Yetser Superbowl
SUNDAY FEBRUARY 3, 2008
Yetzer Superbowl
On Sunday night Sandy, Jim and I watched the Superbowl. A rather dull game gathered interest in the fourth quarter with the New York Giants drive, which climaxed in the game-winning touchdown. Before that, the zest of the evening had come from queso and chips, ribs with black beans and baked apples, Sandy’s home-made potato salad, and Ukrop’s key lime pie. Yes, I confess-I choked down my slice, just so the others would not feel guilty about eating theirs.
For me watching sports with Jim is more than a father-son ritual. In me, heaven swindled my dad; he wanted a football hero like he’d been in high school. Instead, to my mother’s delight, he got a cripple who wrote poetry, played the piano, and reviled football. Every tv game indicted me for being a weakling, and him for being distant. Only as an adult in years of therapy did I figure out that Mom and Dad were opposing players in the real game, and my sisters and I were the trophies they won or lost. Nothing’s more damaging to a child than such games, except a custody fight in a messy divorce.
So when Jim and I watch a game, and I manage to follow along, even ask intelligent questions here and there, I’m finding something I lost in childhood as well as having a hell of a good time in the present moment.
Sandy and I had spent most of Saturday and Sunday pulling data together for a grant application on behalf of the African Counseling Center; our African family have to file online from Africa in a language foreign to them. By grace alone will they find their way through that bureaucratic maze.
After resting my hands several hours, I re-read Buber’s essay “The Way of Man According to the Teachings of Hasidism,” written in 1948 and published online in 2002 by Pendle Hill pamphlets here:
http://www.pendlehill.org/resources/files/pdf%20files/php106.pdf.
Maurice Friedman, translator of many of Buber’s works into English, calls it a “remarkable distillation” of Buber’s wisdom; more important, it’s clear and simple in contrast to the difficult and obscure I and Thou. Perhaps knowing it will clarify Ich und Du.
In everything there is a divine spark, often encrusted by an ungodly shell. The divine in humans, however, sometimes is expressed by the evil impulse (yetzer ha-ra), which they can transform by directing the whole of their life force to God through “turning” teshubah. (In the New Testament this is metanoia, repentance.) The Way has six steps.
1. Search the heart. As God asked Adam, “Where are you?” so God asks us all. To escape responsibility, we turn existence into a series of hideouts. If we heed the decisive heart-searching of “the still small voice,” we begin the way. (Jesus calls it the steep, narrow way that leads to life.) If not, we hide deeper and deeper, not from God, but from our true self. Godly searching leads to a changed life; demonic searching, however, persuades us there’s no way out, leaves us endlessly raking the muck of our unrighteousness and in despair.
2. Find our unique way. After godly searching, each of us finds that unique particular way in which God created us to serve God and the world. Rabbi Zusya said, “In the world to come I will not be asked, ‘Why weren’t you Moses?’ I’ll be asked, ‘Why weren’t you Zusya?’”
3. Unify the soul = the body-spirit. God helps us to be unified, not wavering or divided, so that we may pursue our particular way with resolution. But unification of the body-spirit, the soul, is never final; it is continual but progressive.
4. Begin with self. When there is an external concern or conflict, persons begin with themselves as a whole, neither analyzing self into psychological drives, and so on, nor blaming others. To do this, however, they must relinquish the false narcissistic ego shell and choose instead the deeper true self in which the whole of their being resides.
5. Leaving yourself in the hands of God, focus on serving God and neighbor. Ask “What for?” Why have we done the previous four things? Not to save self, but to be able to forego self and seek the salvation of the world. Here Buber describes Christianity as being concerned with salvation of the individual. While this is a factor, and in some traditions nearly the whole, Christianity is also about saving the world: “God so loved the world…” Brian McLaren points out that evangelism can be self-centered; he levels the same critique that Buber does. Therefore, we search the heart, find our particular way, unify the body-spirit, and begin with self so that we may abandon the self to God’s grace, and get on with the love of God and neighbor.
6. Serve God and neighbor now and here. Finally, we walk in our way, we fulfill our particular vocation, here where we stand-not in some exotic other where, other when, but now and here. Thus, the world to come and this world are one. If there is more to come, well and good. Nevertheless, the world to come is now and here; God is where we let God in.
I can spend another fortune in therapy, struggling with the impact that parenting had on me. Or, spurred on by the good impulse (yetzer ha-tov) I can spend a little less on some good ribs and enjoy the Superbowl now and here with Sandy and Jim.
Hmmm…which will I choose?