Friends, hello.
First things first, thank you to everyone who offered feedback, both positive and constructive. Thank you to those who shared this newsletter with three other people. Thank you for reading today!
Today, I planed to share why I named this newsletter Turn It, Turn It. And I still will.
But before we dive in, I want to say a few things about my pedagogy.
It seems our dominant culture has decided that when someone says something that is wrong or anti-historical or whatever, we think the best way to refute them is to scream, call them and idiot, write them off, and never accept their apology. Or worse, an apology is to be won, not accepted. I see this from all political sides. And I get it. You can feel out of control. You can feel hurt or personally offended. You wish you could take “what you know” and walk up to that person and open up their skull and put it inside their brain and then close their brain and then, poof – they know it too! If only.
You wish they have read what you’ve read or seen what you’ve seen or talked to the people you’ve talked to.
But learning doesn’t happen that way. And sometimes I wonder if we are more interested in teaching or being right. Being right is so seductive, isn’t it? Why is that? Another topic for another day.
It is my opinion that being right isn’t the greatest good. We are only alive for so long. Do we want to look back on our lives and say “I was right a lot?” Or do we want to look back and say “I embraced the challenge of calling people in and worked to build a world of connection and joy?”
I play a team-building game with my students where I ask them to line up according to some objective metric without speaking or with their eyes close, as fast a possible. For example, I’ll say, “line up according to your birthday and you can’t make any sound!” Every once in a while I joke to myself that I’ll say, “okay, now line up from best to worst, go!” I really feel like, for many of us, that is how we see the world now. Oof, I really don’t want to see the world that way.
I want to believe we can learn from one another – I want to believe that we want to learn from one another.
Call me an idealist or optimist or whatever. Someone has to be.
Now, on with the show.
Love, Meg.
The Torah is a wild document – a wilderness of possibility all its own. To read Torah is like to try to understand your parents. It can be clear one day, complicated the next, and full of surprise – pain and forgiveness. As you grow, it grows with you. When you come to the end, you start again at the beginning.
To read Torah is to turn it. To see how the light catches it in each season of the year – each season of your life. It is an orientation towards the world.
In Pirkei Avot we read:
“Ben Bag Bag said: Turn it over, and [again] turn it over, for all is therein. And look into it; And become gray and old therein; And do not move away from it, for you have no better portion than it” (Pirkei Avot 5:22).
Ben Bag Bag’s wisdom here speaks deeply to me. To turn something over – once, twice – to explore it, requires as orientation of curiosity and perseverance. As I write I am reminded of all of those times as a child that I lost a show or book or toy and couldn’t find it. My mother would invariably ask, “did you look under things? Behind things?” Rarely, I did. I mostly just hoped what I’d lost was just sitting in the middle of a room somewhere. But of course, it never was. So too with Torah. So too with so many things.
“Turn it, turn it” means, stay curious and keep going. It is so funny how, to me, this newsletter is so clearly about Torah and not about Torah at the same time. Reader, I wonder if you see that too.
The lessons that the Torah allows are lessons about living a good life – lessons not just about the content of the Torah but about how to cultivate our minds and hearts with a balance of humility and audacity.
When Ben Bag Bag says “turn it, turn it,” of course, he means both the Torah and yourself. Turn yourself around, turn yourself around – see yourself from all angles and consider how infinite you are. Consider how the next minute is not guaranteed and you get to choose what to do with it. Keep reading this newsletter? Close your computer and go outside and scream? Both are possible futures. Turn it, turn it.
One more anecdote and I’ll let you go. Last weekend I was teaching my students about the two creation stories in Genesis (yep, there are two – go see for yourself). I asked, “how can it be there that there are two versions of how the entire world was created?” My students of course had brilliant answers but one stuck with me. She said something like the following, “maybe the two creation stories indicate that we are living in parallel universes and we are only experiencing one version of life. Somewhere out there we are living our lives in new ways.” What a thought – I was thrilled. I had never heard that interpretation before (does anyone know, did the rabbis mention parallel universes anywhere in Talmud?) and responded “indeed, maybe!”
Turn it, turn it, for everything is in it – even another universe. Dare I say it, even a new you.