Friends – I read something this week in Adbusters Magazine, a publication that offers critical reflections on the social and psychological environment of consumer culture, that I found very provocative. It said that the "service industry" - that sector of the workforce dedicated to providing individuals with everything from car tune-ups to "post-traumatic 'grief' counseling," has gradually come to replace the traditional role that the community once played - in short, it's not unusual these days to pay someone for the care and support that we once gave-to and received-from family and community structures - the entire franchise of "care" has been largely handed to profit-oriented industries and professionals whose training has become so specialized that "the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that 95 percent of new jobs created in the next few years will come out of the service industry, and three out of four jobs will be service by 2008. Of these, fully two-thirds of these 'service providers' do work that is mostly 'caring:' teachers, nurses, social workers, police, psychologists, child care workers, those in the burgeoning elderly industry, doctors, lawyers, jailers. People who 'care' for a living now make up most of the work force…(Casey, v.32 p.28)"
Is it really possible, my friends, to 'care' for a living? Can love and caring between people truly be commodified, quanitified, and disbursed upon payment of services rendered? Are we so estranged from community, our loved ones and ourselves that the lifeblood of our very souls, all of our personal struggles and human frailties, represent no more than blips on the map of an economic infrastructure within which 'units of care-service' can be parcelled-out to us like Happy Meals? Are the traditional frameworks of "community" and "family" truly as obsolete as postmodern discourse and the era of global intercommunications seem to render them?
It's hard to give and receive love online, friends. E-relationships are fun and feel good for a while, but they can't ever replace a hug, a kiss, a smile. We need love so much, and we need it in our faces, in our homes, between our friends, families, and ultimately, within our own hearts. It's hard to believe in yourself when you don't feel supported by the kind of love that money can't buy, the kind of love that doesn't involve business, economy, or profit-motive, the kind of love that comes from direct, face-to-face relationship and the intangible bonding of souls. "(This kind of love)," the article continues, "is freely given. It develops spontaneously. Nobody can tell you to do it. It cannot be mandated or managed. To say the government is going to produce it is an obscenity. The say that professionals are going to manage it is an outrage. They can only provide services (ibid 28)."
The kind of self-belief and self-affirmation engendered by this brand of love opens the door for true self-assertion, for the ability to stand up for yourself and what you believe without the fear of being misunderstood or rejected. Matisyahu ben Yochanan, the High Priest during the period of the Chanukah miracle, represents more than simply a figurehead for zealotry and anti-assimilationism; his ability to clearly, unambiguously delineate his own beliefs and values to the Jewish people embodied a self-empowerment which could only have come from the strongest of soul-bonds with them; only through the medium of intimate association and relationship with your own "people" can true inner struggle be expressed, can discourse be rendered, can the individual topple his own inner boundaries that prevent him from giving and receiving the unconditional love he so desperately needs to give and receive, and can his fear of difference and estrangement be overcome.
Matisyahu ben Yochanan's soul-cry, "Whoever is for God - come to me!" bespeaks an inner confidence on personal, communal and global levels to assert the classical purpose of the true spiritual seeker - to look for the spark of holiness inherent within every living being, and to draw it out, draw it close, make it manifest in the external world and to join it together with other sparks, setting the world ablaze with the fiery glow of their combined redemption! We should be blessed this and every Shabbat to *really* search for that hidden spark within ourselves and our close ones, and to join ourselves together as individual wicks burning from the same menorah, filling our hearts and the world with holy light!
Jerry Silverman
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Jerry Silverman is a former student of Yeshivat Bat Ayin. He is working in new media, designing and managing media projects. He lives in Riverdale, NY with his wife Sarah and their two children. |