Show Transcripts

SW04: Accepting Your Family

Hello,  I’m Irwin Kula, and welcome to “Simple Wisdom.”  For the past 20 years I’ve had the amazing experience of traveling around this country, bringing the wisdom of an ancient tradition to the challenges of daily life, to help make life a little bit more creative and meaningful. Today we’re going to talk about something that every single one of us is connected to. In fact, everyone who was ever born and everyone who ever died were connected to. We’re going to talk about family. First, we’ll explore a little bit the importance of family. Then we’re going to talk about what I call the sacred messiness of family and that’s very important. And then I’m going to teach four different principles that I think emerge from a real, genuine understanding of the sacred messiness of family. Now, first, we’re going to start with a meditation on family. Actually, I’m going to ask Sylvia to help me. But everybody should participate. I want you to imagine a photograph of your extended family or, if you can’t imagine that, think of a dining room table – maybe a holiday celebration in which the full extended family is at the table.  So everyone get that in your mind and I’m going to ask Sylvia a few questions, but everybody should be thinking about the answers. 

Sylvia:  I’m ready. 

IK:  Where are you in the position around  the table during the photo?

Sylvia:  Very active and my family [is] the core of my being -- my family -- and when I think of a table, [I think of] everyone joining in and a lot of humor.                  

IK: Where are you sitting? 

Sylvia: I’m trying to sit near one of my nephews because I enjoy watching him. 

IK: Where are your parents sitting? 

Sylvia: My parents are sitting next to each other at the head of the table. 

IK: Any siblings? Where are they around the table? 

Sylvia: Trying to keep the peace and bouncing at the table. 

IK: Who else is at the table that is unusual? 

Sylvia: A lot of friends – anyone who is lonely would come, [anyone] who had nobody would come and we [would] have a lot of humor. 

You see what we have here – when you think of your family for just a minute, there are entire scripts and stories.  Here we had stories about a family that wasn’t an isolated unit, but that had friends – a family that had nephews – a family in which some people kept the peace and some people made the noise.  Parents who sat together – in my family my parents sat at opposite sides of the table – each one of those positions indicates a different kind of script regarding a family.  How many people here are the eldest children?  Oh, we have a lot of type A’s here.  How many people here are the middle children? How many [are] the babies of the family?  Look at that – everyone who raised a hand is at least 30 years old and you still answer to “the baby of the family.”  Actually, what’s interesting about this is that you’re always the baby of the family – that’s your script.  It’s hard to break out – this is just another way of saying [that] family is probably the central unit in defining who we are – not in the family values sense that you have to have a family, but in the reality sense – in all of our lives for good and for bad – and it is so complicated.   

Wouldn’t it be easier if the whole thing was just immaculate – poof, I’m here?  I’m already an adult and now I get to choose which relationships I want to be in.  Well, we’re born into family.  We start inside someone – we start because two people are in a relationship good or bad – we’re born into this world without our choice.  By the way, that’s our fundamental grievance with our family – I had no choice and you brought me here. We don’t articulate it that way – we articulate it in our anger.  

Actually, when you think about family, it teaches us a point that Americans need to learn and that we in western culture need to learn more than anything else.  There is no such thing as an autonomous individual – there is no such thing as a self -made man.  I never met a person who made himself.  There is no “I” without a “we” – this sounds like a cliché, but it’s a profound insight that shapes who we are every day.  You can’t escape your family even if you want to leave – the seeds of that family are carried in your consciousness and we know that.  How many of us have the same mannerisms that a parent had and we may not have spoken to the parent for 10 years?  And we still have the same mannerism. How many of us have a mannerism of a sibling?  You catch yourself with the same behaviors 10 years later.

