Mitzvah Madness: Need a Straitjacket

I am returning to the land of the living after moving, and spending these last hectic days painting rooms. The move has been exceedingly stressful. The first night, I cried buckets out of a terrible loneliness, and I hope that G-d is counting my tears. The only change worthwhile, I think, is a change you look forward to. So often, it seems that change is less than welcome. What tender creatures we are.

This was not one of those thrilling changes, though it has turned out to possess some small positives, like being able to do my marketing every day without benefit of bus fare. Instead of clambering aboard the 210, I walk past the electrical substation, which is literally in my backyard, along a wild, barbed path of bushes weighted down by fat blackberries, transformers crackling overhead, cross a haphazardly busy street, into the welcoming shade of a stand of aromatic, tall trees swathed in evergreen.

As I traverse the path, I wonder, each time, how things grow, whether they grow differently, in the shadow of electromagnetic radiation. The incidence of malignancy is statistically signficant for this kind of environment. Some transformations are transmogrifications, while life on the surface, seems so normal. The flowers blooming amidst the cracks in the concrete, bloom carrying secrets. Yet, along this path, the light is soft and gentle. These are the golden days of summer.

My old rabbi (MOR), who, in effect, is the only one I would call 'mine' so far, loves words, linguistics, and plays on words, no matter how great a groaner it turns out to be (and there have been many). Biblical Hebrew, thusly, is not just another language to him. When you couple that with the fact that he is also a person of great integrity and intellectual honesty, when he talks about words in the Torah, it's a guarantee that it is worth paying attention.

MOR's love of wordplay has wrought the title of Mincha Madness, which welcomes any member of the shul to join in a monthly Shabbat gathering at various homes, davenning Mincha, then partaking in Seudah Shlishit, that is, the third Shabbos meal, shmoozing, and Havdalah, always a graceful and poignant service for me.

I used to complain to MOR that it should be called Mincha Mellowness, which, I think, captures the essence of that time more accurately. But there was no budging him (like most of us he has selective hearing). And so, Mincha on Shabbat somehow remains 'mad' in its conceptualisation, though I am not certain in which ways it is 'mad' in its execution- an online thesaurus suggests the following: desperation, euphoria, folly, frenzy, furor, hysteria, nonsense, lunacy (perhaps on Rosh Hodesh), well, you get the picture. I should throw the dictionary at him. The events that I have attended have been sadly disappointing in terms of 'insanity', but wholly warming and satisfying in terms of heart and soul. It's as if one becomes replete and complete, ready to tackle the coming days of the week, (and, in my case, damned sad to let go of Shabbat).

There is madness to my method here, because for the last several weeks I have been pondering the idea of chesed and what constitutes a perfect mitzvah, or even more significantly, a mitzvah, alone. I actually have no idea what makes a perfect mitzvah, though ideally it is blessed with purity of heart and beauty. I wonder if chesed, a deed of loving kindness, needs heart and beauty, too.

I wondered this a lot when I was in the throes of moving, more so, in the throes of having moved, and ultimately so in the throes of doing this mitzvah of helping my staccato landlady paint the rooms. In the searing heat. While my life miserably languished. Helping this person who in the 8 months I have known her remains emotionally distant and withholding and whose staccato style of speech reminds my tender ears of fingernails scraping across a blackboard. I have hated my life here, in this environment she has created, my fellow Jewess. It has been like sleeping on a bed of cold stones. Argh! It is not a life I would wish for anyone. To be bereft of human connection. To feel tolerated. Even when one musters the all-encompassing embrace of Torah to light, the real reality. Being vulnerably and wholly human, I have the strength to do and perceive only so much and sometimes being all alone is... being all alone. I guess the rest is in G-d's hands, though G-d doesn't seem too involved, and perhaps I'm not getting it.

I understand that doing a mitzvah is more important than kavannah.
Scraps of Torah scrolled through my head all the while I was painting....helping your neighbour's beast get out of the mud/doing for another, even if you hate them...helping your neighbour even though they have blown you off or were unco-operative in the past...the mitzvah is what matters regardless of your feelings.... it is more important to do the right thing than how you feel.... see what an individual needs and try to meet that need if possible...be a mensch even when no one else is... after a while it becomes a whirling kaleidoscope of jewelled ideals. As for the madness-- I alternately (and internally) raged, felt resentful, felt disappointed and hurt, felt hatred and bitterness....all the while, in mitzvah mode.

I sometimes think that the conceptualisation of the mitzvah as it has been normatively defined-- action not necessary of feeling-- must be the creation of males- after all, it is said that men do not necessarily attach feelings to actions, so, I'm guessing that that kind of mitzvah ought to be a piece of cake for men, and heavily justified/complicitous in reasoning - while a real struggle for women. What are we pursuing here, anyway? Even the notion of pursuing justice, as the ultimate end, has that 'masculine mind' kind of flavour to it. Geez, perhaps G-d really is male!

I have hated almost every moment of this mitzvah. The heat, the humidity, the sweating, the tears, the physical hurt and exhaustion, the emotional pain, the endless and prolonged hours, the frustration and vexation and ambivalence and ambiguity and I still do not like my fellow Jewess that much but I can't outright hate her- big fat bummer. But more so, it irks me greatly that she is my fellow Jewess and I feel it (so unmasculine!) and cannot, cannot ignore it. It irks me that I give her the benefit of the doubt even after 8 godawful months, even with all her projections and mine charging the air, and the really ugly alternate universe I live in around her, that challenges me every moment and that I fail most of the time, and yet a part of me understands which irks me even more.... It irks me that I can't find a way round the ties that bind, this benign straitjacket ... and I can't do it with love.....some people you just don't care for....so far....

It is sad.

Last night, after a couple of false starts, I finished painting. I am done. The mitzvah is done. Completed. Hey, it's been a real adventure! And staccato landlady is wondrously happy( aw, I did melt at her blatantly pleased and, I hate to admit it, grateful expression). I have no answers whatsoever as to what constitutes a perfect mitzvah or even a primitive, naked one lumbering along on all fours, dragging its knuckles, drooling. Certainly I have performed mine with absolutely no grace, or beauty, and 'harmony' is a word that I hope to meet and experience some day . It is a fact that I have inhabited a roiling cauldron of primo, homemade, ill will.

On the surface, I have made it work fairly pleasantly, but geez, I wish I had more heart. You could call me a Stoic if ya didn't know I was a Jewess. Yet, I am not a Stoic, because I am a Jewess. And this much I do know: throughout all the upheaval, the chaos (and emotionally, unless you are brain dead, you surely feel it all)...what kept me going was that I subscribe to the very Jewish, and Torah, notion, that it is important to add something to the world, my version of tikkun olam. As of this moment, perhaps I am batting 1000, in my own cranky way. I have added to, and not detracted from, diminished, or destroyed, where and when it matters. This is a good thing.


It reminds me of one of my favourite passages, one that is fashioning a permanent rut in my memory each time that I read it. It is from Shirat Hayam, Song of the Sea, which Moses sang in praise of crossing:

Nations take note and tremble, panic grips the dwellers of Philistia,
Edom's chieftains are chilled with dismay,
trembling seizes the mighty of Moab,
all the citizens of Canaan are confused,
dread and dismay descend upon them.
Your overwhelming power makes them still as stone,
while Your people, Lord, pass peacefully over,
the people whom you have redeemed.