Talmud Class: What is Your Life Story, and What Chapter Are You in Now?

From the Bimah: Jewish Lessons for Life

In How to Know a Person, David Brooks devotes an entire chapter to what he calls life stories. https://files.constantcontact.com/d3875897501/1021ea46-026b-4259-9de3-6f87a6cefd69.pdf?rdr=true "Coming up with a personal story is centrally important to leading a meaningful life. You can’t know who you are unless you know how to tell your story. You can’t have a stable identity unless you take the inchoate events of your life and give your life meaning by turning the events into a coherent story. You can know what to do next only if you know what story you are a part of. And you can endure present pains only if you can see them as part of a story that will yield future benefits. “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story,” as the Danish writer Isak Dinesen said. (p. 217)" Our Torah reading this week offers the official, canonical life story of the Jewish people. This story is so central that it is the heart of the the Haggadah and the foundation of our Passover seder. https://files.constantcontact.com/d3875897501/9e518f3e-016a-4427-b935-e9cbaa5a6b31.pdf?rdr=true In Brooks’ analysis, a life story has low points, high points, and transition points. So too the Jewish people’s story: low points (slavery in Egypt), high points (the Exodus), and transition points (entry into the land of Israel). https://files.constantcontact.com/d3875897501/d1c8d370-7521-4ebc-984e-f1638f904429.pdf?rdr=true As we prepare ourselves for Rosh Hashanah, how is your life story going? Is this current chapter a low point, a high point, a transition point, or some combination of the above? Where do you want your life story to go in this next year? Brooks puts it nicely: it is good to see our life as a “noble struggle.” What is our “noble struggle” now?