You Are What You Is...Drash for Shabbat Toldot, 1 November 2013

Frank Zappa...no, he wasn't Jewish!

Who was the most significant twentieth century philosopher for you?  Hannah Arendt?  Emil Fackenheim?  Jürgen Habermas?  Abraham Joshua Heschel?  Emmanuel Levinas?  Ayn Rand?  Joseph Solovietchik?  Okay, you’ve probably noticed I offered only Jewish names.  But that’s not to say that Jews had a monopoly for philosophical thought in the twentieth century.  I guess I could just as easily have offered you the likes of Aleksandr Aleksandrov, Dietrich Bonhöffer, Miroslav Dzielski, Edward Said, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

On anybody’s list of the deepest thinkers of the twentieth century, you’re not likely to see Frank Zappa.  But profound and memorable things came from the pen of the prolific songwriter and rock musician, whose working career spanned the decades of the 1960’s, ‘70’s, and ‘80’s.  Some examples follow.

You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.

The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.
          Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
          Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.
          Finally there are the lyrics to his song, You Are What You Is.  It was released on the eponymous album in 1981.  It goes:

Do know what you are? /  You is what you am / A cow don’t make ham / You ain’t what you’re not / So see what you’ve got / You are what you is / And that’s what it is.

The song then devolves into language that, today, would be considered racist.  In the early 1980’s, it was just a bit risqué.  But I’ve already given you enough of the song to make my point.  You are what you is; you ain’t what you’re not.

Sometimes it seems that we spend a good part of our lives trying very hard to be what we’re not.  We rebel endlessly against what we are.  And yet happiness is a product of the opposite mindset.  Acceptance of what we are.  And that we cannot be what we are not.

The things that people pass on to one another through Facebook are often a very telling commentary on society.  This week, there’s a 37-second video making the rounds.  It shows a young woman in a rather suggestive pose.  She’s lying with her pelvis, clad in a bikini bottom, against the floor.  Her arms are planted rigidly on the floor, holding her body trunk upright and partially hiding her bare breasts.  And she’s looking directly at the camera.

The woman is attractive, but in a decidedly ordinary way.  But then, as the 37 seconds of the video elapse, her image is continually ‘Photoshopped’; she is transformed into an image of the perfect dream girl.  Her body is shaped and slimmed and toned.  Her hair is made longer, fuller, wavier and blonder.  Her face is sculpted into the kind of pouty visage that some women work for hours with their makeup to achieve.

The video’s message is that what many consider ‘perfect’ beauty is an illusion.  It is false.  When we look at the images of supermodels and starlets, we are likely looking at Photoshopped images that cannot be duplicated in the flesh.  This is the cause of too much anxiety among young women,  Many of them can’t understand why – and are devastated because – they cannot seem to measure up to this image of perfection no matter what they do.  You are what you is; you ain’t what you’re not.

But it isn’t only women for whom this pitfall is a danger.  Who can forget Michael Jackson?  I remember how, when I was in high school, the Jackson Five, the Rhythm & Blues band consisting of MJ and his four brothers, was popular.  MJ had not even gone through puberty yet; he was a wholesome-looking kid singing in a high range.  With the passage of years, he matured into a handsome teenager.  But as an adult, he went through a further, and rather dismaying transition.  He discovered the plastic surgeon’s knife, and as he submitted to surgery after surgery, he transformed into a person bearing no resemblance to the good-looking kid he had been.  As one pundit declared:  He tried to turn himself from a black man into a white woman.  If so, he turned himself into a freakish imitation of a white woman.  Others, men and women, have similarly disfigured themselves in using plastic surgery to craft themselves into a new person.  You are what you is; you ain’t what you’re not.

But it’s not just in the realm of appearances that we try to be something we’re not.  How many of us try to put ourselves across as something other than what we are.  How many of us try to sound educated, even if we’re not.  Or folksy, even if we’re not.  Or talk endlessly about the symphony and opera while, in our heart of hearts, we want to sing Country?

Yes, you are what you is; you ain’t what you’re not.  Look, I’m not trying to say that we can’t develop new interests.  That we can’t educate ourselves.  That we can’t work hard and succeed and transform ourselves from marginality to notability.  I’m not trying to say that at all.  Self-improvement is itself, for so many people, a key to happiness.  We can, and should, admire people’s drive that makes them succeed in business.  That makes them transcend a so-so high school experience to achieve academic excellence and earn an advanced degree.  If we were all simply prisoners of our original circumstances, if we were unable to reach for greatness, then the world would be a bleak place indeed.  You are what you is; you ain’t what you’re not.  But that’s not to say that we can’t – or shouldn’t – reach for the best of what we are.  That’s the message of the midrash concerning Rabbi Zusya.

Zusya was near the end of his life.  He cried out to God, declaring his regret for not having been a Moses, for not having been an Isaiah.  I’m not disappointed in you for not being Moses or Isaiah, God responded.  I’m disappointed in you for not being Zusya.  In other words, for not being the best Zusya you could have been.

Reach for the best you that you can be.  But don’t waste your life trying to be something that you’re not.  Nobody expects that of you.  Not even God.

We Jews are as susceptible to this urge to be something we’re not, as anybody else.  Maybe even more so.  If so, that’s a sad commentary.  We should be happy in our own skins.  And secure enough to feel free to express the person who is inside us, no matter what the setting.

Jews who have spent significant time in Israel, have told me that Israel was the only place where they were able to feel at home in their own skin.  I don’t want to knock the idea of spending time in Israel.  I, too have felt especially able to express myself freely in Israel.  If you’ve felt that, you would indeed be well-advised to organize your life to spend more time in Israel.  Or even live there permanently.

But if you don’t feel free to be what and who you are in Australia, what does that say about you?  Ideally, we should be so free wherever we are.  To you I’d like to say:  go to Israel!  I’ll see you there eventually.  But in the meantime, ask yourself why you don’t feel free to be yourself here in Australia.  Because that freedom comes from within oneself.  Nobody can take away that freedom.  Yes, there are occasional acts of violence against Jews here.  There was one last week in Bondi.

Eli Behar, 66, one of the victims of the unprovoked attack last Shabbat, spoke with the press this week. “I am not going to take off my kippah," he told the Australian Jewish News on Thursday. “I don't want to go and hide or feel threatened or scared of being Jewish in Sydney.”
          I don’t feel obligated to wear a kippah constantly.  And it doesn’t matter to me whether you do or not.  But the next time you feel angst about being Jewish in Australia, think about what this 66-year-old, apparently Orthodox man decided, and expressed after being attacked by ruffians in the street.  “I am not going to take off my kippah.”  Now there’s a man who feels comfortable in his own skin.

 Wear a kippah or not, based on whether your sense of Jewish authenticity requires it.  But don’t ever let your sense of Jewish authenticity be held hostage to what you think, others think of you.  Or caring about it.  Maybe you would feel most authentic, or most free, living in Israel.  If so, go!  But if, in the pit of your being, you don’t feel you can be yourself here, then moving to Israel will not help you.  If you cannot feel comfortable in your own skin here, you will not find that comfort in Israel either.  You will not find it anyplace.

  You are what you is; you ain’t what you’re not.  Be what you are.  Be the best you that you are, the best you that you can be.  But don’t try to be someone who you’re not.  That is not the key to happiness.  Shabbat shalom.