God, Dog and the Meaning of Life - A D'var Torah from Past Years

I turned 60 this year, a notable accomplishment marked by great family joy, personal self reflection and an accelerated schedule of colonoscopies.  In the world of numbers, while 59 was a prime year, that is one that can only be divided by one and itself, 60 lends itself multiple divisions (30X2; 15X4; 5X12…..). Thus, these past months have provided me with an opportunity to divide my years and look at my life in stages or segment; for example, those spent single and those spent married, and those spent without children and those spent with.  And without question, the second halves of these life stages have been far more rich, rewarding and meaningful than the first.  On this coming Jewish New Year, as we collectively reflect on the years that have passed  and plan for those to come, I send my wishes that  each segment your life that awaits you is richer, more meaningful and more filled with peace and joy.

In this context of life and its segments, I ponder another division in my life and reflect that the second thirty years of being a dyslexic have been much more pleasant than the first. Two words, two glorious, life altering words that have brought me from great darkness into light and from despair to destiny account for this life transformation.  Those words; ‘spell check’ .

Spell check has transformed my dyslexia from a real disability to more of a nuisance.  I continue to reverse numbers, mistake my left foot for my right and compensate for my continued writing challenges by limiting my hand-written communications to brief, terse messages: “Hello – am fine, David”.  I have come to delight in dyslexic jokes, my favorites being the “dog” “god” variety e.g., “Untied Church of Dog” and the one about the paranoid dyslexic who always has the unsettling feeling that he is following somebody.

I have come to understand that the vestiges of my dyslexia have left an imprint on my world view, my weltanschauung, (bless you spell check) that provides for and, perhaps, encourages perceiving the world in a different way – reversing things, turning things around.  That in a wink of an eye we can transform ‘god’ into ‘dog’ is perhaps a good thing.  God and our understanding of God is now available for further reflection, for reshaping and rethinking.  That one may have the unsettling feeling that he is following somebody is a good thing. Our world would be a profoundly better and more peaceful place if collectively we were more reflective about whom we are following and who we venerate as leaders and heroes.  Political and social change represents the “dyslexic-ing” of the social or political order.  In the sphere of science, in transposing space and time, Einstein demonstrated that he was, perhaps, greatest dyslexic of all.

We dyslexics see a world that is slightly different and sometimes a bit mixed up.  We are, at times, a confused lot, reversing numbers, mistaking our left foot for our right and, of course, advancing new innovations in spelling. But our message that reality, or at least our perceptions of reality, can be plastic, that we have the capacity to reverse and reorder our understanding of our worlds is a good thing – perhaps a necessary thing.

The upcoming High Holidays call for all of us to be open to dyslexic-like reflective flexibility.  What/who is our God? What does God ask us to believe? How does God guide us to act?  How does our God enable us to live a life of meaning, a life that makes sense?  Who are we following?  What values do these individuals advance?  Is the organization, the city, the nation and the world that they envision and that they seek to build one where people are treated with greater humanity and one where peace and harmony can reign?   In the coming year of 5773 let’s celebrate the dyslexics around us and the dyslexics within us and, together, use this capacity to see the world in different ways and to create a better world together.

Love and best wishes for a happy, sweet, healthy, and slightly altered 5773.

Solomon Schechter

I ponder the core influencers of my life. The death of my father, my marriage to Jo, the birth of my children and confronting Jacob’s developmental challenges immediately come to the fore.

But as I reflect, I increasingly focus on my own learning challenges as a central framing element in my life. It wasn’t until graduate school, when I chanced to read an article in the New York Times on the linkage between dyslexia and auto immune diseases that the pieces fell into place. Two years earlier, I had been diagnosed with idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP) an auto immune blood disease that caused my platelet count to drop to a tenth of its normal range . As I read the article, all the pieces began to fall into place. In articulating the symptoms of dyslexia, the author was describing me; my childhood learning challenges, an inability to decode written words; reversing letters; disastrous, undecipherable handwriting and most profoundly of all, a complete inability to spell even simple words – a characteristic that remains with me until this day.

I think back to Mr. Gladstone’s third grade Hebrew Class at the Solomon Schechter School. He was kind and gentle and, in order to spare me the embarrassment of my inability to keep up, he set me aside and gave me the menial task of cutting strips of paper. Even as a third grader I knew this was wrong. He had given up on me and deemed that I was incapable of learning. And I understood that message.