So family is central to who we are and today there seems to be a family crisis. Everyone is talking about a family crisis – the demographers, the ministers, the rabbis – our families are falling apart.  We have abuse in families – we lament the end of the nuclear families – we have families that are so mobile no one speaks to each other any more and we miss that and feel a longing for family. In fact, family is polarizing America in many ways.  We have the family values people on one side and the free diversity for families on the other.  You know those sides.  The family values side is claiming [that] this is the end of America – [that] the end of the nuclear family is the end of all families.  The country is going to go down the tube.  By the way, just ask them – they know exactly what kind of families we need. They are kind of “Ozzie & Harriet” meets “Leave it to Beaver” with an extra dose of patriarchy to make up for the feminism of the last 20 years.   

By the way, on the other side, there is the diversity side that [believes] the only thing wrong with family is that we need to widen our definition.  Anything that people call a family -- if we just support it and call it a family – will be a family and everything will be okay.  But most of us know there is something wrong with this – most of us know that on the family values side, those families are oppressive – we don’t want to live in those families.  And, moreover, when we get to look at those families, they don’t look much different or much healthier than the rest of the families.  

On the diversity side, it seems they are a little too loose in definition.  They don’t give us that sense of belonging and rootedness that we really long for in family.  In fact, we don’t really know what a successful family is.  What does a meaningful relationship of family feel like?  Well, here’s my first definition.  The real challenge to defining family is to understand that two things have to hang together. Family is the only unit where attachment and messiness have to be held together.  Attachment and messiness. The attachment side is you can’t get away from your family. It doesn’t make a difference. Leave for 20 years – you can’t get away. And because there is so much attachment – because the bonds are there, no matter what – you inevitably have a lot of messiness. Now there is choice and this is the choice of what family ultimately means to us. Does the messiness make us break our attachment to our family even though we can’t really sever that attachment – or does the attachment squelch the messiness?  Family without messiness isn’t real and you don’t learn anything about life.  Messiness without family – that’s kind of like regular life.  You have no roots, no sense of kinship or belonging. That’s actually part of the polarization. On the conservative side, they really do understand attachment – but they are so fearful that messiness will undermine attachment that they squelch the messiness, but it is dealing with the messiness from where all the growth comes.   On the liberal side actually – they really understand the hurt that messiness creates – they understand that, but what they fail to understand is how attachment is so central to who we are as human beings and so they allow the messiness to create much looser attachments. Our challenge is to bring together attachment and messiness and here are the models – it’s unbelievable. If you look at the biblical families, they are probably -- especially in the Book of Genesis -- the most dysfunctional families ever created. You have everything – you have child abuse – you have sibling warfare—murder – you have parents that can’t get along – terrible parenting – you have everything. Here is the amazing thing about those families, though. These dysfunctional families produce people that are at the foundation of civilization. Think about what it means to have a sacred text – and I don’t mean sacred in the touchy-feely sense – I mean a text that is read for thousands of years by all kinds of people which begins with family, precisely how our own life stories start, that are more dysfunctional than you could ever imagine and that those dysfunctional families produce incredibly interesting people.  I mean that’s not how I imagine or want my family to be.  By the way, it’s very hopeful for us. My family is far less dysfunctional than the Biblical families, but what do we make of that?  The genius of the Book of Genesis is this: in those families, attachment and messiness always stay together.  It may take 20 years.  You may not see your brother for 20 years, but you know you’re always attached and, because of that, there is at some point resolution.  Sometimes the resolution doesn’t come until the grave site.  Ishmael and Isaac -- who fight because of their parents, who live separate because of their parents – wind up at the grave site of Abraham. I wonder what that conversation must have been like because what we know about them is that following the burial, they traveled back together to where Ishmael lived and they lived together.  Attachment and messiness held together and now here is what we learn if we hold these two things together. And only if we hold them together.  

