Righteousness

Each day you should move closer to becoming your true self. You are unlikely to ever be your true self. But persisting in the struggle to become your true self is fundamental to any success, effectiveness, or hope of happiness.

Whenever you perceive tension between your “personal ethos” and “professional commitment” there is cause to pause. This is the tension at the heart of every Exodus experience. The tension may be caused by either your own selfishness or the community’s expectation that you sacrifice your true self. The tension is a great opportunity.

The search for our true self – tsedeq or righteousness – can too easily become an excuse for self-righteousness. This path leads to rejecting our shared identity with others. Rather than weaving a web of mutually supportive links, the self-righteous cut links and build barriers to linking. Righteousness cannot prevail unless it is tightly linked to justice, and justice is the outcome of differentiation linked together for mutual support.

The claims of community can sometimes be used in an attempt to deny your true self. In searching for justice the community may begin to focus more on the rules and rituals that reinforce what we share, rather than the inspiration that celebrates the rich differentiation that also sustains us. Justice is the outcome of a community of true selves, not the leveling of selves into sameness.

To help in achieving this difficult - even treacherous - balance of righteousness and justice recall what our latter-day Amos, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, has called entropy. Among the principal characteristics of entropy that he lists are, “disorder, confusion, waste of energy, the inability to do work and achieve goals… the dissolution of order into redundant randomness… violence, conflict.” When we perceive in ourselves or in our community – family, place-of-work, hometown, or nation – a tendency for entropy we should be ready for wrestling. These are the symptoms of bad choices, bad leadership, and a bad direction. They must be resisted.

Ideally the forces of entropy can be redirected. In the life of Moses we have seen how to apply principles and techniques for such redirection. But we have also seen in the Exodus story when persistent sources of entropy are cut off and left behind in order to move on toward the Promised Land and the achieving of ultimate purpose.

The most difficult decisions I make relate to terminating colleagues for cause and resigning difficult clients. In both cases I have to make a decision that the other has become a persistent source of disorder, confusion, waste of energy and more that threatens my own true self, the true self of my colleagues, and/or the true self of our enterprise. It is a dangerous judgment, but after wrestling with the tension and finding no other resolution, it can be a necessary choice. I have too often delayed the decision too long.

Moses transformed his own weakness and the weakness of his community by embracing creativity, empowerment and love. He did not interfere in the free choice of others. Moses offered helpful frameworks for making good choices and he demonstrated the need and opportunity for redemption. These are your wrestling “holds” and “moves.” These are the tools for finding your true self and creating a community of true selves.

Wrestling is a sport that can really only be learned on the mat and by wrestling. In most other sports there are a whole host of helpful modes of practice that can be engaged individually and outside a scrimmage. But wrestling requires wrestling. We learn primarily by engaging in the struggle. We may sometimes practice with friendly challengers – helpful colleagues and appreciative clients – but the only real test, and the only real way to seriously refine your skills, is in struggling with those who seek to defeat you. These moments of true tension are the most meaningful opportunities for applying principles, learning and confirming your commitment.

In wrestling you do not destroy – or purposefully hurt – the other. But you seek to apply your strengths to the weakness of the other, to refine your skills in application, and to sharpen your consciousness of strength and weakness, in both yourself and in others, and thereby to prevail, and then to wrestle again.

A commentator on the Torah once wrote,

We are here to do.
And through doing to learn;
And through learning to know;
And through knowing to experience wonder;
And through wonder to attain wisdom;
And through wisdom to find simplicity;
And through simplicity to give attention;
And through attention to see what needs to be done.