How Do I Look?

Shelach Lecha/2011
How Do I Look?

There is an old elephant joke that goes like this. “How do you catch an elephant?” And, the answer is: “You need a milk bottle, a tweezers, a piece of thread, and binoculars. First, of course, you have to look for an elephant. Then, when you find an elephant, you take the binoculars and you look through the opposite side so that the elephant looks really tiny. Then you pick up the elephant with the tweezers, you tie the little thread around him, and you gently lower him into the bottle.”

This is a silly joke, of course, and it seems to be based on a fallacy, namely, that how we look at something or someone can actually affect their size---that we can make them bigger or smaller. But, while that may not be true in a physical sense, from a psychological standpoint, it can be very true. Depending on how we look at someone, we can magnify a flea to the size of an elephant, and we can cut an elephant down to the size of a flea.

And, that is the core issue in today’s parasha. For the Jewish people leaving Egypt, from the standpoint of the nations in the area, they were a powerful herd of elephants. They had defeated the mighty Egyptians, and their reputation had impressed everyone in the region. After Israel crossed the Red Sea, Moses led them in a song of victory which proclaimed: “namogu call yoshvei Canaan…the Canaanites melted at the thought of us….chil achaz yoshvei pleshet…the Philistines trembled when they heard what Israel had done.”

But, in their own eyes, the Jewish people were not elephants. Quite the contrary. When Moses sent a group of scouts to spy out the Promised Land, they came back with a terrifying report:
Eretz ochelet yoshveha hi/it’s a land that devours its inhabitants
V’sham ra’in et ha-nefilim b’nai anak—and we saw giants in the land
Va’nehi v’eineinu ka’chagavim/and in our eyes, we felt like grasshoppers compared to them
V’chein hayeenu b’eineihem---and that’s how we seemed in their eyes, too.

How is it possible that a people that so recently had left Egypt b’yad ramah, with such confidence, with a fist in the air, could only a short time later be reduced in their own eyes to the size of grasshoppers? What set of binoculars was causing them to see themselves this way?

Perhaps recent events in the news can give us some insight here. Ross Douthat recently observed in the NY Times that there is a very noticeable difference between the Anthony Wiener scandal and the ones that came before---Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Arnold Schwartzeneggar, Elliot Spitzer---the list is long. In all of these other cases, there was an illicit attraction to another person. But, what drove Congressman Weiner was not attraction to another, but a desperate need for attention for himself, a need for other people to validate his importance, to notice him, to praise him.

And, we can snicker and smirk at Weiner’s odd behavior, but are we so immune ourselves to the deeper insecurities that drove his behavior? As Douthat points out, we live in a culture in which there is a constant pressure to perform, in which being a United States Congressman isn’t enough. You have to hit the House gym and look good coming out of the shower, and then find a Twitter follower who is willing to tell you how great you are.

We live in a celebrity culture in which all of us are always running for election. It’s not just that we can make or break people’s careers by the power of our votes on American idol. Any one of us can run for American idol. Any one of us can now put ourselves out on youtube or facebook, and measure our self-worth by the number of friends we collect, or the number of hits we get, or by the number of people who read our blog.

But, that makes for a very shaky foundation for our self-esteem, what Christopher Lasch once called “ the tenuous quality of our selfhood.” It’s a sense of self that is grounded in the attentions of others, and it’s as fickle as the fluctuations of the marketplace. When we start to care too much about how we look in the eyes of others, we can never get enough praise or adulation to reassure ourselves that we are worthwhile. No matter how much we achieve, we will always be grasshoppers in our own eyes.

Some of this insecurity is inevitable fallout from being free and democratic. Once we say that we want our leaders to be responsive to public opinion, then we’ve created a culture where worrying about how we look to other people is a high value. And, once we say that we can change our status for the better, and that we will be judged by our merits and not by our birth or by our race, then what other people think of us matters a great deal.

And, as the Torah tells us, even God cannot avoid this. The Torah is a story about the possibility of human change for the better. And, in this story, even God starts out as an underdog. Pharoah doesn’t even know his name. And, the purpose of the ten plagues was to make God a celebrity, ‘veyadu Mitzrayim ki ani adonai/so that the Egyptians will know that I am God.” God Himself goes from rags to riches.

And, when God threatens to destroy the Jewish people and start again with Moses, Moses persuades God to change his mind by saying: How will this look to the neighboring nations? Your reputation as a history-changer will be ruined, because you will have failed in the eyes of the world to create an ideal egalitarian society. So, if even God is watching the public opinion polls, what hope is there for us to overcome our desperate need for approval by others?

I had an experience at the shul this week that helped me to understand this better. We had a lunch on Wednesday to honor Tammy Soeun, the daughter of Chuck and Elaine Soen. Chuck has been our head custodian for 30 years, and Chuck and Elaine often work together, preparing our kiddushes and in many other ways. And, Tammy, their daughter recently graduated from UW with high honors in computer science and engineering, and her accomplishments are even more, but I won’t list them because she is a modest person, as are Elaine and Chuck, and I know that it would embarrass them.

But, the staff, wanted to honor Tammy in a small way, because she grew up at Herzl-Ner Tamid. She told her friends that she was half-Jewish and as a child. She led the motzi. And, Tammy’s family story is a great American dream story. Chuck and Elaine came to this country with very little except their own talent, their own discipline and an enviable work ethic. They worked hard, they saved, they valued education, and now they have the naches of seeing the fruits of their labors. Their story is a story about human possibility that resonates deeply with our own Jewish experience and ethic.

So, there was something very warm, and touching and inspiring about this little lunch on Wednesday. And, after the funny stories and remembrances, everyone turned to Tammy to say a few words. And, she got a little choked up and she said, “I just wanted everyone to be proud of me.”

And, I think in those words is the answer to our question. Did Tammy care what others thought of her? Of course she did. She cared what her parents thought. She cared what her community thought. Not because she needed other people to tell her how great she was, but because she wanted her actions to reflect the kind of person she wanted to become. When others looked at her, Tammy wanted them to see the values of honesty, integrity, and responsibility for others that were important not only to her but to the people she cared about the most.

When God worried ‘what will the neighbors think,’ it wasn’t because God wanted to be voted as ‘most popular God.’ God was worried about His moral reputation. God had a dream of changing us for the better, and God knew that nobody would that take that dream seriously unless God was a model of ethics in our eyes.

So, that’s why God cared what we thought. And, that’s how we should care about what others think of us, too. If we spend our lives constantly worrying about how many people think we’re good looking, or smart, or funny, or cool, then we are going to always feel deeply insecure. Because no amount of outside validation will ever be enough to convince us how great we are if we do not have a sense of worth that comes from the inside.

But, should we care what our parents think? Absolutely. Should we want to make them proud? Yes, we should. Should we as Jews worry before we take any action about how our ethics will be perceived by the outside world? Yes, we should. That is the best kind of worry.

We need the feedback of other people so that we don’t become selfish, so that we gain insight into the feelings of others. We can’t correct how we may have hurt others without hearing how our actions have impacted other people. Getting that feedback can never lessen us. It can only help us grow larger.

The binoculars of ego and insecurity are bound to shrink us and we will end up trapped in a milk bottle kind of life. But when we measure ourselves by how we better the lives of others, then the road to the Promised Land will always be open before us.