There are four central insights about life – four principles that you need to internalize to have a good/wise life and you can’t learn them anywhere else.  Principle #1: You learn forgiveness in your family, and if you don’t learn forgiveness in your family – you’ll never be able to forgive.  And you know who it is we have to forgive – we have to forgive our parents because our parents make a lot of mistakes. They smother us with love and they don’t give us enough love. They protect us from all hurt and they don’t protect us enough. They curtail our freedom and then they give us too much freedom. They place us on the altar of their dreams and then they don’t take sufficient care of us. We have to forgive our parents and it’s really difficult, but if we don’t forgive our parents, what it really means is we can’t forgive life and existence itself.[1] And when that really becomes possible – when you can hold together attachment and messiness -- the messiness of everything they [our parents] did or didn’t do, and the attachment that they are always your parents – you learn that actually as a parent, you can’t do much better.

 I now have two children – I have a 14 year old and an 11 year old and I can’t believe how well my parents did.  I now am a full-fledged nature person on the nature-nurture debate – I believe that everything bad is nature and everything good is nurture.  You learn that it’s really hard to know when to be patient and when to be impatient – when a child need a scolding and when a child needs encouragement – when you need to say yes and when you need to say no.  It is so complicated.   Actually, it’s remarkable that my parents raised me at all and the more I hold together attachment and messiness – the more ready I am to forgive them. And when I forgive them – I can forgive anybody because no one will disappoint me as much as my parents, because there is no one in the world who I had higher expectations of and, by the way, that works vice versa, too.  They had a lot of expectations of me. 

And here is the second truth – if the first truth is forgiveness, the second is how to love and let go – that’s the relationship that you learn about loving and letting go.  Do you know what it means to love and let go?  It means at a bar mitzvah at 13 you stand up as a parent with a child who is reaching puberty in front of all these people and you say: “I am happy you are growing up” -- even though you’re not 100 percent happy.  Because how could you be?  The growing up of your child is moving towards the end of your life. Loving and letting go is actually not what Abraham and Isaac did.  Abraham placed Isaac on the altar because he wanted Isaac to be him, on the altar of Abraham’s dreams – he was bound and Isaac and Abraham never spoke again after that, but because Isaac held together as painful as it must have been to messiness and attachment – he was at Abraham’s funeral.[2] Loving and letting go – sometimes our parents want us to go to that school that they didn’t get into. Sometimes our parents want us to be that athlete that they weren’t able to be – sometimes our parents want to be that doctor that they couldn’t be. Loving and letting go. And all of these lessons have to be learned either because our parents did accomplish them or they didn’t accomplish them. If they did a good job – we learn it that way. If they did a bad job – we have to learn it the other way. But either way, that’s where we learn it if we hang in and hold together attachment and messiness.  

The third principle: love is not scarce. There is abundance in blessing. And this is the lesson that we learn with our siblings. It’s a very hard lesson. I’m one of six. I have five younger brothers. That’s a lot of displacement. And there are also a lot of brothers beneath me that got displaced. And you know how it is. They are jealous of me because I got to stay up late. I’m jealous of them because they seem to get more love. I was already working at 14 and they were still being pampered. Well, of course they were at ages one, two and three.  The resentments that are part of fighting for what we initially think is scarce – love – is the Cain & Abel story.  They fight for love and Cain kills Abel and here is why. The text gives us a hint. It says, out in the field after whatever happens, “And Cain said to Abel,” and then we are not told what he said.[3]   

Siblings need to fight.  When my kids are fighting, I don’t stop them from fighting unless it gets violent. They need to fight.  They need to see that you can fight and still love and that you can fight and still be loved by the parent.  The worst thing is to repress it and that is why Cain kills Abel.  And we see it in Jacob and Esau but, you know, they hung in there and believed in attachment and messiness even though they couldn’t be together for 20 years.  And after 20 years, they meet and they realize – wow, have we changed – we don’t have to fight over that love anymore.  Our parents aren’t even here.  In fact, there was enough love to go around. Look how our lives are.  

