There is No Prize for Misery

Faith’s leap of uncertainty, and other thoughts for dark times.

This post is dedicated to Eli Chalmer (Hebrew name: Eli Asher ben Yehudis). Please pray for his healing.

2024

“The miserable have no other medicine
But only hope.”
— William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure (III.1)

He can open his eyes now, and he can squeeze his hand. He can lift his arms and even give a tiny little wave. And the whole family is thrilled.

Show me those words a few months ago; I’d have thought they were about someone’s infant. But I’m talking about my brother, Eli. He’s a 39-year-old man who was, as recently as October 2nd, 2024, in excellent health. He is an incredibly sweet, kind, thoughtful, open-hearted man; a professional trombonist; a husband; a father of two adorable boys soon to turn 6 and 3; and an avid hobbyist rock climber, too.

And it was indeed while rock climbing, in the Shawangunk mountains, on October 2nd of this year, that Eli had a ridiculously unlikely accident.

He was doing everything right. He was wearing a helmet. He was properly harnessed and roped and anchored and such — I’m not going to try to use the right climbing terms, because I don’t climb myself, so I’ll just get them wrong — but his climbing partner says he was doing everything right. And he didn’t fall. He didn’t even fall! What happened instead is that, while he was climbing, something happened with the equipment that I don’t understand, and, as a result, an enormous chunk of rock broke off the mountain and struck his head and chest.

The rock fractured his sternum, but that’s the least of his problems. The blow to his head was so heavy that his helmet was split nearly in two. He was airlifted to a hospital. He had a severe traumatic brain injury, multiple brain bleeds, multiple skull fractures… I will spare you some of the details; he had a bad time. And, for about four weeks, he was in a coma.

And so now, each lift of his eyelids seems a minor miracle. Now, each small gesture of his so-recently-mighty arms calls for a celebration — in the form of emojis in a group chat, if not exactly champagne. Now, having been discharged from the ICU, he is in rehab, no longer comatose, but seemingly not yet what I would call “awake,” either. He can sometimes respond to instructions like “wave” or “squeeze,” so clearly he can process language. But we don’t know what he’s thinking, what he’s experiencing, what he remembers, or how much of his personality and former cognition are there, or are awake. When I visit, I speak to him, but I don’t know on what levels and in what ways he’s hearing me; I don’t know if he knows who I am. I think (although I am hazy on the medical details, of this and of all else) that a proper term for what his current condition might be is a “minimally conscious state.” I’m not sure. I’m not sure of anything.

We are hoping and praying for healing, recovery, restoration. The medical team members are cagey about giving any numbers or specifics for his chances. The word “unlikely” has been used to describe the chances of him walking or talking again. But this is also the kind of injury for which substantial recovery is possible. There are good stories out there, and we are told his progress so far in rehab is good. Nothing is known. Nothing is predicted, let alone guaranteed. But a wide range of outcomes is possible.

And so we, his family, are supporting him and supporting each other, and especially trying to support his wife and sons, through this horrifying, sudden calamity, and through this period of supreme uncertainty.

What do we do when we’re deeply afraid, and the stakes couldn’t be higher, and there’s so much we just can’t know? How should we try to carry ourselves? What should we think? How should we feel? What should we believe?

I mean those questions sincerely. It’s tempting to say that thoughts just arise, and feelings just happen to us, and beliefs are just the unchosen result of our mind’s best subconscious calculations about reality. That’s all true; it’s all part of the truth.

But we also have choices. When thoughts arise, we can hold them or let them go. When feelings arise, we can stoke them or (gradually) starve them. When we reach a conclusion, we can stop and rest on it, or we can keep on going…

2004

“It is good for a man that he bear a yoke in his youth.
Let him sit alone and keep silent, for he has taken it upon him.
Let him put his mouth in the dust; perhaps there is hope.”
— Lamentations 3:27-29

“R’ Shmuel bar Nachman (Bereishis Rabbah 68:11) teaches that Maariv, the nighttime prayer, is, in effect, a prayer that God rescue us from the darkness of night… Shacharis, the morning prayer, is an expression of gratitude that He has shown us the light of a new day. These are straightforward… However, his explanation of Minchah, the afternoon prayer, seems somewhat cryptic. The afternoon prayer, he says, is an appeal: ‘Just as You have privileged me to see the sun rise, so may You privilege me to see it set.’ Why does R’ Shmuel bar Nachman say that it is a ‘privilege’ to see the sun go down?… The sun is setting; the darkness is coming. Hope wanes and suffering approaches… The Minchah prayer was instituted by Isaac, and it represents his personal experience. The concept of Jewish exile began when he was born… His mature years were darkened by blindness and the rift between his sons… Given his plight… we would expect to find Isaac morose and depressed, but we do not… Isaac was conceived in joy and born in joy, despite the darkness closing in around him… Isaac’s legacy was an awareness of how to understand and cope with tragedy.”
— Rabbi Moshe Eisemann, quoted in “An Overview / Inspiration in Sunset” in “Minchas Shalom (Artscroll Mesorah, 1999).

