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I wonder where the point is where you decide to let go of the past and look toward the future. When is it that we let go of our old dreams and flames and look for new life goals, new meaning, and new love? When do we take the step forward into the great unknown, to plunge its scary depths of uncertainty and disbelief? When can we say, “it’s time to move on”? And when we take that plunge, can we ever be certain we made the right choice? Can we ever avoid the nagging thoughts in the back of our heads saying, “was this the right move?” beckoning us to imagine ‘what if’ or to run back toward our past, give it a hug, and stay there, the place we once called home? How can we make these decisions? Based on what criteria, if there is any criteria at all? How.. where.. is it possible? How do we know when it’s time to really enter the “infinite abyss” and leave our world of comfort and what we’ve known behind? How can we repel that nagging, longing urge to look back and turn around when it’s time to say goodbye and how can we choose to say goodbye when we don’t have to? When the past is looking straight at us with open arms and the future beckons toward us to move forward, how do we make that decision, how do we choose between the two? How do we know our past can no longer be our future and will not be part of our grand life plan in the way we once might have hoped or dreamed about? My advice to myself, and anyone who may be reading this, with permission or not, are the words that you and I don’t want to hear, but we know are true and don’t want to face. It has been said that’s what advice is anyway, the truths we know but seek to avoid. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that the future is something very scary. We put on brave faces, all if not most of us, and say we are prepared for whatever is thrown our way and whatever life brings us. But that’s not really what we feel. On the inside we are terrified and worried and frightened about what the future will bring. Will we be alone? Will we find companionship? If we have found true love once can we find it again, and if we haven’t ever, will we? How will my life turn out? Will something traumatic happen in my life that will alter and disrupt it chaotically and catastrophically? The honest answer is we are absolutely and entirely clueless about anything our future will bring us. And does our future bring us things or do we make our own future: it’s never really clear and the balance is quite tricky. I suppose .. I suppose it depends on you and your own worldview – no one can answer this question, this is just one of those things that differs from person to person. But getting back to our question, to my question, is that the only advice I have to offer is that we do have to accept the fact from the outset that life is crazy. We have to accept the fact that there will be ups and the ups will pass by like a dream so my advice is to everyone that when they come, live in the moment and enjoy. I don’t mean to say life is a roller coaster. I don’t think we are strapped to our seats and stuck with wherever the coaster takes us, which frankly is a scarier reality than the alternative, because on coasters there are guarantees that there will be plenty of both ups and downs. But the most honest truth of the whole matter is that is just one question that truly I do not know the answer to and I’m not going to claim to anymore. I honestly have no idea what you do with these situations, with letting go and sticking around.
What comes to mind today is an acquaintance's honoring during an event. It was the most emotional moment for me there. This person was honored after, or for, being involved and dedicated to a cause for the past 3 years. Only this person stuck around this long. Everyone else whom this individual started out with moved on if not after the first year, the one after that. And at this event I saw that look on this acquaintance’s face that I recognized; I recognized it because I’ve worn it too. It was the look of being the last of the era, a dinosaur. The look of knowing that this is the end for you, that you’ve stayed long enough and maybe you should have moved on already, but you stayed on longer for reasons you yourself don’t quite understand. Maybe it was because you loved it, maybe it was because you cared about the cause, or maybe, just maybe, there was some part of your own self that you could not bring yourself to say goodbye to, not until you felt you could no longer stay here. Perhaps this is the dilemma, it’s not about leaving behind others, it’s about leaving behind the things that make you ‘you’. Because saying goodbye to ourselves isn’t just hard, it’s painful. It’s not just sad, it’s a tragedy for which you feel you cannot express the words. It is the feeling that what you had once is no longer there anymore and the emptiness that results is overbearing often and while it remains we can no longer be ourselves, for we are incomplete, we are walking around without a body part that was and still is necessary for our functioning. I need to digress now because the subject matter demands that I must. Because the similarity between these concepts and the concepts of tumah and taharah are overwhelming and overly powerful. It is stated that tumah occurs when the loss of kedusha and its potential take place. When a Jew dies, his neshoma leaves his body, losing his most vital organ, and this leaves him of all his potential, the kedusha the neshoma created is now gone and there is now a void there that we know and call “tumah”. But on my mind right now is the more, I don’t know but it is, the even more esoteric concept of taharah. The idea that this void can be rectified somehow, that somehow this void can disappear with all returning to status quo. This idea, this state, known as tahara is generally reached with a mikva, a pool of mostly or at least partly rain water, and sometimes the addition of the red heifer, the para aduma that we no longer have today. And it puzzles me right now how jumping up and down in a pool of water can rectify a void of a certain loss of potential. Parenthetically, I am also wondering how being made tameh from bugs fits into the classification/explanation of tumah and taharah. I am not so into symbolism, especially, anymore – separate discussion – but I’d like to make an observation about the mikva and the mikva process. The mikva as stated before contains the key element of rain water, water that comes directly from heaven. Even thought the rain water is really water that rose up from the sea and into the clouds, when it falls it is still falling from the sky. Because ultimately meaning