“.…in the human condition there is a fundamental life and death struggle with which we are constantly faced – the struggle between the soul and the body. Your body usually chooses death – meaning, the yearning to live a pain-free existence. The body seeks transitory comfort and sensual pleasures. The body wants to drown in passion, to procrastinate, and to quit. But the soul is fighting the body every step of the way. Your soul is the true image of yourself, representing the person you truly want to be. Your soul is your drive to reach your potential and to attain something beyond yourself, which is greatness. Your soul strives for meaning and clarity and purpose and to attain all things ultimately good. Your soul wants to grow, tackle challenges, and overcome obstacles. It wants to ‘live’ in the fullest sense of the word.”
– from What the Angel Told You by Rabbi Noah Weinberg and Yaakov Solomon.
In this parasha, the Israelites are on the edge of Canaan, and God gives Moses the option of sending scouts ahead of them to see what’s what. A representative of each tribe (save Levi, who would not receive land) travels throughout the land for forty days. They witness funeral processions in Canaan and conclude it is a dangerous place, not realizing God had caused those deaths to distract the inhabitants so the spies would not be found out. Some of them carry back enormous pomegranates and bunches of grapes to show the others not the abundance of the land but how freakish it is. When they return, all but Caleb and Joshua give negative reports. They claim they felt like grasshoppers in comparison to the giants they saw living there. They also believed that the inhabitants saw them as grasshoppers, too. The Rebbe of Kotzk said this was the foundation of their sin - they should have thought only of their mission and not about what anyone thought of them. They return to the Israelites frightened and intimidated, so the people lament ever having left Egypt - and even want to appoint a new leader to take them back there.
At this point, HaShem does a face palm. How long, He asks, will the people refuse to have faith in Him despite all He has done for them? Ten times they have doubted Him and behaved in a grasping, controlling, and anxious manner instead of trusting Him. He's God, for crying out loud! He is so disgusted and infuriated, He considers destroying them. Moses persuades Him to respond more leniently. Thus, everyone over the age of 20 is condemned to wander in the desert for 40 years and die there. Only those young enough to transcend a slave’s mentality will enter the land of milk and honey.
This story is a powerful metaphor for becoming trapped in negativity. I know from experience that my fears have a way of driving me to behave in such a way as to bring about exactly what I’m afraid of. The expectation of defeat can color my interpretations. Without God’s help, it would be impossible to overcome a lifelong habit of pessimism.
Duties of the Heart, by Rabbi Bachya Ibn Pakuda (11th century Spain), provides a series of logical arguments to support the conclusion that G-d exists, loves His creation, has made for us everything that we need, and that we should serve Him wholeheartedly. For the atheist contingent, belief in a loving Creator can be viewed as a metaphor for a state of mind or philosophical approach to living which says, essentially, that what happens in this world is not for us to decide, but we can decide how we will respond to it. We get better results when we respond to it with honesty, love, integrity, and compassion.
“God resides in a Holy Spark within each and every one of us,” writes Rabbi Dr. Arthur Segal in The Handbook to Jewish Spiritual Renewal. The goal is to be in conscious contact with our Holy Spark, which we call God, “so that we can live a life loving our fellows, doing justice, being humble, and being happy, joyous, and free. We will learn to reach inside of ourselves and let the goodness flow, not the bad. This is the ultimate in following God’s will.”
There appears to be a pervasive belief that we should struggle and fight and wrestle to fix what’s bad, wrong, weak, or broken in ourselves, and not allow ourselves to feel free until we’ve expunged all the negatives. In any case, that's the message I've received - that I should root out all the fears, dig out all the rot and poison, eradicate every bad impulse, feel chronic guilt about sin and failure, and strive to control myself ever more rigidly. But I begin to suspect there is no cheese at the end of that maze; as an approach to self-improvement, or to spiritual awareness, it just doesn’t work. If I had the ability to change by sheer force of will, I would have done it by now.
In Authentic Happiness, author Martin Seligman, who pioneered the field of positive psychology, writes, “I do not believe that you should devote overly much effort to correcting your weaknesses. Rather, I believe that the highest success in living and the deepest emotional satisfaction comes from building and using your signature strengths.” He finds evidence to support much of what our religious teachers tell us: that we need to feel we have earned positive feelings by using our strengths and good qualities; that being kind makes people feel better than just having fun; loss of self-consciousness (as in a creative act, or in teaching) brings about feelings of joy; and it is empowering to be challenged to respond in a crisis, when we learn about our own untapped potential. Personal qualities, such as curiosity, love of learning, originality, perspective, moderation, fairness, generosity, nurturance, and the capacity to be loved all have an impact on our quality of life. A feeling of connectedness to something larger than ourselves is important – the larger the entity to which we feel connected, the greater the sense of purpose and meaning. Whether you believe in God or not, this is, I believe, the essence of spirituality.
Everyone dies. Millions were here, they did things, they felt and thought, they worked, loved, suffered - and now they are gone - most gone from memory forever. Some of them left behind information we can use. How strange that our window of consciousness on the world is so limited and fleeting. I don't suppose we'll ever know what that's about, but whatever you love, whatever you value - find it now and do it.