It began to happen in the daytime, too.

That’s when, and that’s why, I knew it was a crisis — something I needed, somehow, to handle. As long as it had happened only late at night, I could always write it off. I could tell myself it was nothing more than a bizarre manifestation of insomnia, or even, perhaps, just a silly, immature holdover of childhood — like being afraid of the dark.

But it wasn’t the literal dark I was afraid of. I was afraid of death.

The time was winter, late 2004, lasting into early 2005. The place was all over the United States. It was my first year out of college, and I was performing in a nationally touring production of “Sesame Street Live: Elmo’s Coloring Book.” I was the puppeteer for Oscar the Grouch and also played a human character named Professor Art.

Top left corner: your humble servant as Professor Art (right) with Elmo (left) in August 2004.

The job was magnificent for a 22-year-old. The pay wasn’t great — we were a non-union cast traveling with a union stage crew — but the lifestyle was incredible. We cast members worked well under 20-hour weeks (while the better-paid crew rarely stopped working), and we got to see the country. And I mean, we really saw the country. We visited I don’t know how many cities in 25 states. Some were major cities, but we also went to places I might never have visited otherwise and have never visited since — we rehearsed in Minneapolis; we opened in Lacrosse, Wisconsin; we played Madison, Nashville, Baton Rouge, Denver, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Corpus Christi, Omaha, Des Moines, Tuscon, and Portland, among many others. In Las Vegas, we did a ticket exchange with the Blue Man Group (we saw their show, they brought their kids to ours). Shout-out also to my friend Robyn, who got me into the lighting booth to see Cirque du Soleil “O,” where she worked, also during our Vegas week. We played the Kodak Theatre (now called the Dolby) in LA. We ended the tour with two weeks in Honolulu. Understand, previous to this, I had grown up in Vermont and spent time mostly in New England, except for some trips to Montreal, New York, and Florida, before attending college in Dayton. This tour was my first time being anywhere farther West than Ohio.

Every Monday was travel day, spent in ease (although not in comfort), occasionally on a plane but usually on a charter bus, reading books and watching America’s highways zoom by in between rest stops at Cracker Barrel or McDonald’s, before arriving in the city that would be our home for the coming week. Some of the more sociable cast members would go clubbing at night, but not me; I was a creature of cafes, bookstores, museums, and the hotel bar. Tuesday was a day off for the cast, while the crew worked long hours assembling the set. I would explore the new city every Tuesday; despite how bulky they were in my suitcase, I lugged rollerblades around the country for this purpose. I would skate around town, visit a bookstore, send home a postcard, and write a bit in the evenings. Most weeks, I didn’t have to be anywhere for work until Wednesday evening for the first show. Then (in a usual ten-show week) there were two shows each on Thursday and Friday, three shows on Saturday, and two on Sunday. (The poor crew worked all night on Sunday nights striking the set, then got some fitful sleep on the Monday bus.)

If this all sounds idyllic and carefree, it absolutely was. It remains one of the highlights of my life. I had all my needs taken care of, endless novelty and stimulation, plenty of exercise, and nothing whatsoever to worry about.

And maybe that’s why my subconscious decided that this was the perfect time to confront death.

It’s hard to describe what this meant. Nothing happened to prompt it. I didn’t have any kind of scare or close call. Nobody in my life died. I didn’t suddenly learn anything about death I didn’t know before. I didn’t “lose my faith” — there had been none, per se, to lose; I had been before, and remained at the time, a proud but ignorant and entirely secular Jew.

All I can say is that it just happened; I started obsessively fixating on death — my own death, as well as the death of people I love. The certainty, the finality, the cruelty, the meaninglessness, and, above all, the eternality of death. The absolute end of our experience, our perception, our existence. Utter annihilation with no end and no escape…

Throughout the years I had occasionally had this thought, of course. Not often, just once in a while. But previously I had always simply decided to put it out of my mind, and that had always worked. What began to happen, that winter, was that distraction stopped working. Or, put better, I stopped being satisfied with choosing distraction. A thought is just a thought until you grip onto it, but I came to feel that I must grip this thought tightly. I felt that it was somehow important to do so. I had to face my own oblivion squarely. I had to face it until I could bear it. But I couldn’t bear it.

