There is No God Proxy

Since my last post, I have been in the End-of-School-Year vortex: wrapping up teaching, finding a new apartment, booking movers, and planning summer travel. Some days, I feel like I am KILLING IT at this adulting thing...other days, I want to curl up on my futon and not do anything except watch the chimney swifts darting around in the sky outside (they always look like they are having the best time). Yesterday evening was of the latter type, and then it got dark out so no more chimney swifts, so I decided to search for a little inspiration online. I went on Instagram (sometimes a good idea, sometimes a tricky one) and saw that Laura McKowen had written a blog post in honor of her 1,000th day of sobriety.

One of the greatest blessings of my recovery is that I've found myself some truly outstanding teachers along the way. These women are some of the most open-hearted people I know, and they are all eager to share the wisdom they've gained from their own journeys. With some of my teachers, I've had close personal relationships; with others, like Laura, I've connected in person but know them mainly through their blogs or other online forums. Laura is a true gem. She positively radiates authenticity and she is brave as all get-out, even when being brave means saying, "I don't have anything figured out and am a total mess right now." So when I saw that she had been sober for 1,000 days, I immediately had to read her post about it.

www.lauramckowen.com

Laura lists 5 lessons she's learned in 1,000 days of sobriety. They're all perceptive and each one rings true for me, but #2 resonates with me the strongest. Here is Laura's second lesson from sobriety:

Don't make anyone your god.

Never before have I seen anyone articulate so clearly what I do all the time, what I have always believed to be proof that I am pathologically insecure or hopelessly needy or pitifully devoid of integrity. Maybe each of those things is a little bit true, but the bigger truth is that I haven't been negating myself, I've been trying to find myself. I've just been going about it the wrong way. And, while I've known for a long time that this pattern isn't healthy, it has been very, very hard to change it. Old habits die hard, and all that.

For me, making someone my god means that I adjust my words and actions to elicit the approval of another person. It means that I reach out with emails or texts and then wait, simmering with anticipation, for a reply--and, when one is late in coming, spin fantasies about what I might have done wrong to make this person not want to stay in touch with me. It means I let another person dictate what parts of me are acceptable and what parts need adjusting or squashing. It is giving higher weight to someone else's opinions and judgments than I give to my own. It is not believing in my own strengths and positive qualities unless someone else affirms them. And it is a driving hunger-- deeper and more desperate than any I ever felt for food--for connection with a person; a hunger that leads me to think, I will be anyone you want me to be--just don't leave me.

Without going into all the painful details, I'll just say this: making someone my god has never, ever ended well.

Laura's post got me thinking: when I make someone my god, what happens to my actual God? I still think about God when I'm davening or saying brachot or observing Shabbat, but I stop thinking about my relationship with God, because I am mistakenly looking for that relationship with another human. I am so busy seeking validation, praise, and affirmation from someone else that I forget I already receive all of those things from God. When I make someone my god, that person inevitably ends up disappointing me because humans cannot actually manage all that power. I also end up feeling out of control because I am flailing around in search of a security that doesn't exist. People were never, ever meant to be god.

Who I am, and how "okay" I am, is a matter that is solely between me and the God Who made me. Other people can have their opinions, but those are just human opinions, not Divine opinions. If I get rejected or rebuffed by another individual, that is human rejection, not Divine rejection. That's not to say it doesn't sting--it does, often badly--but it is not a final verdict on my worthiness. People might cause me to feel insecure or inferior, but those are just feelings, not facts. The fact is, I am fine. I am flawed, and I have things--many things--to work on, but at my core I am a good person who is deserving of love and belonging...and I can always find both of those things with God.

For sure, we need other people, and people's opinions matter. Connections with people matter. God cannot replace relationships with other humans, and I don't think He wants to. But if you find yourself trying to use people to replace God, if you are looking to human beings to affirm your baseline worth as an individual, I would suggest that you examine how that's working for you. Take Laura's advice: don't make anyone your God. You already have a God, and that God created you with love and care. You are who you're supposed to be. You're independent, remarkable, and intuitive. Use people to enhance those qualities, not to work against them. But never forget that God has already ruled: you are worthy. You are.

What's a Woman Worth?

I know...I'm a delinquent blogger. I actually can't even think of a good excuse, other than, "life." But I have been thinking about writing and have had a post brewing in my head for a few weeks...so here it is.

