Lay These Words Upon Your Heart ...

Jacob Needleman is a professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University and the author of many books, including: Why Can't We Be Good?, The Wisdom of Love, Time and the Soul, The Heart of Philosophy, Lost Christianity, and Money and the Meaning of Life.

More than a decade ago, we invited Jacob to do a special evening presentation for our Masters Forum members. His topic was Money and the Meaning of Life.

Since that time, I've made it a point to keep in touch with his work, and early this year bumped into a transcript of a speech he gave at Indian Springs School on January 22, 2004. The speech was about the great unanswerable questions of life; the questions that come from a deep place within us, such as:

• Who am I?
  
• Does God exist?
  
• Is there a soul, and is it immortal?
  
• What can we know?
  
• What ought we do?
  
• What is good and evil?

A great body of ideas and teachings has been built up over thousands of years to help people as they try to answer these questions. This wisdom is alive in every culture of the world, and forms the basis for all the great religious traditions and spiritual philosophies of the world. It was studied, practiced and passed on by mystics, saints, and great philosophers. It comes in many forms: words and stories; pictures and symbols; modes of behavior; and various forms of art. According to Needleman:

"The great stories and images of the world don’t usually reveal their meaning to us right away. These great stories, these fairy tales, these Biblical images, these myths, these great works of art - sometimes they’re not there to convince the brain, the head which is rational - but they’re there to make a kind of end run around the rational mind, which is sometimes connected to the superficial sense of ego; to do an end run, and go down in the direction of the heart. And later on, as the years pass, and suddenly life does something to you, some shock, some disappointment, some triumph, some extraordinary thing, and suddenly, 'Ah! That’s what the story meant, that’s what the story was telling me!' So try to let these stories come into you and slowly radiate their meaning."

Jacob told a story to drive his point home; it's an exchange between a pupil and a wise old rebbe:

"And so, the pupil asks the wise rebbe about a passage in the Bible, in the Book of Deuteronomy, which is part of the Torah, the heart of the Old Testament. There is a sentence there that says to 'Lay these words upon your heart.' The words, which sum up the fundamental belief of the Hebraic tradition, are these: 'Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord; And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.' (Deuteronomy 6: 4-6) And the pupil asks the rebbe, 'Why does it tell us to lay these words upon our heart? Why doesn’t it tell us to put them in our heart?' And the rebbe answers, 'It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and the words can’t get it in. So we just put them on top of the heart. And there they stay. There they stay until someday, when the heart breaks, they fall in.'"

He ended his time on the dais by saying:

"The great wisdom: study it in all its forms, and someday when your heart breaks, either in great sorrow or in uncontainable joy, it will fall in, and you’ll understand this other level of human values that every school worthy of the name is trying to lead you toward."

Conversation:

• How is your life guided by the deep wisdom of the heart Needleman refers to?
  
• What words are laying upon your heart?

Afterwords:

"Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" - T.S. Eliot

"Australian Aborigines say that the big stories - the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life - are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting their prey in the bush." - Robert Moss, Dreamgates

The Magician of Lublin

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) was a Polish-born American writer of short stories, novels, and essays. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978.

Singer was born the son of a Hasidic rabbi. When he was four, his family moved to an apartment on Krochmalna Street in Warsaw, a neighborhood full of thieves, prostitutes, street vendors, rag pickers, and observant Jews. Singer later called the street his "literary gold mine." He emigrated to the United States in 1935, and - for a time - eked out a living in New York City as a journalist on the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward. Singer's career as an author effectively began in 1953 when his story "Gimpel the Fool" was discovered by Irving Howe, translated by Saul Bellow, and published in the Partisan Review.

Singer's work draws heavily on Jewish folklore, religion, and mysticism, and frequently deals with shtetl life in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe. Many of his later works treat the loneliness of old age and the sense of alienation produced in Jews by the dissolution of values through assimilation with the Gentile world.

The Magician of Lublin - a book published in 1960, and subsequently made into a movie - is the story of Yasha Mazur, an escape artist on par with Houdini, who gets so caught up in the dream of conquering the big capitols of Western Europe that he is willing to accept baptism as his ticket to get in. By a series of misadventures, however, which includes an abortive attempt at crime and the suicide of the girl he has been working with in his act, he is brought back to the faith of his fathers.

Somewhere near the middle of the story, Yasha is tugged back toward his roots:

"Yasha paused at one of the prayer-houses and glanced in. . . For a moment, Yasha lingered at the open door inhaling the mixture of wax, tallow, and something musty; something which he remembered from childhood. Jews - an entire community of them - spoke to a God no one saw. Although plagues, famines, poverty, and pogroms were His gifts to them, they deemed Him merciful and compassionate, and proclaimed themselves His chosen people. Yasha often envied their unswerving faith."

Conversation:

• What is the one thing you believe is true even though you can't prove it?
• What are things you believe to be true that others you know don't believe to be true?
• What is something you believed for a long time, but don't believe anymore?
  

Afterwords:

"Crooked is the path of eternity." - Nietzsche

"While the poet entertains, he continues to search for eternal truths, for the essence of being. In his own fashion, he tries to solve the riddle of time and change, to find an answer to suffering, to reveal love in the very abyss of cruelty and injustice. Strange as these words may sound, I often play with the idea that when all the social theories collapse and wars and revolutions leave humanity in utter gloom, the poet - whom Plato banned from his Republic - may rise up to save us all." - Isaac Bashevis Singer

"If we think about it, we find that our life consists in achieving a pure relationship between ourselves and the living universe about us. This is how I save my soul - by accomplishing a pure relationship between me and another person, me and a nation, me and a race of people, me and animals, me and the trees or flowers, me and the earth, me and the skies and sun and stars, me and the moon; an infinity of pure relationships, big and little." - D. H. Lawrence

"What we call the beginning is often the end, and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from…we shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." - T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding