Carpe Diem
Thoughts on Mikess 2018
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R. Tarfon said:
The day is short and the work is much, and the workers are lazy and the reward
is great, and the Master of the house is pressing. (Pirkei Avot 2:15)
After hearing Yosef’s
interpretation of his dreams, Pharaoh exclaimed, “Could we find a man like him,
whom is the spirit of God?” (Bereshit 41:38). He then turned to Yosef and
remarked, “There is none as discerning and wise as you” (39). Just as the
cupbearer and baker were overwhelmed by Yosef’s clairvoyant interpretations in
prison, so too was Pharaoh at that time. But were Yosef’s explanations actually
that impressive? Asked to render a plausible solution to those very
dreams in his same circumstance, isn’t it possible that you too might
interpret them like Yosef? What, then, were Yosef’s powers of wisdom and
insight that appeared so remarkable at that time?
Many of the technological
products that we buy and use are designed with planned obsolescence in mind.
The operating systems of our smartphones, for example, slow down significantly
after a mere two years of use. At that same time, their battery life begins to
drain quickly, as well. There is, in fact, a purpose that underlies this
seemingly money-making scam. The systems are able to produce at maximum
capacity because they possess a confined window of time. Building a
lifespan into the usage of our devices ensures their maximum efficiency during
that time period.
Allison Arieff noted the
irony that the same Silicon Valley culture that produces these gadgets appears
obsessed with living forever. She pointed to venture capitalists like the tech
billionaire Peter Thiel who have begun pouring money into anti-aging and life
extension start-ups. Arieff mentioned, as well, that Google has launched the
biotech company Calico to study “the biology that controls lifespan,”
specifically researching the long-living naked mole rat, which shows little to
no sign of aging.[1]
The tech world shares good
company in its obsession with “living forever.” Our society at large has become
possessed by the dream of eternal life. Noting the long list of new books
related to “successful aging,” Barbara Ehrenreich remarked, “A major themes is
that aging itself is abnormal and unacceptable.”[2] And
before detailing the many other ways that this mindset and approach has spread
throughout our culture, she wrote, “You can think of death bitterly or with
resignation, as a tragic interruption of your life, and take every possible
measure to postpone it.” Alternatively, and more realistically, she suggested,
“You can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal
nonexistence, and seize it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with
the living, ever-surprising world around us.”[3]
Peggy Noonan recently wrote
about a depressing outgrowth of our society’s concept of life. She noticed the
adolescent clothing donned by many of today’s well-known business executives –
the casual T-shirts, hoodies and jeans. She pointed out that although our
culture has always honored the young, it has never honored immaturity. The
model of dignified “adult attire” has largely been lost, replaced instead by
“soft clothes, the kind 5-year-olds favor.” The past ideal of a life of serious
demeanor and style has disintegrated to one of childish thoughts and behavior.[4]
Along the path of our futile attempts to “defy death,” we have begun to act and
attempt to “be young” forever.
Joseph Epstein described this
phenomenon over a decade ago, adding to it his own critique and misgivings.
