I have discovered the secret of life and the person who taught it to me was a Polish peasant. I know this sounds weird. But it is true. The year was 1978. I was fresh from law school in New York City and a year as a law clerk to a member of the Missouri Supreme Court in Missouri's state capitol in Jefferson City. My brother Mat and I had planned a great adventure - a search for our family's roots in Eastern Europe. We arrived in Paris, leased a little Fiat automobile there, and proceeded eastward.
There I noticed the incredible fact that the rhythm of Eastern European village life had changed almost not at all in perhaps 100 or even 200 years. The big cities were different, but the small villages were just the same. Many did not have electricity or plumbing. The only vehicles many of these people saw were trucks going to or coming from one major city to another. There were no private cars. Of course a lot of this could be attributed to the phony so-called “success” of communism - but that is another sermon.
Everywhere we went in Poland, it seemed, there were peasant women carrying all kinds of bundles and buckets down the roads. Everything, from water to crops, from laundry to produce, it was all carried on their backs - from both shoulders. Both shoulders. I was so preoccupied reading Polish maps and getting lost with my brother and wondering how to say “ice cream” in Polish (the word is “lodi”, by the way), that I failed to realize what I had learned.
Long after that, when I was ending my tenure as the rabbi in Sharon, Massachusetts, I had a second chance to learn the secret of life. We were getting ready to sell our house and so we fixed it up to make it look better than it had ever looked while we lived in it, and the painters whom we hired were carrying big buckets of paint up the stairs. They always carried two buckets, one in each hand, and when I asked Steve the painter why, he said, “It keeps you balanced and you can carry more in one trip.” I did not learn the secret of life that time either because I was so distracted by the excitement of my new community here in Danbury with everyone so brilliant and religious and warm and polite to each other. Ah hem.
Then just this past August, when I was getting ready for my annual trip to the cabin in Vermont where I go in retreat each year to write my High Holy Day sermons and fish and hunt and cavort in the wild - ah hem - I asked our Building Super (the ever-loyal and trusted Ricky) to help me carry my twenty seven books to my car. He insisted upon taking them in both hands, and then again, finally, that is when I learned the secret of life which, had I not been preoccupied in Poland, I could have learned from a peasant woman 30 years ago. I am a slow learner but I am a patient learner, and today I want to share with you the secret of life, and you don't have to say “ice cream” in Polish to learn it. However, you do have to be ready to learn it. Don't worry if you are not ready to learn it, you will remember it when you are ready.
The secret of life is not a text or a message, it is not a belief or a maxim, not a proverb or a prayer. It is Jewish - it is even in the Torah, Numbers 24:7, about which more in a moment - but not exclusively Jewish because life is not exclusively Jewish (food may be exclusively Jewish, but not life). It is rather a discipline, something like yoga or better yet like lamaze which teaches pregnant women how to deliver their babies without cursing the men who made them pregnant for the pain they are going through in delivery. Like lamaze the technique of spiritual balancing is based upon a simple truth - the brain cannot think about pain and breathing at the same time.
By concentrating on breathing, the technique short-circuits the brain's ability to think about the pain of delivery. Spiritual Balancing operates on the same principle. We all have blessings and burdens in our lives. This is the truth of all life. Some of our burdens come to us as consequences of bad choices we have made, and some come because of simple bad luck, bad fortune, wrong place, wrong time, wrong person. The same is true of our blessings. Some of our blessings come to us because of good choices we have made in our life (the choices to be loyal and honest and loving and charitable). And some of our blessings (like good looks, good genes, athletic ability, and healthy children) come to us just because of good luck. Every life has two buckets. Every life has blessings and burdens. Spiritual Balancing is a way to balance the two buckets. It is way to balance our burdens and our blessings. In one way the technique is as simple as breathing; and in another way like dieting and exercise it can be quite challenging. So here it is, the secret of life - spiritual balancing.
Take a specific and defined period of time (I suggest starting with nothing more than five minutes). In this set period of time, think about your burdens. Think about everything that is going wrong in your life; everything that is causing you to suffer. Name these burdens that are weighing you down. Feel their dark and dismal weight. Do not flee from them during your fixed time to think about them, and do not worry if they drive you to tears. Then, for the same exact period of time, think about your blessings. Name those blessings. Get absolutely clear in your mind all the good things that are still in your life. Feel the joy of your blessings and then feel gratitude for them, thankfulness that these good things are still with you. That's it! That's the secret of life.