Three weeks ago we read parasha Bechukotai, the last parasha in the book of Vayikra. Towards the end of the parasha the Torah speaks about "valuations," that is, how much monetary value gets assigned to a human life should one want to contribute the value of oneself to the Temple. The chapter opens with these verses:

וידבר יהוה אל–משה לאמר: דבר אל–בני ישראל ואמרת אלהם איש כי יפלא נדר בערכך נפשת ליהיה

Hashem spoke to Moses, saying: "Speak to the Children of Israel and say to them: If a man articulates a vow to Hashem regarding a valuation of living beings... (Vayikra 27:1-2)

The Torah then goes on to list how much a person is worth, as follows (in translation):

...the valuation of a male shall be: for someone twenty years to sixty years of age, the valuation shall be fifty silver shekels, of the sacred shekel. If she is female, the valuation shall be thirty shekels. And if from five to twenty years of age, the valuation of a male shall be twenty shekels and of a female ten shekels. And if from one month to five years of age, the valuation of a male shall be five silver shekels; and for a female, the valuation shall be three silver shekels. And if from sixty years and up, if for a male, the valuation shall be fifteen shekels; and for a female, ten shekels. (Vayikra 27: 3-7)

Okay, so I might be the Queen of the Obvious Question, but here it is: Why is a woman always worth less than a man?

The week of that parasha, I heard a beautiful dvar Torah given by Torah scholar and writer Tamar Biala, in which she referenced a contemporary midrash written by Rivka Lubitch. In the midrash, Rivka Lubitch focuses on one word in particular:

בערכך

which, she notes, doesn't actually translate as, "the valuation," but as, "your valuation." What does this mean? It means that it is not G-d who declared that a woman is worth less than a man; rather, it is humans who decided this. In the time that the Torah was given, the general consensus--among both men and women--was that males were worth more than females. Hashem understood this, and so the valuations were written to reflect it.

In other words, the problem is not that women are Divinely decreed to be of a lesser value than men. The problem is that women themselves feel that they are of a lesser value.

Now, I'd like to think that feminism has a strong enough foothold today that most of us would agree that a woman and a man should have equal value. But I know that in many cultures this is not the case, and even in my own culture, women receive messages--both overt and covert--that they are worth less than their male counterparts. These messages are troubling on many levels but they do the most damage when the women themselves buy into them. And we have bought into them. Nearly every woman and girl I've talked to who has a history of an eating disorder has expressed that at the heart of her struggles was the core belief, "I am not worthy."

I am not worthy of taking up space.
I am not worthy of help.
I am not worthy of food.
I am not worthy of love.

How much depression, shame, guilt, and self-hate could be avoided if we had a different view of our own worth?

This idea came up again for me this past week as we read parasha Nasso, specifically, the section about the Sotah or "Wayward Wife." In brief: if a husband suspected his wife of adultery but had no proof of either guilt or innocence, he should bring her before the Kohen. The Kohen would remove the woman's head covering (to shame her) and make her take an oath that if she had not committed adultery, there would be no curse, but if she had strayed, she would die. Then the Kohen would write out the oath on a scroll, dissolve it in water, and force the woman to drink it. If she was innocent, nothing would happen to her, but if she was guilty, she would die an unpleasant death.

I would say that's more than a little troubling and I could go on about it at length, but that's not for here.

Anyway, as I read those verses this past Shabbat and thought about the Sotah in conjunction with the issue of valuations, I began to wonder, "What would have happened if the women of that time had stood up and collectively said, 'ABSOLUTELY NOT!'?" What if they had said no to such a degrading and humiliating ritual? What if they had known that they deserved to be treated with more dignity, just as their husbands were? Now obviously, the women of that time would not have responded this way and it's unfair to project modern sensibilities onto ancient times, and all that. But to me, that is the real tragedy of the Sotah--that both the men and the women believed that was a reasonable way for women to be treated. There was no collective uprising of women who said, "I am too valuable to be subjected to this. I deserve better."

I think the lesson here is twofold:

1) G-d really does value all humans equally--it's just the humans themselves who have a different idea.

2) We cannot expect others to consider us worthy if we do not consider ourselves worthy.

And we are worthy. Of food, of love, of respect, of support, of happiness. G-d already knows this. He's just waiting for us to catch on.