Sunday, February 27, 2011

Va Yak Hel : On Vocation

A friend who does me the great honor of reading my d’var torah each week recently did me the greater honor of asking me why I was ‘not a writer’. I told her I had an answer to that, and my answer dovetails with one of the themes of VaYakHel, which is now (heh) last week’s parsha.

A few weeks ago we got an entire parsha with tedious instructions about just how to go about constructing the tabernacle in the desert. This parsha is almost entirely a recapitulation of that one, except that where that one was God giving instructions, this one is the Israelites carrying out the instructions God gave.

This is the part I am interested in: “And let all among you who are skilled come and make all that the Lord has commanded.” (Exodus 35:10) “And everyone who excelled in ability and everyone whose spirit moved him came, bringing to the Lord his offering for the work of the tent of meeting and for all its service and for the sacral vestments.” (35:21). “Moses then called Bezalel and Oholiab, and every skilled person whom the Lord had endowed with skill, everyone who excelled in ability, to undertake the task and carry it out.” (Ex 36:2).

My Chumash notes: “The Hebrew translated as ‘skilled’ (hakham lev) literally means ‘wise-hearted.’ A Hasidic master comments, ‘Wisdom of the mind alone, without wisdom of the heart, is worthless’ (Aaron of Karlin).”

Against this background, I’d like to talk about the idea of vocation, about what I see as my vocation, and about why the fact that I haven’t yet come fully into my vocation does not mean that I don’t intend to someday.

I have always been a terrific writer. When I was a kid I knew I would grow up to be a writer (probably a novelist). When I was in college I knew I would grow up to be a writer (probably an academic, writing also popular books for the New York Review of Books audience, probably Malcolm Gladwell). After college, I knew I would grow up to be a writer, mostly of activist screeds. But somehow, I never did grow up to be a writer. First of all, I never did reach a point where I thought “I’m all grown up now, time to be a writer.” Second, I looked around at people who were writers, at the work they did to be writers, and it looked too damn hard to me. There was a lot of toiling for very little reward. Writers didn’t make very much money. Writers had to spend a lot of time selling themselves and selling their writing, and that wasn’t very attractive to me. If a writer got successful a writer had to go on book tours and there would be gross coffee at gross hotels in gross places. And even most successful writers do not find it a lucrative business. I doubted very much both my discipline and my ability to write best-selling anythings.

My husband thought I’d enjoy programming, so I ended up as a programmer instead.

( Programming is a terrific career. When programmers are in short supply, which is often, we are paid a lot of money and treated very well, because the companies that hire us know that we can leave them at any time. Last September I decided I wanted a different job so I sent out a couple of resumes. My job hunt lasted a week and a half. Now, it won’t always be the case that programmers will be in such short supply -- tech goes through cycles, like everything else. But overall, as skilled labor, I am paid well and I have a lot of flexibility and respect in my work. The combination of the good pay and the flexibility is one reason I became a programmer, because I knew if I wanted to work when I had kids I needed to make enough money and have a flexible enough job to support that. I recommend programming to anyone who is thinking of a career change and has not yet considered it, because you really don’t know if you’ll be good at it and like it unless you try it. If you read this and you are wondering about whether you should try programming please let me know and I would be happy to talk to you about it. )

Despite my career choice, I have never been able to escape from the calling to write. Fortunately the rise of the internet made it possible to indulge my need to write (and to write publicly) in a completely unencumbered and undisciplined way. For several years I had a political blog, mostly focused on changing what had apparently become U.S. policy to engage in torture. Then for a while I kept up a professional blog discussing topics of interest to programmers and the people who work with them. About a year ago I began occasionally guest-blogging on a Christian blog I had fallen in with. Several months ago I started this blog, hoping to write each week about the torah portion. Then last week I started The Mussarista, primarily to capture quotations and my responses for the work I do each week on strengthening particular character traits.

Actually, a couple of years ago I had an actual signed contract to write a book, about computer science. I wrote a proposal for the book one night I had insomnia, sent it off, and three weeks later got a contract in the mail. ( I should note that this is not as insane as it seems, because the publisher, although ‘real’ and highly respected in my field, did not issue advances on its books. So getting a contract turned out to be easy, but if you could not actually deliver on the book, the publisher did not lose anything, and in fact got to keep the idea. ) Ideas are cheap, though -- I’m good at ideas. Follow-through is something else altogether. I started trying to write the book, but I had a one-year-old, and then out of the blue I got a job, and after four absolutely miserable months of making very little progress but feeling a lot of despair, I gave up the book. I spun it well: it’s not the right project for me, and it’s not the right time, I said. Both were true. I was happy to let the idea go -- as I said, they come cheap to me. But I was sorry to let the book go, because after all, writing books is what I was born to do. How could I have a chance to get published like that and let it slip through my fingers? Could I finish nothing? Was I not, after all, meant to be a Writer ? For me, the best part about getting a book contract was getting the book contract. The rest of it was awful.

Still, having gotten one contract, I blithely assume I can get another when the time and topic are right. But I am also unwilling to “Become a Writer” until the time and topic are right, because I’ve seen that I can’t deliver when they are not.

What does this all have to do with this week’s parsha?

This week’s parsha is all about men and women who have been called to do the work of building the tabernacle. They are talented in different ways, and they use their talents in the service of God. “And everyone who excelled in ability and everyone whose spirit moved him came,” we read. Jews don’t talk much about vocation, these days, but Christians do.

Here is Frederick Buechner, a Christian writer I love to read, on Vocation:

Vocation comes from the Latin vocare, “to call,” and means the work a person is called to by God.

There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of society, say, or the superego, or self-interest.

