Eternal comedy

Tshuve: I joined the Armory YMCA as a charter member last winter, and I got a wonderful cranberry inaugural jacket with a New York Y insignia on the arm. You see them all over the neighborhood -- members sporting them like we are all on the same hipster team. The new wonderful Armory YMCA has no showers though, and my old apartment was a little far from the gym, so I didn't like going, getting sweaty, and not being able to get clean. So I stopped going. But now I have moved 3 blocks from it, and so I am back lifting weights, running on the track, and using the elliptical machine. It's not just a return to the Y -- it's also a return to a certain kind of physical activity. I've been quite physically active since not going to the gym -- running and swimming and doing yoga -- but that's not the same as going to the gym, which gives me a deep sense of tshuve -- return -- to the most grounded place in my adolescence, to which I have returned and found strength, both literally and figuratively, many times over the past 30 years.

Never done: I went to a reading of Nahma Sandrow's brand new translation of a Yiddish play, Yankl der Shmid (Yankl the Blacksmith) by David Pinski. Nahma is a gifted translator, and I loved the play, which is really about the main character's struggle against the yetzer hore, which Nahma translated as the "evil impulse." Yankl is a drinker and a womanizer, but he wants very much to change his ways. He falls in love with a lovely young woman -- an orphan with few prospects -- and she marries him despite his reputation, because he is super good-looking, she believes he can change, and she doesn't think she has better prospects. The play is about the struggle between good and evil -- his in action, and hers in faith.

In Mussar practice, one way we look at yetzer hore is as focus on self, whereas the yetzer tov (good impulse) can be seen as a focus on the other. It could be thought of as a moral conscience -- the impulse that reminds us of god's laws when making decisions. Yetzer hore is selfish nature -- the desire to satisfy personal needs like sex, food, shelter, etc without taking into consideration the moral consequences of fulfilling those desires. What most interests me about Mussar practice is right at the nexus of these two impulses: how do we balance out our own needs with the needs of our communities? With the needs of the environment? With the needs of the world? This is something I, like many socially conscious people, have struggled to understand for myself for many years. Buddhism taught me to hold my own needs in one hand while holding other people's needs in the other hand. Therapy, the same. But it's still not easy for me; years of subsuming my needs for the needs of the family made it difficult for me to gently, confidently, easy-goingly stand up for myself without over-asserting my self. It is also not easy for Yankl the blacksmith, who is tortured by the yetzer hore, or for his beautiful orphan wife Tamara, who is constrained by the yetzer tov. But their lives are a melodrama in four acts, and mine is, hopefully, an eternal comedy.