The Feigelson-Blitt house is a bit of a physical mess right now. Our eldest graduated from college and brought all his stuff home. Our middle child finished his first year of college and brought a lot of his stuff home. And both of them have had a lot of laundry to do. The effulgence of stuff—sheets, blankets, towels, winter coats, phone charging cables, electronic devices, assorted college tchotchkes—has been oozing out into the hallway. Conversations have been had, but it’s a challenge.
Plus, having five people in the house, including three who qualify as teenage boy or young adult man, means we need to have approximately seventeen times as much food in the house as normal. The fridge is jammed with leftovers, a round-the-clock supply of schnitzel at the ready, and the various condiments each seems to require. The shelves are bulging with boxes of protein bars, bananas, and Trader Joe’s dried mango (my God, our capacity to eat that stuff).
First-world problems, 100%. We are fortunate to be able to afford to feed everyone, especially with prices soaring the way they have in recent months. I recently read that a food bank in New Mexico used to have a monthly fuel bill of $10,000. Since the latest war began, that has increased to $22,000, which ultimately impacts the increasing number of people who need to use the food bank. As I’ve grown used to saying when people ask how I’m doing, “Thank God for the problems I have.”
Despite that awareness, I find my attention still tends to focus on the mess. Why can’t everything be neat and tidy? (Which is to say nothing of my wife’s attention—she has a higher standard than me.) Why can’t we figure out a storage solution so that we don’t have a box of protein drinks sitting on the floor? And why are there clothes on the floor of the kids’ bathroom—what happened to the laundry hamper?
Rabbi Moshe Chaim Ephraim of Sudilkov (1748-1800) was the grandson of the Ba’al Shem Tov and author of the Degel Machane Ephraim. He offers an apt comment on God’s commandment to Moses to assemble a band of people to reconnoiter the land of Canaan: “Send someone from each of their ancestral tribes, each one a nasi, a chieftain, among them” (Numbers 13:2). The word nasi in Hebrew is spelled nun-shin/sin-yod-aleph. Thus, the Degel points out, “it includes within it the letters of the words ‘ayin’ (nothing) and ‘yesh’ (something). A nasi, a leader, who thinks of themselves as ayin is ultimately a yesh; while one who thinks of themselves as a yesh is ultimately an ayin.”
On one level, there’s a simple message here about literal selflessness, particularly in leadership (though, following my teacher Parker Palmer, I would argue nearly of us exercise leadership much of the time). When spiritual or psychological myopia takes hold, it is possible to perceive oneself as yesh, that which is, while perceiving others as ayin, nothing. In such a view, other people become instruments to us while we live out our egoistic fantasy. Ultimately, that’s a path to a broader ayin, nothingness—not in the transcendent spiritual sense, but quite plainly: under such circumstances, it doesn’t take long for relationships and communities to fall apart.
But I think the Degel is also saying something deeper about our perceptions. So often, our evaluation of a situation rests on how we answer the questions, “What is yesh—what’s here? And what is ayin—what’s not here?” Consciously or subconsciously, our minds are making this evaluation all the time. We can bring our attention to what is true now, or to what we wish were true instead. We can focus on that which we perceive to be present, or that which we perceive to be absent. And when we do so, we might actually find that things aren’t quite what they seem.
Yes, the house is full of clutter right now. Yes, I’m making a lot of trips to the grocery store and spending more on food and running the dishwasher more frequently with all these people home. There’s messiness and complexity and a lot more laundry to do. It might be nice not to have to do all that.
And: the house is full. All my kids are home for a few weeks—a rare and precious event. The chessboard is out on the coffee table because they’re playing each other in the evenings. The house is noisier—and it’s a good kind of noise.
Famously, the Torah portion that begins with a charge to the spies latur, to scout out and perceive the land ends with the mitzvah of tzitzit—to make, and then look at, the fringes on our four-cornered garments, so that lo toturu, we will not follow after only our hearts and eyes. “Do not form judgments by following the impulses of your hearts and eyes,” explains Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. “Do not rely on them in deciding what to accept or reject. Do not call anything ‘good’ merely because your hearts are drawn to it and your eyes yearn for it. Do not call anything ‘evil’ merely because it is distasteful to your hearts and eyes.”
A key aim of our spiritual practice is to help us hold these questions, to create space within our heart-minds in which we can perceive clearly, discern, and make wise judgments. On a fundamental level, those judgments center around the questions, what is present and what is absent? What might it be that we think is absent but is actually present? What is yesh and what is ayin?
For Reflection & Conversation
- When have you held one reflexive view of a situation that, upon further reflection, turned out to be quite different than you assumed? What supported you in coming to a new understanding? What, if any, was the role of your spiritual practice in that change?