too, while technically originating from here on earth, is truly something which falls from the sky, purified, directly raining down to nourish us and our environment. When we go into a mikva we are immersing in the water of renewed potential, just as the water was renewed in the clouds. But in order to accept this renewed potential, there can be no chatzitzot – nothing between our bodies and the water at all, and the water must surround our body completely. The idea here is that the waters of the mikva are ready and willing to renew our ability for new potential, but we must be willing to accept it completely, we cannot hold anything between ourselves and beginning again. And perhaps this answers our original question. When is it the time to move on, to embrace new potential and the future. The answer is that we are ready the moment we manage to take off all of our chatzitzot and embrace and submerge ourselves in our new reality, potential, and future. Even though we may don those same chatzitzot we were wearing before we entered the mikva, it is too late, it is no longer the same. We, by taking that fateful plunge, have embraced our future, we have moved on and turned a new corner. Even though we bring the past with us, we are not going back to where we were before, rather our past is joining us in our future, the past was there while we turned the corner and dunked in the mikva, but we did not hold onto it in our jump, it stayed on the side and was there when we got back again. And that’s the difference between jumping to the future and running to the past: whether we are willing to simply embrace separation from the past, but not that the past is not allowed to have a place in our future. It is now time for us college seniors, or whoever you are, to embrace the future and be willing to understand that the only necessary part of yourself is you and not things that are external and are attached to you, because ultimately it is your life. Let me be clear, I am not advocating the idea that we should wake up tomorrow or any morning and haphazardly decide that we need to change our lives or move on in some way and abandon our families or anything else we may hold dear. What I am saying though, and this is important, is that perhaps the career we planned for ourselves in internet marketing is not what is best for us and that in order to move on with life we have to understand that we have to be potentially willing to let go of that to move forward with our life. What I am saying is, is that we have to be potentially truly willing to let go of the girl or guy we may carry with us in our hearts, in order to reach our goal of raising a family and getting married. The criteria upon which we choose to decide whether to embrace the future or run to the best is, for once, actually simpler than we expected: are we potentially willing to live without the external things, organizations, people, or life goals we have attached ourselves to. It is when we decide we can embrace the possibility that they may not be in our lives in the way we envisioned or that the career or life goal we set for ourselves may need to be left behind, then, and only then, are we ready to be m’taher ourselves in the mikva and renew our thirst for meaning in life and find new purpose. My dear fellow seniors, I will not see many of you again, not tomorrow, not ever. You were all an important part of life and I am thrilled that we took this journey together. But it is not that we leave college, the place that we have called home for the past 3 or 4 years and move on to whatever else life has to offer us. True, it will terrify us at times, but that is not the point. The point, the point is, that all need to find our inner purpose and if we have found it already we may at a future date need to turn back and find it again. And if we are willing to move forward and not turn back, we can embrace the great unknown once more, as we do now in our youth. I am sorry to have droned on so much, but no one forced you to read this. You are sitting here in front of this text out of your own free will. And if you aren’t, I’m quite confused as to how that could have happened.
My rebbe in fifth grade once told me that I would need to talk more, he said it was because I was going to have to in order to talk with girls. He was talking far down the line, I think, well far down the line from a 10 or 11 year-olds perspective, but this is the point of my life I am at today. And it is funny for me to think back that every prediction my fifth grade rebbe ever said has come true. He’s not a prophet, he just knows people. I am not certain how to explain the relevancy of any of this, beyond the fact that this is page 3 of a speech that should not be 3 pages, making my rebbe’s words seem laughable. But the fact is anyhow that he is right. What was once far down the line is now today. The next point I would like to make is not the fact that what seems like far down the line today will arrive as swiftly as tomorrow, but that I don’t know if I’ve reached that goal yet because I’m writing this from the past. Which means, my dear peers, that I can still change. My rebbe’s words can affect me now because now they find themselves applicable, now I can find a way to learn to open my mouth and find a way to learn to talk more but still not make myself out as someone who has nothing to say by speaking words that have no value. While this remains my challenge for today in the year 2009, your challenge now in the present is to bear in mind that the words of the past will affect you in your future and are there for your guidance when they become applicable.
These words I speak are applicable to me now, and that is why I write them from the past and not from the present. But to you they may not be applicable till much later. For most or many of you, however, I believe they are applicable for you today, and that is why I cannot wait for the future to explain and deliver them to you. It is not because I am dead, G-d forbid, it is because I am alive and am living this current moment to its fullest. And because I am, I am extending my arm with the offer to everyone to join me and do the same. My life is not super-stable and definitely not problem free, I am ready to jump into the mikva now though. I have reached a crossroad in my life where it is my time to be willing to part with my past and to be ready to embrace a new future. Congratulations seniors, we made it. Let us jump together toward the rest of our lives and while we shall never forget our time at Yeshiva, or wherever else we went, we shall always be ready to face the future with full belief. Congratulations.
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