The attempt began to consume my nights, when I lay awake in the dark— not sleeping and not really trying to sleep, because I was trying, in fact, to tell myself, over and over, the story of my own death, death forever, and to force myself to be okay with it, and the okay with it part never came. Eventually, this consumed my daytime thoughts as well. I might be distracted temporarily by things like a conversation, or being onstage in the show. But backstage, at the hotel, in a restaurant, out on my skates, in a bookstore, watching the sunset… Wherever I was, as soon as I had the opportunity, I would pull out that thought like a smoker reaching for a cigarette, and deliberately run my mind over and over the contours of death, until my pulse would race in panic.

I was partially confused about this, but also just embarrassed. I was a grown man; it was as if I suddenly needed potty training. Why couldn’t I just accept the basic facts of the world, the way I effortlessly had just a few months before?

Eventually, I decided I had to do something different. I had to give myself some kind of new procedure, because whatever this pattern was, it just wasn’t helping anything. It wasn’t going to stop me from dying, but it was preventing me from fully enjoying a life I had every reason to enjoy.

So I decided to give myself permission to be irrational. I decided to try to have faith in God and the human soul. I decided to believe in the afterlife. I decided you don’t get a prize for misery and despair — even if the facts behind them are correct.

And look, I know, it’s not some kind of innovation, I didn’t make this up. It’s basically Pascal’s wager. But for all its unoriginality, it remains a good bet! If there is no God, no soul, no afterlife, no meaning to life — if the world is just random particles and we’re nothing but machines made of meat — then, when you get to the end of all things, you’ll never know you were right. There’s no big reveal where the veil is lifted and the studio lights come on and the Insistently-Not-a-Soul of Christopher Hitchens, serving as host of the show, congratulates you and hands you a medal and a certificate and inducts you into the Honorable Society of Brave and Clear-Sighted Accepters of Their Oblivion. No, if you’re right, you get the oblivion, but you never get to observe it, and therefore you never get to think, “I told you so,” even silently to yourself, let alone tell it triumphantly to all the rubes. You lived in fear and pessimism, until you knew nothing at all; meanwhile, the rubes, all those people of mistaken faith, got exactly the same oblivion you did, but they got to live in comfort and hope along the way. I decided it’s smarter to join them.

Of course, it’s hard to just decide to believe something. You can’t just say it and make it so. You’ve got to talk yourself into it. Step one was trying to picture it, and willing myself to believe. Picturing the plane I was on going down, picturing the bus crashing, and then, instead of endless nothing, picturing my soul rising from the flaming debris and laughing with relief that this was not the end… This exercise was a little bit comforting. I still had enormous doubts. I still couldn’t straightforwardly “believe” in the great beyond. But as a meditation, as a mental procedure to replace gripping myself into a panic, it did the job well enough.

Step two was realizing that if I wanted to find comfort in God, then I ought to get to know God a little better. I looked online for a siddur (Jewish prayer book) and ordered the cheapest search result. I think it was something like six dollars, and it was the Artscroll mincha/maariv (afternoon and evening prayers). (Yes, we could order things by mail on the tour; we had a mailing address in Minneapolis and the company would forward our mail ahead of us to where we were going to arrive.) I didn’t know when I ordered it that it would be a tiny, pamphlet-sized prayerbook, containing very few prayers — just the weekday afternoon and evening services, because I didn’t know what “mincha” or “maariv” meant. I learned what they were — and this was probably my first serious, voluntary, grownup Jewish religious learning in my life — from reading that slim volume’s introduction, quoted above.

After I told my parents about all this on the phone, my dad sent me a more comprehensive prayer resource: the complete weekday/Shabbat/holiday siddur. And my mom sent me a better inspirational learning resource: Rabbi A.J. Heschel’s God in Search of Man. I was fascinated by both of these books, and enraptured by Heschel’s writing. From then on, my on-the-road reading was mostly about Judaism. I read more Heschel, and other rabbis, too, and, with the tiny scraps of Hebrew knowledge I had (which was very little more than how to prounounce the sounds of the letters and vowel marks), I began teaching myself prayers and, with excruciating slowness, figuring out some of how the Hebrew worked by induction. I put a lot of hours into it. (Later I would move on to actual Hebrew language textbooks.)

