Bo - I am 4/5 mediocre
Exodus 10:1 - 13:16 | Jeremiah 46:13 - 28
Summary: How fabulous am I supposed to be? About 1/5th fabulous. As such, I will hit dry spells and writers’ block and all that. But this is normal. Just like the 1/5th of each Jew who left Egypt - the people who left were the ones who could accept their 1/5th-ness.
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You may have noticed that I’ve hit a bit of a dry spell in my writing. I still write every week - it is a commitment that I make to myself, and I am fairly certain that, even when I’m in a dry spell, what I’m writing is still pretty good, or at not a waste of time, or at least not dangerously misleading. But there is a sort of mission-drift that can affect anyone who is making a concerted effort to creatively produce something on a regular basis - a loss of focus, a mistrust of the inner process, an inability to translate an inner vision into a weekly offering, a lack of connection with the reader, an overemphasis on the imagined needs of the reader at the expense of attune-ment to the inner voice, over- or under-estimation of of the importance of the work, etc. Each of these can derail that delicate process.
I offer this not as an excuse or as a plea for sympathy or heart-emojis but because it is the most real thing to me right now. This is true for me not just with writing weekly Torah, but in almost every aspect of my life - work, relationships, health, praying, learning. I am in a dry spell in almost everything I am doing right now.
It’s alright, though. I’ve been here before. Dozens and dozens of times. I have been here. And I have left here. I have been stuck. And I have gotten unstuck. I deeply and firmly believe in the importance of entering such phases, and I fully and completely believe in my and your and everyone’s ability to emerge from such phases, better for it.
I think dry spells are an essential part of any process of growth. When we hit a dry spell, something is telling us it is time to grow into the next level of whatever it is we’re in. It’s not that life has become inherently and ontologically dry - it’s that we’ve quietly agreed to something mediocre, something less than full. It is almost always the assertion of something brilliant inside of us that has been neglected to the point where its only recourse is to shut down some essential joy-systems, some essential satisfaction-systems inside of us so we will pay attention enough to say “What’s wrong? What’s missing? What have I neglected? What am I not bringing out? What am I not saying?”
**
The most important statistic to consider, when thinking about the Exodus from Egypt is One in Five. Our tradition teaches, based upon various textual inferences, that only one in five Jews in Egypt actual left. (And that, by the way, is a generous version. Some say one in fifty. Others say one in 500.)
Rabbi Henoch Dov Hoffman reads this to mean that one fifth (or one fiftieth, or one five-hundredth) of each of us left. I take this to mean that it is a small part of us, and not all of us, that moves forward. At moments of leaving, of moving on from the dry spell, it is a small part of us that is emphasized, a small part of us that makes sense, that feels worth investing in, that seems worth building on. At such times, though the tendency might be to attempt some valiant defense of all the decisions we have made, of all that we have become, of all that we are, the truth is that, to move forward, we have to be willing and able to identify points, pieces, partial expressions, potentials, tiny indications of greater things to come, and we need to be willing and able to put all our eggs in those baskets.
When the dry spell hits, the hard-but-necessary move is to say, OK, a lot of what I’m doing right now is sub-par. What pieces of what I’m doing, producing, and creating, however small, do I love?
Those one out of five who left Egypt were the ones who could look at themselves in this way, who could accept being part-mediocre-part-brilliant, who could be honest about who they have been and also honest about who they will become.