Last year, a young woman wrote an essay which was published in the Modern Love section of the New York Times. In the essay, she describes an evening she spent with a young man, deep in conversation. They had chosen to work their way through a series of 36 questions to get to know one another – 36 questions designed back in the 1990s by social psychologists for a study about generating closeness between strangers. She and the young man, already clearly interested in one another, sat talking for hours. Near the end of the essay, she writes: “You’re probably wondering if he and I fell in love. Well, we did. Although it’s hard to credit the study entirely (it may have happened anyway), the study did give us a way into a relationship that feels deliberate.”
I loved the idea of the 36 questions as soon as I heard about it. Seeking out the original research, I learned that the 36 questions were designed to elicit “escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure.” The researchers found that even 45 minutes of such a conversation with a stranger leads to increased feelings of closeness and good will.
This makes total sense to me, and points towards something at the heart of the human experience at its best: When we have the opportunity to share something of our inner lives with someone who is making an effort to listen to us, we blossom like plants reaching upward towards the sunlight.
Thirty-six questions. Imagine if there were 36 questions that could connect us not with a stranger, but with our own soul.
Jewish tradition offers us more than enough of such questions. Tonight I bring you two. These questions come from a story not about one of our heroes, nor about one of our sages. These questions come from the biblical story of a slave woman named Hagar.
Hagar was the servant of Sarah, Abraham’s wife. Hagar – pregnant with Abraham’s first son – runs away because she is being mistreated by Sarah. An angel appears, and asks Hagar two questions: Where have you come from, and where are you going?
In ancient Jewish story-telling, angels are not necessarily other-worldly beings. The Hebrew word malach, translated as angel, means simply a messenger. Our tradition seems to hint that sometimes the deepest messages come to us from people who may not even be aware that they are saying – or asking – exactly what we need to hear in that moment.
So now consider: This malach, this messenger, is not talking to Hagar. It is talking to you and me. And it is asking us: Where have we come from, and where are we going? Two questions worth asking our own souls on Rosh Hashanah.
Where have we come from, and where are we going? Implicit in these two questions is the understanding that life is a journey.
First, where have we come from? We can ask and answer this question on many levels: Family history. Family dynamics. Formative relationships. Geographical locations. Cultural influences. What are the factors and experiences that have led to our being who we are and where we are in this moment?
When I think about it this way, I begin to recall some of the seemingly random experiences which ended up having an impact on who I am and where I am now: The three girls walking ahead of me on the sidewalk in sixth grade, carelessly leaving me out of their shared laughter. The new young high school teacher who introduced herself to me one day in the hallway for no apparent reason, and befriended me. The book that my hand inexplicably reached for in the little bookstore on Brattle Street in Cambridge in 1987.
The more you think about it, the more you realize that the number of these experiences along the journey approaches infinity. Where we are in life at this moment is a result of all the encounters, decisions, influences, roads taken and not taken, conversations spoken and not spoken. And the total number of experiences that have led to each of us sitting here, in this sanctuary, together, at this moment, is truly infinite, and mind-blowing.
Now remember that in the context of the biblical story, Hagar has just run away. So when the angel asks Where have you come from? it may also be asking What are you running away from? We can hear this question either literally or metaphorically. Some of us may be literally trying to break free from an unbearable situation such as abuse, or addiction. And some of us may be metaphorically running away from aspects of our own psyche that we are not accepting or even acknowledging. The human capacity for self-deception is great. Sometimes it takes the right question to shine the light of awareness just where we most need it, in order to see clearly what we may be running away from, or ought to be running away from.
Where have you come from, and where are you going? In the biblical story, Hagar doesn’t have an answer to the second question. She runs away without thinking about where she’s going. And where does she end up? Right back where she started, in an abusive situation. Sometimes if we don’t ask where are we going, we end up going nowhere.
Where have we come from, and where are we going? Ultimately, the answer is: from mystery to mystery. From the mystery of birth to the mystery of death. We imagine we are in control of the journey of our lives, but, as it says in our rabbinic wisdom teachings: “…against our will we were created, against our will we were born, against our will we live, against our will we die….” (Avot 4:29)
And in between birth and death, how do we make sense of our lives? The vast majority of human beings on the planet seem primarily caught up in the all-consuming tasks of survival. Those of us fortunate enough and privileged enough to lift our sights above mere animal survival, find ourselves still too often consumed by seemingly urgent but ultimately unimportant tasks and worries. Instead of experiencing our life as a journey, we may feel like we are just spinning our wheels and getting nowhere.
The medieval philosopher Maimonides says it this way: “Awake, you sleepers, from your sleep! …. Examine your deeds, and turn to God in teshuvah. Remember your creator, you who are caught up in the daily round, losing sight of eternal truths. You who are wasting your years in vain pursuits that neither profit nor save. Look closely at yourself, improve your ways and your deeds. Abandon your evil ways, your unworthy schemes, every one of you.” (p. 139)
Perhaps his old world vocabulary feels awkward, but the message is right on. Maimonides mentions turning to God in teshuvah. Normally translated as “repentance,” the word teshuvah can be better translated as “re-turning,” as in turning around again (and again) to get back on the path. Without consciously checking out where we are on our journey, without making corrections and adjustments to bring ourselves back onto the path, we may wander off and squander what the poet Mary Oliver calls this “one wild and precious life.”
Heart-opening questions such as Where have you come from, and where are you going? cannot be answered easily. When I shared some of these thoughts with an 85-year-old friend of mine, he reminded me of the words of the German poet Rilke, who lived at the turn of the last century. Rilke wrote in one of his now-famous Letters to a Young Poet:
“You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.…”
Life is a journey, and sometimes the right questions can re-direct us when we wander off the path. And so my blessing for all of us as we enter this new year is that we take the time to ask ourselves and one another: where have we come from, and where are we going? And may our answers gently, lovingly guide us back onto the path of a life of meaning and purpose.