Spiritual balancing does not remove our burdens or increase our blessings. It just puts them into proper balance and proper perspective. What I have leaned in my life is that people who are suffering understand even at the moment of their worst suffering that they are still blessed in many ways. It's just that they don't take the time to list those blessings and savor them because they have become obsessed with their suffering.
And what happens to people in severe grief happens to all of us on a daily basis on a less traumatic level. Most of us spend our days focusing on our burdens, and this makes us lose track of our blessings. Spiritual balancing allows you to take as much time as you want feeling your burdens but requires you to balance the time thinking about what you have lost or fear that you might lose with the same amount of time thinking about what you have been given that has not been taken away. What is causing you joy is every bit as important as what is causing you to suffer. And for such sensitivity and discipline, the Torah itself (Numbers 24:7) projects the ultimate reward of overflowing receptacles - it actually employs the image of buckets on each shoulder! - of life-sustaining righteousness and spiritual clarity.
People know that exercise is not an idea but a life saving discipline. Gratitude for our blessings is the same thing, and by tying gratitude to our natural inclination to kvetch about our burdens, we bring the full picture of our life back into proper spiritual focus. And when we are in balance we can carry a heavier load. We can endure our burdens because we see them against the horizon of our blessings. The most corrosive pathologies of our time: loneliness, depression, anger, substance abuse, all are the products of a spiritually unbalanced life. They come from spiritual slipped disks in people who are only carrying one heavy bucket - the bucket of their burdens, and who have forgotten to carry the bucket of their blessings - a bucket that is equally heavy with joy and gratitude and which alone can keep them from being twisted by pain and despair. Take exactly as much time thinking about your blessings as you do thinking about your burdens and you too will have learned the secret of life.
The very last words spoken at the edge of the grave at the conclusion of a funeral is the most powerful mantra of spiritual balancing in Judaism: adonai natan vadonai lakach, yhi shem adonai mevorach, “God has given, and God has taken away, blessed is the name of the Lord.” At the very moment when we could be excused for fixating on what God has taken from us, our tradition teaches us to remember and to praise in perfect spiritual equipoise, what God has given to us.
The prayer before the Shema in the Shaharit service is called yotzer and it begins with a version of God's words to the prophet Isaiah, yotzer or uvoreh hoshech, oseh shalom u voreh rah, “God, you are the one who makes light and creates darkness, who makes peace and creates evil.” The Talmud in Tractate Berachot (11b) explains that the prayer replaces the phrase describing God as the creator of evil with the phrase u'voreh et hakol “and who creates everything” so as not to scare people. We pray to a spiritually balanced God who makes light and dark, peace and evil - a God who is the author of the antinomies of existence so that we can live spiritually balanced lives in God's image.
You know, the most common and most destructive spiritual pathology of our time is the idea that God only brings us blessings and every burden we are forced to bear is just a mistake from a God who forgot that every day of our lives was supposed to be happy and free of pain. Where is God's warranty for that illusion? Where is that promise for constant happiness inscribed? Nowhere! In the actual religion of actual Judaism we are taught to worship a God who gives and takes, a God who places us in a world of light and darkness, good and evil, and we - for our part of the covenant God has made with us - are commanded to live that life in balance - to understand that we have been given more than we deserve and to understand that burdens are a natural part of every life.
Focusing only on our burdens, my friends, is actually a form of idolatry.
Spiritual balancing at its highest levels does not merely help us to endure our burdens by setting them off against our blessings, it can actually help us to transform what we think are burdens into blessings. A story is told of an elderly woman and her little grandson who were spending the day at the Bronx zoo. His face was sprinkled with bright freckles. Lots of children were waiting in line to get their cheeks painted by a local New York artist who was decorating them with tiger paws. Standing in line, a little girl looked at the boys freckles and said, “You've got so many freckles, there's no place to paint!” Embarrassed, the little boy dropped his head. His grandmother knelt down next to him. “I love your freckles. When I was a little girl I always wanted freckles”, she said while tracing her finger across the child's cheek. “Freckles are beautiful!” The boy looked up, “Really?” “Of course,” said the grandmother. “Why, just name me one thing that's prettier than freckles.” The little boy thought for a moment, peered intensely into his grandma's face, and softly whispered, “Wrinkles.”
Smile at your wrinkles, my dear friends. Carry them and your freckles with pride. Your burdens are heavy but your blessings are so abundant, so overflowing, so compensating. Resist the temptation to carry only your tzores on one shoulder. Lift your blessings, and glory in your life and in God Almighty, who gave it to you.
L'shanah tova tikateivu u'tchateimu. G'mar chatimah tova - may you be inscribed this day for a year and a life of overflowing blessings, which will surely balance your portable burdens.
Amen.