My struggles with Hebrew and other subjects continued and I was a consistent failure in my Solomon Schechter classes. At a young age I accepted my status as a failure and a fool. I remember one fifth grade evening, determined to do best and really try I worked for hours on assigned Hebrew essay. The following day Mr. Chorovsky read my paragraph out loud – and laughed while he derided it in front of the class. I never tried again. That memory lingers in my consciousness and as I retell it, the feeling of embarrassment wells up. It is not a distant memory but a present sense of pain and anger.

These memories of frustration and embarrassment come cascading forth. Mr. Katzir telling my mother, as I stood watching, that I shouldn’t take the New York Statewide Hebrew Regents examination. I would fail and my failure would be a negative reflection on the school. My mother’s response “He needs to learn to fail”. I so distinctly remember being heartbroken by my mother’s response. She saw no hope either. Mom, with all do respect, fuck you. How about “Let’s figure out a way to succeed”. I took the test. And got a 95%. Fuck you Mr. Katzir.

A friend of mine talks of being in the “C” group in a prestigious private school in Baltimore. The “C” group was just what it sounded to be – third tier students who had been tagged and labeled with low expectations. As a perennial “C” group student at Solomon Schechter School I fully related to his experience (having graduated from Johns Hopkins University and Georgetown University Law School my friend is now a highly successful attorney in Baltimore). To this day I get flushed and feel a profound sense of failure, of embarrassment of being in the “C” group when I misspell a word in a work document, mispronounce a word when reading out loud or get caught in a malapropism. That sense of embarrassment quickly transitions to a burning anger.

While my dyslexic and ADHD-based limitations and failures were framing my life, there was always a subtle but unidentifiable counter force in the background. A second set of incongruous clues that seemed not to make sense in the context of my daily frustrations began to emerge. One day in seventh grade, the abominable Mr. Katzir announced that he had a headache and left our class alone for an hour. As consciences and thoughtful students in a Jewish day school, we did what any thoughtful group of pre-teens would do in that situation – we rifled through his desk, discovered his record book and perused its pages. In it we found a listing of the IQ’s of each member of the class. Janet’s IQ topped the charts at 160. That was an eye popper. But, strangely enough, incomprehensively, mine was among the highest in the class. It was, in fact, higher than many successful students in the de-facto A group and higher than those who were perennial favorites of the teachers.

Our study of the Bible in the Solomon Schechter School began in third grade. If learning Hebrew was difficult for me that learning to read the bible in that alien language was exponentially more difficult. It wasn’t pretty. The standard for accessing our biblical knowledge was the “Me amar Le me” (who said to who) question. We were given a line from the biblical text and had to recall which biblical figure had said it and to whom. As an example, the text “'Wilt Thou indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” would be written on the exam (in Hebrew) and we would be required to remember that it was Abraham speaking with God in Genesis; negotiating for the salvation of the occupants of Sodom. With profound challenges in reading, decoding and consequently, memorizing, Hebrew text, these test were among the low points of my academic life and a regular confirmation of my incapacities.

But one day in seventh grade, Rabbi Alex Kaplan, the school principal, came to speak to our class. He asked us a puzzling question:

“In the story of creation, God created light on the first day but did not create the sun and the moon until the fourth. How is that possible?”
As always, the A group students were the first to respond”
“Perhaps God created fireflies”
“Maybe the rocks glowed”.

Rabbi Kaplan nodded and graciously accepted these answers.

Risking embarrassment and the furthering of my humiliation in the classroom (can I possibly be reduced below C group status) I raised hand and ventured:

“Maybe the light represents knowledge and wisdom”.

Rabbi Kaplan smiled with gentleness and warmth. It was a spark of success, a moment of accomplishment in a decade of frustration and failure. But in that moment, I had a fleeting sense that I possessed a level of understanding that was of value. I had no capacity to comprehend what it meant but I instinctively knew that it was important. In retrospect, I now understand that I possessed a symbolic capacity that many of my classmates lacked. I understood the meaning of “light” as a metaphor. But symbols and meaning were not the currency of academic success in grade school or, for that matter, in high school. Me amar l’me”. What can you remember? What can you spell? “What can you repeat?” I could do none of these.

Still can’t