Night 2 / Re-run

It is very late, even though the time change gave us an extra hour tonight.  We used it to keep the Kibbutz pub open an extra hour and dance.  The Machon (Arava students), the volunteers, and the Garin (pre-army civil service Israelis) all danced together until we were forced to shut down around 1:30, and, still awake, I come writing to you.  But I am tired, so as a cop out, though a fitting one, I am going to post one of my letters from the farm from last summer.  The stars are gorgeous here, and they made me feel like I did one night on the farm:

Out here on the farm, you can really see the stars. Not one or two of the most persistent ones, breaking through the glowing haze of the human hive, but pretty much the whole deal, milky way and all. And yes, they do make you feel small. It’s not for nothing that God promised Abraham that his descendants would be like the sand and the stars. Long ago it was clear to most people that the stars, the planets, the sun and the moon were god-like. They encircled the earth on which people lived and which was the center of the universe, cared dearly about and greatly affected world affairs, could be placated with gifts and pleas. For most ancient people the passing of the sun, moon, and planets through different constellations of the “fixed” stars bore portentous information about the ages and epochs of the world and what they would bring. Many viewed the drama of earth as a very brief sequence, a flash of five or six thousand years which would end in apocalypse, and possibly rebirth.


Today the stars are largely silent. They do not speak our language, but the language of radio telescopes, pulsing electromagnetic radiation by which we can, across the gulf of light years and ages, decipher their chemical make-up, their stage of “life,” and much more. The drama of the stars is breathtaking – gigantic supernovas, multiple star systems in intricate dances, black holes ripping space-time – but is the same sort of drama as the moving of continents, the buckling up of mountains, and the advance of glaciers. There is less tragedy in the death of a star that in that of a butterfly. I look at the stars and long so much for there to be something else out there capable of speaking to us in our language. Maybe someone out there can help us, give us some wisdom. Things would be so much easier if we could, like those ancients, read the answers to our questions in the stars. But maybe the vastness of space, that great physical emptiness of things like us, can serve as the same sort of abyss as the one that I talked about last week. If The Answer cannot be divinely inspired or sent from outer space, that leaves things to us. On the one hand, this is quite a responsibility. On the other hand, it is incredibly liberating.

But where to start? We have access today to the great works of almost every tradition on earth, from the Upanishads to the Tanach to Plato to Lao Tzu to the Tibetan Book of the dead. There must have been more books written in the last fifty years than in the whole rest of the 5,000 years since the written word and maybe 50,000 since the art of storytelling emerged. I love wandering in used book stores. Some people need dope fixes, I need my browsing fix. My latest read, by Ryscard Kapuscinski, is called Travels with Herodotus, and is an autobiography of a man who spent time covering events all over the world for 50 years. He describes the conundrum of feeling incredibly small in the face of this expanse of humanity, yet somehow wanting to understand it: “It was a kind of malady, a dangerous weakness, because I also realized that these civilizations are so enormous, so rich, complex and varied, that getting to know even a fragment of one of them would require devoting one’s whole life to the enterprise.” I would add that the same goes for any single person, present or past. In fact, the longer I spend on this planet the more I realize that getting to know even myself feels like standing before the stars.

I used to feel as though if I read enough, learned enough, gathered all the relevant information, then I could really make a final decision on things, then I would know who I was and what I wanted. I would have it all figured out. But like that old hydra, you bite into one question and two grow back in its place. Read one book and three more seem necessary. Wouldn’t it be great to know the story of everyone on the subway car with you? One instinct at this junction is to throw in the towel and say that since we can’t know everything we shouldn’t bother trying. But instead of wanting to understand it all like I did before, I think I've slowly shifted towards wanting to be a part of it all. It's better to be happy with the one book that I'm reading, the one person I'm talking to, the one course I'm taking in life, than to be sad about the millions of books I'm not reading, the billions of people I'm not talking to, and the infinite courses I'm not taking in life. I think I’m growing to love my smallness more and more.

So, there it is.  This experience is pretty overwhelming, but I'm loving it.