I kept wanting these Jewish books to directly reassure me about the soul and the afterlife. None of them did so — not because Judaism doesn’t teach about the soul and the afterlife (that’s a myth; it does!) but because those teachings were simple assertions, not proofs. The itch for convincing reassurances of immortality remained unscratched; but meanwhile, as I learned more, other needs I didn’t even know I had began to be fulfilled.

When the tour ended in July 2005, I declined a contract for the following year for multiple reasons, but one of them was a desire to join a synagogue and try praying in community. I joined a Conservative congregation in Dayton and got really into it. Under a year later I would begin experimenting with partially keeping kosher and partially observing Shabbat. Just two years later, I had moved to New York City and joined an Orthodox synagogue, fully bought into increasing my observance.

Becoming religious didn’t ever lead me to some kind of settled “conclusion” about death. Mostly it has made me less certain about everything, less trusting of my own mind and capacities, and more willing to entertain new possibilities, especially about that which is larger than myself and stranger than I can know. It has trained me in the practice of speaking to a God Whom I can’t possibly understand — of speaking to a God Who might be a mind or might be a metaphor — of speaking to God without knowing whether or not He is hearing me, whether or not He knows who I am — of speaking to Him without knowing whether or not He is (in a literal sense, anyway) awake.

Faith and uncertainty need each other. Hope; redemption; change; faith — all of these require uncertainty, and live in it. Faith doesn’t mean certainty; faith isn’t naive optimism. Faith is the emotional choice to decline despair. Faith isn’t a hallucination of light, it’s a choice to keep walking forward in the dark.

2024

“Behold, He shall neither slumber nor sleep, the Guardian of Israel.”
— Psalms 121:4

Is anything on your mind these days? Any kind of fear? Any kind of uncertainty?

We may sometimes think of fear and uncertainty working together. But uncertainty cuts both ways. In my journey out of despair twenty years ago, it was uncertainty that saved me from fear.

None of this is to say that we should completely banish worry or fear. Worry and fear are loyal hounds; they have their place. They stand guard, they point out dangers, and when there’s something we can do about those dangers, then we should do it, and they have done their job well. But worry and fear are too rowdy, too restless, too ambitious; they want to rule the pack. They want to run and jump and bite just for the painful thrill of it. They don’t know what dangers we can or can’t avoid; they will howl and roar even when there’s nothing whatsoever we can do about the danger. That’s why the wise know to keep them firmly on their leashes; to give them chances to patrol, and chances to bark, but then to give them firm orders, most of the time, and especially when there’s nothing to be done, to curl up by the fire and rest.

At this moment, many people are yearning like mad to know what will happen in America over the next four years; or what will happen next in Israel, or in Gaza, or in Ukraine, or in Taiwan, or in Sudan. I would like to know those things too. Even more, though, I am aching to know: How much will Eli recover? I wish to God I could know it.

At the same time, I am also comforted that I don’t know. The worst thing I could do is decide that I do know — to decide that I already know the worst will come, just because living in the uncertainty is too scary. I could decide to run my mind, again and again, over all the worst possibilities for Eli. I could decide to pre-grieve for what may, indeed, turn out to be lost. If, for some other people, in my family or in similar situations, that feels right to you, then you’ll do what you feel is best; I’m not trying to shame you. But for myself, at least, I’m not going to do that. I am not going to lie awake at night again, the way I did twenty years ago, torturing myself with horrors that may indeed come to pass, but in which it avails me nothing to bathe my mind today. “Don’t borrow trouble” is, it seems to me, sound advice. I am orienting myself toward the positive possibilities. I am living in the hope of uncertainty.

There is so much we don’t know — about the future, about each other, about ourselves, about right and wrong, about cause and effect, about recovery and return, about life and death. To say we are uncertain about these things is not to say they don’t matter. They matter tremendously; they matter desperately. They matter, in fact, far too much to permit us to indulge in the lunatic luxury of pretended certainty.

There is no prize for misery. Never will be. Despair is a con, and when we indulge it, we’re at once the con man and the mark.

We just have to live while we can, do what we can, and hope while we can. We just have to love everyone else who is groping forward the way we are, walking on in the dark with whatever kinds of integrity and strength we’re able to attain along the way.

We’re none of us fully awake the way God is awake, the way the world at large is awake. I still hope and pray, though I cannot (yet?) know, that there’s a wider kind of vision that will open itself for each of us to see, in the end.

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