Stories

This post is a follow-up to The BSF.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about stories, and as always, the Big Scary Future.

We grew up learning, telling, hearing, loving stories that seemed completely detached from reality. Fairy tales, with their brave knights and fearsome beasts, folk-tales, with their witches and wise men. As a kid, I loved these tales. I ran to read my monthly Cricket magazines, eager to discover new legends from China, India, Russia, or the Congo. On the rare occasion a Jewish folk-tale was featured (usually a Chelm anecdote or a Chanukah tale), I gave a little shriek of joy.

I've saved every one of these magazines. Every once in a while, I look through them, rereading the Ramayana or adventures of Lohengrin, and all the time I wonder, why is it that I know about as much about the legends and myths of all these amazing cultures as I do about my own (that is, not that much)? Why is it that I spent my whole life going to Jewish schools and camps, and yet the most I’ve learned about the folk-culture of our generations, the superstitions and silly jokes, I learned from a magazine without any Jewish connections?

Oh, I’m not saying I don’t know my own culture. I grew up learning the Tanach and Halacha and Talmud on the surface and in-depth, along with enough commentaries and Midrashim to challenge those Shakespeare-typing monkeys in space any day. But to me, these seem like a different caliber of Jewish cultural education. I mean, think about it. Essentially, we’re being taught what we must learn in order to continue our faith and pass it down to future generations. They’re indispensible. But what’s to become of the lighter fare of our faith, those stories told by Rabbi Nachman of Breslov and Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, or the Chelm Tales, or even those medieval Jewish legends of the Ten Lost Tribes?

We didn’t learn them. Or if we did, they were told to us at a fire-side Kumzits by an energetic speaker, or on a Shabbaton, or on the bus to camp. And I don’t know about you guys, but I treasured those story-telling moments as much if not more than when I learned the authoritative lessons in the classroom.

I've had many discussions with people from all along the spectrum of Judaism: Yeshivish teachers, Modern-Orthodox friends, proud culturally-Jewish atheists, and High-Holiday-only family friends. Some have told me that those classroom essentials are basically just better-known folk-tales (a view which, I must admit caused me to flinch a little. I respect it, but I can’t agree with it). Others called them leftover superstitious nonsense. Still others recalled them with nostalgia, having heard them during childhood from their European grandparents.

My own view is that they have little to do with the essentials of the faith. These aren’t part of the guide to living as a Jew. They have nothing to tell us about keeping Shabbat or Kashrut, or about what Moshe Rabbeinu meant when he said “x”. They are not our faith, but they are our culture, as much as those Zemirot we sing at the Shabbat table, or the paintings of Chagall, or the reggae beats of Matisyahu. They are our past, and so we have what to learn from them. They were the stories fathers in the shtetls told their kids to alleviate the fear of the next pogrom. They were the jokes they told to deal with the Dreyfus Affair and the latest blood libel. They are windows into how we lived, and how we were treated not so long ago. Haven’t we been taught that those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it? In the end, our history is all we have to shape our future. 

They are ours to be proud of, the influences of our modern sense of humor and comic-book superheroes. And, as I recently discovered via some book-shelf surfing and amazon.com searching, they are really, awesomely…well, cool. How often do you hear that about something undeniably Jewish?

Did you know that during the 18^th-19^th centuries, European Jews had their own versions of Snow White, Cinderella, and Rapunzel? I sure as heck didn’t. And why shouldn’t they? Every other culture did. Did you know that we had fairy tales starring brave princes who kept Shabbat, and princesses who played upon the violin of Eliyahu HaNavi? Some of these stories are so fantastically amazing, I can’t help but read them over and over, and annoyingly shove them in the face of everyone I know.

And now, it seems they’ve come to influence a lot more than just my sense of Jewish pride. My art projects echo them. My blog posts and cartoons mention them at every turn. And now that I’ve started that scary climb into real adulthood (eek!), they seem to have pushed me into a career path as well.

After years of agonizing over majors, then trying out internships in every field that interested me, then checking out programs in those fields, I seem to have picked a road to walk down. My first, real, every-single-day job starts this week, and I’ve begun the process of applying to graduate school, finally choosing an actual path of study. And it’s not what many would call a “safe” career path. I’m not going to be a doctor or a lawyer. I’ve chosen to combine my love of all things nonpractical: my love of art and culture, and my seemingly aching need to teach the future generation of young Jews to be proud of their background and realize there’s more to being a Jew than bagels with lox and being a nerdy Woody Allen caricature. It may not make me a dime, but it sure is fulfilling.

And it’s the stories that did it. That’s something I only realized last week, when I sat down to start my first graduate-school admissions essay. The topic demanded of me: “What connections can you make between (experiences in childhood and your background) and your present feelings…about children and youth…and your own patterns of action?”In other words, what about my past possessed me to do what I’m doing now?

And I realized: it’s my culture. It’s those legends I learned from my parents as we walked along the banks of the Danube in Budapest. It’s every gasp of excitement my five-year-old self issued when she realized this PBS kids’ show was going to mention Chanukah in its holiday special. It’s every ache of nostalgia and sense of responsibility I feel when I read one of these so-little-known stories, and my repeated thoughts: I can’t let these be lost. They’re too beautiful. They’re too enchanting. They’re too significant. They’re too Jewish. I’m going to write about them. About my culture, how it’s undertaught, and how that inspired me to make a career out of helping kids discover the parts of knowledge beyond the essentials: art, music, and yes, stories. 