By and large a good rule for finding out is this: The kind of work god usually calls you to do is the kind of work (a) that you need to do and (b) that the world needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you’ve presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing cigarette ads , the chances are you’ve missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you’re bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a), but probably aren’t helping your patients much either.

Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

Does anyone believe these days that they have callings? Or, if they feel they have callings, do they believe that they have actually been called? Am I trying to say that I believe I have been called, by God, to write my little blog entries about my little thoughts? Am I that much of a narcissist, am I that delusional, and do I need to adjust my meds?

Here’s what I do know.

I have always been compelled to write. But I have never felt that what I wrote mattered, in particular. The words that came out of me were of little consequence. They were just words, they came out of me because I seemed to have an excess of them. Sometimes I vomit words or shit them out. I’m good at words. I’ve used them to be cruel, and I’ve used them to get what I wanted, and I’ve used them to get back at people who hurt me. At work I’ve used them to write documentation, and pitch ideas, and get things done. But all those words have been so much sound and fury, signifying nothing. And somewhere in me I knew that was true, I knew that all those words, clever as they were, touched nothing real. I had nothing of consequence to write about, and hence, little interest in ‘being a writer’, either as a profession or as a hobby.

I had nothing to say.

I don’t know how to describe what’s changed. I can say “God has entered my life, and in my relationship with God I have been changed, and changed for the better. And that -- that! -- is something to write about.” But some of the people I most want to understand this will not understand it if I say that. So I’ll try a different way to explain what it’s like, why I feel as though I understand, finally, what this talent of words I have is for.

So think of “the world’s deep hunger.” No, think of your own hunger. Maybe you have none. Maybe you have no longing. Maybe you are not looking for anything. You’re only reading my blog because you know me and you’d read anything I wrote, even a phone book. There is nothing you want so deeply and so profoundly and that sometimes seems just within reach, you see it just from the corner of your eye, but then it’s gone. You are not plagued by fear and uncertainty. You feel centered and strong and you know how to behave and you find yourself able to behave how you know you should behave. So maybe you’re not hungry. That’s cool.

But maybe you are. Maybe you don’t even want to admit it, but you are.

I’m hungry. I’ve always been hungry. It’s in our nature to be hungry in the way I’m talking about. To hunger and thirst for something that we can’t even describe.

I’m hungry, and I have found food. I have found food in the Torah, and I have found food in the spiritual writing of Jews, and Christians, and Buddhists, and others. Most of all, I have found food in a living relationship with God. If you are hungry and you don’t really want to admit it, you read “God” and off you go again, you’re outta here. That woo-woo shit is not for you. You are sensible and grounded in the reality-based community. Just think of it as food, then. Something that keeps the gnawing feeling at bay. Jews like to look at Christians like they are crazy because they eat and drink their god, but really, the feeling of spiritual yearning is precisely a hunger and a thirst, and there’s something very satisfying about the concreteness of the Christian ritual to meet that need with bread and wine. (Still not a Christian, don’t worry, friends and family! Just giving credit where due.)

This food I’ve found, it’s not a chili dog from the 7-11. It was not invented in a laboratory last year, either. Humans have been cultivating the stuff for a long time, this food. The tree of Judaism, in particular, has been cultivated continuously for thousands of years. It’s been burnt to the ground many times, and green shoots come from the stump, again and again. It doesn’t make my life easier, it doesn’t soothe all my doubts or make me unafraid of death or give me a certainty that I am right or a feeling of safety and protection or a nice easy simple story where I always know what to do next and I don’t have to make tough decisions and everything is going to go my way. People who haven’t tasted it think it must do one or the other of those things, that it must have a nice easy point to it. They think it’s not complicated, the food. They think I must be eating cheese-wiz.

The food doesn’t do any of those things -- or at least it doesn’t do any of those things all the time, reliably. It’s not simple like that. It’s not cheese-wiz, it’s camembert. You have to taste it.

I can’t explain it very well, of course. Who could?

But --- and here’s the thing -- I know I have been blessed with a talent for words, and therefore I know that while I can’t explain it very well I can explain it better than most. And when I am explaining it, I find myself full of a “deep gladness”.

So, why am I not a writer? Well, I am. Why have I not made it my profession? Because it never seemed worthwhile for me to devote my life to it. Sure, there was some deep gladness in it, sometimes. But there was no deep hunger in the world for what I wrote. Perhaps there isn’t any deep hunger for what I write now, either. I haven’t given up my day job, and I don’t intend to anytime soon. I have in any case only begun to acquire wisdom of the heart, hakham lev. There has only now seemed to be a point behind my cleverness, something useful I could say.

I do not think it means that my purpose and goal in life is to write a bunch of powerful-sounding stuff that ‘converts’ people to Judaism in particular or to God in general. I just want to talk about the camembert. And to the extent that some people may find that they would like to taste the camembert themselves, I want to point a way. I’m gesturing at something outside the frame, smiling, with my mouth full.

I’m working on joining Bezalel and Oholiab, trying to get wise-hearted enough to help build a dwelling place for God, a tabernacle of words, the words themselves just the tents, the ark, the cherubim, surrounding a cloud and a pillar of fire so powerful and mysterious and strange that words can never tell.


P.S. I’ve been writing this blog for a few months now and have not made any effort to publicize it. I’m not interested in becoming a ‘blogger’ (which is sort of like becoming a writer only generally involves AdWords rather than book tours). But the discipline of writing is hard, and I need encouragement to maintain it. If you like what you read here, I hope you’ll consider subscribing to my feed, either via a feed-reader, if you have one of those, or via email. ( See the links at the top right.) And if you know someone else who might like it, tell them about it. When I know I have readers I am encouraged to keep writing, even those weeks when I can’t think of anything good to say, like in May, where I believe we’ll get a lot of rules about lepers. Thanks!

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