LIVING A LIFE THAT MATTERS : Resolving the Conflict Between Conscience and Success

Chapter 1

The Two Voices of God Like many people, I live in two worlds. Much of the time, I live in the world of work and commerce, eating, working, and paying my bills. It is a world that honors people for being attractive and productive. It reveres winners and scorns losers, as reflected in its treatment of devoted public servants who lose an election or in the billboard displayed at the Atlanta Olympic Games a few years ago: "You don't win the silver medal, you lose the gold." As in most contests, there are many more losers than winners, so most of the citizens of that world spend a lot of time worrying that they don't measure up.

But, fortunately, there is another world where, even before I entered it professionally, I have spent some of my time. As a religiously committed person, I live in the world of faith, the world of the spirit. Its heroes are models of compassion rather than competition. In that world, you win through sacrifice and self-restraint. You win by helping your neighbor and sharing with him rather than by finding his weakness and defeating him. And in the world of the spirit, there are many more winners than losers.

When I was young, most of my time and energy were devoted to the world of getting and spending. I relished competition. I wanted to be challenged. How else could I find out how good I was, where I stood on the ladder of winners and losers? I was living out the insight of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung that "act one of a young man's life is the story of his setting out to conquer the world."

Of course, I was not the only person who did that. Most people lived as I did. For several years, our next-door neighbor's son was a nationally renowned professional athlete. It wasn't money that kept him playing and risking serious injury. It was the challenge, the competition, the opportunity to prove once again that he was better than most people at what he did.

When I was young, I saw that second world, the world of faith, as a kind of vacation home, a place to which I repaired in order to relax from the stress of the world of striving, so that I could emerge refreshed to resume the battle. At times, it seemed almost a mirror image of my first world, a place where different people played by different rules. Old people were respected there for their wisdom and experience, as were old ideas and old values. People were described as "beautiful" because they exuded compassion and generosity rather than wealth and glamour. "Success" had a very different meaning there.

As my life increasingly became a story of giving up dreams and coming to terms with my limitations (Jung went on to say, "Act two is the story of a young man realizing that the world is not about to be conquered by the likes of him"), I found myself returning more and more to that second, alternative world. I would often recall the words of my teacher Abraham Joshua Heschel: "When I was young, I admired clever people. As I grew old, I came to admire kind people."

Looking back at my life, I realize that I was commuting between those two worlds in an effort to meet two basic human needs, the need to feel successful and important and the need to think of myself as a good person, someone who deserved the approval of other good people.

We need to know that we matter to the world, that the world takes us seriously. I read a memoir recently in which a woman recalls staying home from school one day as a child because she was sick. Hearing the noises of the world outside her window, she was dismayed to realize that the world was going on without her, not even missing her. The woman grew up to be devoutly religious, a pillar of her church, active in many organizations, picketing abortion clinics, feeding the hungry. As I read her story, I wondered if she became an activist to overcome that childhood fear of insignificance, to reassure herself that she did make a difference to the world.

In my forty years as a rabbi, I have tended to many people in the last moments of their lives. Most of them were not afraid of dying. Some were old and felt that they had lived long, satisfying lives. Others were so sick and in such pain that only death would release them. The people who had the most trouble with death were those who felt that they had never done anything worthwhile in their lives, and if God would only give them another two or three years, maybe they would finally get it right. It was not death that frightened them; it was insignificance, the fear that they would die and leave no mark on the world.

The need to feel important drives people to place enormous value on such symbols as titles, corner offices, and first-class travel. It causes us to feel excessively pleased when someone important recognizes us, and to feel hurt when our doctor or pastor passes us on the street without saying hello, or when a neighbor calls us by our sister's or brother's name. The need to know that we are making a difference motivates doctors and medical researchers to spend hours looking through microscopes in the hope of finding cures for diseases. It drives inventors and entrepreneurs to stay up nights trying to find a better way of providing people with something they need. It causes artists, novelists, and composers to try to add to the store of beauty in the world by finding just the right color, the right word, the right note. And it leads ordinary people to buy six copies of the local paper because it has their name or picture in it.

Because we find ourselves in so many settings that proclaim our insignificance--in stores where salespeople don't know our name and don't care to know it, in crowded buses and airplanes that give us the message that if we weren't there someone else would be available to take our place--some people do desperate things to reassure themselves that they matter to the world. I can believe that Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy and that John Hinckley, Jr., tried to kill President Reagan in large measure to prove that the world was wrong in not taking them seriously. They had the power to change history. At a less crucial level, there are people who confuse notoriety with celebrity, and celebrity with importance. They go to extreme lengths to get their names in the Guinness Book of Records, or to appear on daytime television shows, revealing things about themselves and their families that most of us would be embarrassed to reveal to our clergyman or our closest friends. They may come across as pitiable; the audience may scorn them. But for one hour their story holds the attention of millions of Americans. They matter.

At the same time, we need to be assured that we are good people. A few years ago, I wrote a book entitled How Good Do We Have to Be? Its basic message was that God does not expect perfection from us, so we should not demand perfection of ourselves or those around us, for God knows what a complicated story a human life is and loves us despite our inevitable lapses. As I traveled around the country talking about my book, something interesting kept happening. Although most people in my audience welcomed the message that God loved them despite their mistakes and failings, in every audience there would be a significant number of people who were uncomfortable with it. They wanted to believe that God loved them, and other people loved them, because they deserved it, not because God and the other people in their lives were gracious enough to put up with them. They wanted to believe that God cared about the choices they made every day, choosing between selfishness and generosity, between honesty and deceitfulness, and that the world became a better place when they made the right choices. They were like the college student who hands in a paper and wants the professor to read it carefully and critically, because he or she has worked so hard to make it good. The people in my audience felt that they had worked hard to lead moral lives. They might hope that God would make allowances for human frailty, but, like the college student, they would be sorely disappointed by the response, That's all right, I really didn't expect much from you anyway.

My answer to them when they challenged me was that I believe God speaks to us in two voices.

One is the stern, commanding voice issuing from the mountaintop, thundering "Thou shalt not!," summoning us to be more, to reach higher, to demand greater things of ourselves, forbidding us to use the excuse "I'm only human," because to be human is a wondrous thing.

God's other voice is the voice of compassion and forgiveness, an embracing, cleansing voice, assuring us that when we have aimed high and fallen short we are still loved. God understands that when we give in to temptation it is a temporary lapse and does not reflect our true character.

Some years ago, Erich Fromm wrote a little book entitled The Art of Loving, in which he distinguished between what he called "mother love" and "father love" (emphasizing that people of either gender are capable of both kinds of love). Mother love says: You are bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, and I will always love you no matter what. Nothing you ever do or fail to do will make me stop loving you. Father love says: I will love you if you earn my love and respect, if you get good grades, if you make the team, if you get into a good college, earn a good salary.

Fromm insists that every one of us needs to experience both kinds of loving. It may seem at first glance that mother love is good, warm, and freely given, father love harsh and conditional (I will only love you if . . .). But as my audiences taught me, and as a moment's reflection might teach us all, sometimes we want to hear the father's message that we are loved because we deserve it, not only because the other person is so generous and tolerant.

People need to hear the same message from God that children need to hear from their earthly parents. Just as it is an unforgettably comforting and...