And as a bonus, I've realized my faith and my culture are some unexpected weapons I can use in the fight against the BSF. When I feel like the monster's beating me, I have my faith, my culture, and my loved-ones who share them. I’m not saying that’s enough to win the battle, but it sure feels good to be armed with something that’s got as much of an investment in me as I've got in it.

Big Scary Future, let's dance.

The BSF

In childhood, we all had our monsters. Some were hairy and lived in closets; others were multi-fanged and slept under a bed. We were told as kids that if we ignored them, the monsters would go away, back to whatever tortured chamber of our subconscious they had come from. What grown-ups didn’t tell us was that as we got older, those scary (but at least nighttime-bound) creatures would be replaced by worse ones, specters that would haunt our late teenage-early twenties years day and night, whether we were asleep or awake.

They never warned us about the BSF.

Now, as we enter adulthood, so many of my peers and I are plagued by questions of the future. We were led to believe that if we were polite to grown-ups, followed the rules, worked hard instead of watching TV, and brought home good grades, these questions would practically answer themselves. But I’ve found that the questions of what am I going to do and who will be there with me while I do it can strike at any time…

…And without so much as a blink transform themselves into uncontrollable, drooling monsters the likes of which I have never had to face before. The future has become the BIG SCARY FUTURE.

The BSF. The haunter of any college grad’s nightmares.

You can recognize the BSF by its two heads, the Drooling Head of Love and Marriage and the Sharp-Beaked Head of Career (also known as the What-The-#$%&-Are-You-Doing-With-Your-Life Head).

The scariest part about the BSF is that is cannot be fought off. If you ignore it, you risk turning into a character to be played by Seth Rogen (also starring a 40-year-old Michael Cera). Eventually, you must face this monster with every weapon you’ve acquired over the years. The problem with this is that you have little-to-no way of knowing which weapons will be effective, or if the only way past the BSF is sheer, dumb luck.

In facing the Love/Marriage Head (recognizable by its distinctive gold ring and constant drooling), I’ve gotten every form of advice from “attend more parties” to “grow your hair” to “wear more/less makeup” to “don’t think about it and it will drop into your lap.” So far, the monster keeps roaring in my face, and its breath stinks. So far, I’ve watched many of my friends tame it with varying levels of effort, from “bat my eyelashes and I’m taken” to “this is my sixteenth Shidduch date and at least he’s tolerable.”

As for the Career Head (with its sharp features and under-eye bags), I’m armed with a little more: a few part-time jobs, an internship or two, references from kind people, and a shiny new college degree. However, it seems that the monster has built up a resistance to this type of weaponry, considering that every knight it faces nowadays is armed with exactly the same things, especially in a city like New York.

Blech.

Our battle with the BSF can wage for months, even years, and between our weekend attempts at meeting new people and our scores of cover letter/resume combos, we still have to live our daily lives, whether we attend school, wait tables, or take advantage of the pause in life progress to try the programs we know we’ll never have time for again once the BSF has been defeated.

There come moments in this day-to-day living where we may decide: forget it, I’ll defy convention. Let’s start our own path, our own way to dodge the BSF. Travel! Start a business! Inherit billions! Become a reality superstar! This discovery is elating. You may feel like you want to shove your new method in the faces of all the other yuppies with their suits and ties, and sing defiant anthems from the rooftops. This is ill-advised.

Whether or not the action is metaphorical, shoving your plans at other people while screeching My Chemical Romance will get you egged.

Whatever you do (especially if your battle with the BSF has, like mine, forced you to take repeated trains to Flatbush), never wait for public transportation in the rain, in Brooklyn, while listening to Radiohead.

I don’t care if you’re the most cheerful, luckiest person alive. Trips to Brooklyn in bad weather accompanied by depressing alternarock will turn you suicidal. And it will take many comforting phone calls, multiple favorite movies, and several types of pie to get you out of that funk.

If you do decide to face the BSF in your every waking hour, whether by job searching full-time or studying for big tests and kissing professor butt, beware. Tackling one head can often weaken your fight against the other. And even if it doesn’t, occasions like this may arise:

If this happens, no one will care how stressed you are or how good your intentions. You have become a jerk, the opposite of the admirable time-organizer/prioritizer I discussed back in December.

I think it’s safe to say that at some point, we’ve all tried almost every one of these approaches to dealing with our impending future. And as Jews, we may feel the added pressure of knowing that we’re expected to answer these questions sooner than we thought. 22 is very, blissfully young. I’ve heard that statement more often than I’ve heard advertisements guarantee satisfaction or my money back. And yet at times I feel like I can see 30 rounding a corner. I can name at least a dozen girls I know who were married before 21, and many more friends of mine who seem to have found their perfect job/mate/apartment/sword to slay the BSF. We seem to have forgotten that we’re still at the beginning of our journey.

On bad days, this thought depresses me, and I have to resort to one of the above methods of distraction (wipes tomato off face and accepts pudding sheepishly). But on better ones, I can remember, with a deep breath and a smile, that worrying about it now will not allow me to tame the BSF any sooner, and I decide to enjoy the time I have (I think that link illustrates my point better than I do, and the song partly inspired this post).

Because no matter what, I’ll have to meet the BSF eventually. Hopefully, I won’t have to fail in too many attempts before I finally stroll, victorious into the sunset. And having typed this, I realize that this sentence alone gives me reason to hope, because despite my fears and nightmares, I still see myself coming away from it happy, having found what I’m looking for, even if it’s only a long while from now.

And that can only mean I haven’t let the BSF beat me yet.