There is a beautiful story that talks about the abundance of love.  There were two brothers: one who had a large family [and] one who didn’t yet have a family. And they were farmers.  Each had very, very successful harvests.  Well, one night in the middle of the night one of the brothers – the brother with the large family – felt bad for the brother who had no family and he took a portion of his harvest and brought it to the other brother.  That night a little bit later, the other brother felt bad for the brother who had a large family and he said: he needs more food than I do and I need to share some of my food.  So he brought some of his food and put it on the doorstep of his brother. The next morning both brothers woke up and there on their doorsteps was the same amount of food that they had given each other the night before.  They didn’t know what happened.  The next night – the same.   And the third night – the same.  And on the fourth night – it turned out that they met each other right in the middle and they embraced, recognizing how much they loved each other.  Jewish wisdom teaches that at that spot, the Temple in Jerusalem was built.

When we understand that love is not scarce, when we understand that there is blessing to go around, the Temple gets built – Redemption can happen.  In fact, every sibling fights throughout the Book of Genesis – but you know the first siblings that don’t fight are Moses and Aaron.  Moses says: “I need Aaron to come with me even though God doesn’t want him to come.”  And Moses and Aaron go together, and it’s because Moses and Aaron can work together that we have an Exodus and Redemption.  So the first principle is you have to learn to forgive your parents because when we learn  that, we can forgive everybody.  Second, we learn how to love and let go.  Third, love is not scarce. There is enough love for everybody.   

I have to tell you one more beautiful story.  I promised I would tell a story about my mother.  About five or six years ago, it was my mother’s birthday.  The phone rings, she’s calling me (it’s typical), and she says, “Irwin, I have to tell you something.  Every brother sent cards and four of the six cards are the same.”  And we lived in all over the country.  Two people lived in Minneapolis, two people lived in New York, one lived in Boston, and one lived in Florida.  Four of the six cards were the same and they all said: “Dear Mom, happy birthday, from your favorite child.”  That’s teaching all the messages in one move.  Love is not scarce.  You can love four people at the same time.  I know the other two are a little concerned.  You can forgive your parents obviously.  We had all forgiven our mother for whatever she did and my mother had learned how to love and let go.  When you learn all those three lessons, here’s the fourth thing you learn – and it’s only if you learn the other three.  [You learn] that it’s okay to need people.  That’s a really serious message in America.  It’s okay to need people.  Need doesn’t mean you have to be dependent.  In fact, what we really learn about family is that family is the place where you don’t have to be dependent and you don’t have to be independent, but that a wise life is about interdependence.   

There are three practices that I want to suggest that I think will really help. They are all exactly the same but with different people. They are all blessing practices and they are based on an ancient wisdom tradition that on Friday night at the Sabbath table, people bless each other, or when one lights candles on Friday night, one offers blessings. I want to suggest that this is a magnificent practice to help us understand all of these principles that we spoke about today and, most importantly, holding together attachment and messiness.  First, every week, we can’t let a week go by in which we don’t offer a blessing to our children.  In my family, we do it this way.  I offer a traditional blessing.  My wife offers the creative blessing.  The creative blessing is something the child did that week that was an accomplishment, that was creative.  And so our kids learn every single week that each one of them is loved for her own [accomplishment/creativity] because it’s not the children who want to be loved equally.  They want to be loved uniquely.  

The second blessing: children must bless parents once a week, specially children our age who are fortunate to still have parents.  So call your parents once a week ( I know for Jewish parents once a week is not enough -- you have to call five or six times -- I understand that’s not enough), but call once a week and, during the week, think of one thing your parent did for you – one thing you learned.  

And the third practice is to call a sibling. I can’t tell you how many funerals I have officiated at where two brothers came together and all they could do was cry that they had wasted their lives not being in relationship.  Pick up the phone.  Call a brother and offer a blessing – a thank you – a joke – something. Now if we do this, then here is what happens – messiness and attachment become something that we accept, and the family where we learn that expands well beyond our own family – to become the family of the human community – which then means, through our own families, we transform the human family. That’s “Simple Wisdom.”  Thank you very much.  I’m Irwin Kula, and I look forward to seeing you again.