Epstein began “The Perpetual Adolescent” by contrasting the “grown up” attire
one beheld at the baseball games of the 1940’s and 50’s – tailored suits and
fedoras, to the youthful jeans, caps and T-shirts that fill the seats of
today’s games. Broadly observing many of society’s general trends, he noticed a
sharp shift from a society that conceived of adolescence as necessarily
transient to one that yearns for its eternal existence. Epstein viewed this
perspective very negatively. He suggested that it lowered the tone of national
life, took away from its richness, and lowered intellectual expectations. He
argued that an observable “dumbing down” of society is to be attributed to this
mindset, as contemporary journalism has lost its depth by necessarily adapting
to the short attention span with the soundbite, photo-op, quickie take and a
general suppression of complexity.[5]
Leon Kass noticed a similar
trend in his search for the underlying factors for our society’s shift away
from traditional dating and marriage. He wrote about today’s shared clothing
styles, spoken lingo and interest in music between parents and children, and
commented: “Youth, not adulthood, is the cultural ideal, at least as celebrated
in the popular culture.” Kass explained that today’s young man doesn’t feel the
urge to take his father’s place, as he has seen his father continuously running
from it “with all deliberate speed.”[6]
Ancient Egyptian
society was pervaded by a strikingly similar feature to ours today. Leon Kass
explained that Egypt sought to abolish change and to make time stand still in
their pursuit of “changelessness, agelessness and permanent presence.” He
elaborated: “Whether one looks to the hieroglyph in which the mobile world is
represented in static ideograms; or to the worship of the eternally circling
but never-changing heavenly bodies or of the cyclically rising and ebbing
river, with its life-giving overflows; or to the practices of denying aging
through bodily adornment and defying death through mummification and
preparation for reincarnation – everywhere one looks, one sees in Egypt the
rejection of change and the denial of death.”[7]
Indeed, the first thing that Yosef did before approaching Pharaoh was shaving
his beard (41:14). A beard is the paradigmatic sign of “old age” (hence its
Hebrew word – zakan), which was the perfect emblem of the
Egyptian penchant to deny change and conquer human decay.[8]
Attempting to enter the mainstream Egyptian society, Yosef made sure to first
dress the part.
The legacy of Am
Yisrael, in contrast, was built upon the core concept of remembering the
past and anticipating the future. God’s covenant with Avraham was passed down
from father to son in a continuous chain. Adherents of this dynasty lived with
“full awareness of time and with full acceptance of change and unavoidable
decay.”[9]
Consider the
establishment of berit bein ha-betarim, the foundational covenant with
Avraham, when God clearly stated to him: “As for you, you shall go to your
fathers in peace, you shall be buried in ripe old age” (15:15). We were first
taught then to accept – and embrace – the existence of old age and the inevitability
of death.
As Yosef listened
to the retelling of the ministers’ dreams and then those of Pharaoh, this
veritable clash of worlds came to the fore. Denying the inevitable passing of
time, the Egyptians couldn’t possibly fathom that the objects in their dreams –
the vine branches, baskets of bread, cows and ears of wheat – represented the
passage of time. The very concept of a set “deadline” was foreign to their
intellectual conceptions. And as Yosef described their symbolism – first as
three days to the ministers, and then as seven years to Pharaoh, the Egyptian
dreamers were spellbound by its novelty. The idea of the fleeting nature of
time, although intuitive, had been squashed by their culture and society. And
Yosef’s seamless mention of this concept opened their eyes to a hidden truth.
“Carpe diem,”
John Keating (played by Robin Williams) famously shouted to his students in the
classic film Dead Poets Society. “Seize the day, boys. Make your lives
extraordinary,” he urged them. Living in a world which once again seeks to freeze
itself in “perpetual adolescence,” the Torah awakens us to the inevitability of
aging and the concept of a lifespan. It reminds us to seize the day.
[1] Allison Arieff, “Life is
Short. That’s the Point,” The New York Times, Aug. 18, 2018.
[2] Barbara Ehrenreich, Natural
Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves
to Live Longer (New York, NY, 2018), pg. 164.
[3] Ibid., pg. xv
[4] Peggy Noonan, “If Adults Won’t
Grow Up, Nobody Will,” The Wall Street Journal, April 5, 2018. Thank you
to Morris Manopla for sharing this article with me.
[5] Joseph Epstein, “The Perpetual
Adolescent,” The Weekly Standard, Mar. 15, 2004.
[6] Leon R. Kass, “The End of
Courtship,” Leading a Worthy Life (New York, NY, 2018), pg. 51.
[7] Leon R. Kass, The Beginning
of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Chicago, IL, 2003), pg. 557.
[8] Ibid., pg. 563-4. Rabbi
Dr. Ricky Hidary commented to me that archaeologists have in fact found that
ancient drawings depict the Egyptians as clean-shaven, in contrast to the
foreigners who don beards.
[9] Ibid., pg. 556-7.