a tray of hot chocolate, Ralph slips on the ice, and his companions fail miserably in their efforts to raise him. By the next scene they have returned to the apartment. Ralph is steamed; he paces angrily, reliving the shame of a middle-aged fat guy who has fallen down, and after falling down is unable to get up, all because he has foolishly engaged in a young man’s recreation. “What are you laughing at?” he snarls incredulously at the chuckling Norton, and then, as it dawns upon him that there is much to laugh about, he roars in recollection of the escapade.
Then Ralph waxes philosophical: getting old doesn’t matter, he claims he has learned tonight, if you can recall the good times you had when you were young. Recalling an apocryphal adage attributed to Chesterton’s secularist adversary and friend George Bernard Shaw, Ralph opines, the sad thing about youth is that it is wasted on the young. Now it is Alice’s turn. She too has learned something tonight. She has learned that she doesn’t mind getting old if she and Ralph get old together. The comedy having reached its terminus, no more jokes need to be made...
The prophets cried out to God in distress at the prosperity of the wicked and the desolation of their betters. Chazal come back again and again to the mystery of suffering that cannot be explained. The problem of evil, in its various philosophical formulations and guises, visited the greatest Jewish philosophers from the middle ages until this very day. The magnificent book of Job is entirely devoted to the pain, the confusion, the protest, of the righteous man who suffers incomprehensibly. Back when I observed the social conventions and donned the hat, and for years after my emancipation, I thought that if only I mastered every twist and turn of the argument in Job, the heavens would be parted and I would be vouchsafed the true answer to the question about which Moses, in a unique moment of grace, asked for illumination and was refused.
Since then I have taught the book of Job approximately thirty times, and many fine lines of human reality and philosophical drama of Job and his friends have yielded to my attentions and to those of my students. And yet there is more that is not contained in Job’s pages of argument and complaint. Ramban and other authorities did not regard Job as the Bible’s ultimate word on the subject. Instead, they pointed to the culmination of Psalm 73: “I am always with You; You held my right hand… Even as my flesh and heart are consumed, the rock of my heart and my portion is God forever… As for me closeness of God is good.” Perhaps getting old, with all its attendant troubles, will not be as terrifying or as terrible as one fears so long as one grows old in His presence. There is no argument here, and no demonstration. There is only an experience and the confession that closeness of God is good. Would I have understood this as a child? I doubt it. Would I have accepted it as a solution to the problem of evil? Almost certainly not. If I see things differently today, it may be due to the Torah that I have learned, or the example of teachers and other admirable persons I have experienced, without any corresponding intellectual growth. I am inclined to think there has been a philosophical change as well, inasmuch as I have discovered that it is neither necessary nor desirable to keep score and to mark every event as either demerit or gold star. Perhaps I should have discovered this earlier, but the sad thing about humor is that it is often wasted on the young.
