My precious students*, I had a high school teacher who on the last day of class put a snow globe on her desk. Then she directed each of us to make a list of the most important things we’d be leaving behind when we finished high school. She asked us to imagine putting those things in a snow globe. That way, she explained, our imagined snow globe would be a kind of high school souvenir. Then she warned us to consider carefully whether it would be a journey snow globe or a destination snow globe.
A journey snow globe would have artifacts from one's daily experience: maybe a pair of soccer shoes, a picnic lunch we enjoyed with a friend, and a park bench where we sat with a bestie up all night talking. A destination snow globe would have big memorable buildings,, the college we would be moving to in August, and a favorite swimming pool.
What would you be in your snow globe? The journey -- markers of the steps along the way? Or the destination -- a marker of your end goal.
It had been decades since I last thought about that imaginary snow globe. That was until I heard a podcast about unusual items confiscated from travelers at airports by TSA. You’d be amazed: stun guns, machetes, toy rocket kits, Ninja throwing stars. But apart from all these confiscated weapons, can you guess what’s the most confiscated souvenir? It seems to be snow globes!
If there can be journey snow globes and destination snow globes, then there must be Journey People and Destination People. Precious graduates, which are you? Jewishly, it’s an important question, too. For instance, this week in the Torah reading cycle we start this week (outside of Israel) reading the book of Bamidbar (literally, “in the wilderness”) -- it catalogs more than three dozen stops along the way as our ancestors moved through the wilderness. It is a wilderness journey travelogue.
That wilderness is so comprehensive for our ancestors that Avivah Zornberg (contemporary, Scottish Torah scholar) writes that the book of Bamidbar, “evokes not only geographical terrain, but also an inner landscape, an ‘inscape,’ as it were - a world of imaginative being.” That inscape is powerful in the Jewish imagination. The first chief rabbi of pre-state Israel, Abraham Isaac Kook (Rav Kook) challenged each of us to consider whether we were journey people or destination people.
Kook observed that for some people “there is a great divide between the [destination] and the journey. Having decided on a certain [destination, they] feel as if the entire detailed journey is [by contrast] some heavy burden. [As a result they] feel frustrated and tries to rush and hurry everything.”
So it is with many of us. For example, lots of high school or their parents move through the college search as Destination People instead of Journey People. As Destination People they have a hyper-focus on the name or brand of the school they seek over (nearly) everything else. As a result, they are frustrated by any perceived high school detour and some even try to rush or hurry past high school. It is as if, in Kook's words, “all of one’s steps are simply [felt as] an effort to remove the frustrating requirement of the journey.”
By contrast, according to Kook a Journey Person, “understands that each and every step has the profound effect of bringing one to a greater level of improvement.”
Precious graduates, as your classmates who spoke today reflected, your class is made up of strong individuals who have worked hard to both pursue ambitious destinations and also cared deeply about others in the group -- day by day -- seeking to make each day’s experience and oneself, a little bit better.
These themes also resonate with the famous psychotherapist, Lori Gottleib, in her recent memoir titled, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. In it Gottlieb introduces us to a newly married woman excited to begin building her family. She comes to Gottlieb after learning she has a terminal illness. Suddenly the newlywed’s life is turned upside-down and inside-out. To one therapy session, the newlywed brings an old essay someone mailed to her about having a baby born with a cluster of birth defects. [That infant grows to thrive nearly independently through his differences, though that could not be known when his defects were detected and the essay was written].
The essay was sent to the newlywed to inspire her to figure out, in my mind, if she’s a Journey Person or a Destination Person. The essay is by Emily Perl Kingsley:
“When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip – to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. Michelangelo [‘s] David. The gondolas in Venice. You may even learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting.
After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The flight attendant comes in and says, ‘Welcome to Holland.’
‘Holland?!?’ you say. ‘What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.’ But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed [you] in Holland and there you must stay.
Kingsley continues: The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine, and disease. It’s just a different place.
So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.
It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around . . . and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills . . . and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.
[Still] everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy . . . and they’re bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you [could] say ‘Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.’ . . . But . . . if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things . . . about Holland.”
Lori Gottlieb explains, “Truth is ‘we’re all in Holland, because most people don’t have lives that go exactly [or, I woiuld add, perfectly] as planned.'”
Precious graduates, as you embark on the next stage of your life’s journey, I encourage you to put-down the destination of Italy, or of that perfect destination or of being perfect. That path does not exist. Pursuing it is a path of frustration and profound disappointment.
Instead, recognize that you, along with everyone else, is on a journey toward "Holland." Rav Kook offers similar encouragement, "When one realizes that being totally perfect is unattainable, one can finally understand that one’s true greatness is found in the holy journey of constantly becoming just a little bit better.”
Kook doesn’t mean abandon all goals. Rather, instead of the goal of perfection, set the goal of continual improvement. Set for yourself the goal of increasing joy and encouragement for others, the goal of increasing happiness and fulfillment for yourself. Set the goal of experiencing a journey animated by wonder and curiosity, open-hearted and open-minded to receiving the world as it really is.
Precious graduates of 2019, Abraham Joshua Heschel taught, “Never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame. I asked for wonder, and [God] gave it to me.”
Our precious graduates:
Listen for wonder and you will hear it.
Look for wonder and you will see it.
Seek wonder and you will discover it.
Precious students, as your journey continues, we will miss you; “Welcome to Holland!”
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*My charge to Class of 2019 from Jewish Community High School of the Bay (@jchsofthebay) was delivered June 6, 2019 at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco.
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