Boys to Men: The Troubles of Contemporary Masculinity

When I was a boy, I stood with my father in the plaza of the Kotel, the Western Wall, in Jerusalem, for the first time. We walked in, and were confronted by a guy, who looked at my father and said, in heavily accented English, is he bar mitzvah? My dad did some calculations in his head, and said, yes, he’s of age. So the man grabbed me, and strapped tefillin onto me. If you haven’t seen them, they’re leather boxes and straps, filled with parchments from the Torah, that you strap to your arm and your head. It wasn’t my first time. Dad had had me putting them on for about a year already, to practice. But I still remember the rough grip of this man’s hand, and the tickle of the hair on his arms as he put them on me.

I had a bar mitzvah, only a few days later, in Jerusalem, in fact. It was amazing. But if you had to ask me, even so many years later, when I started to grow up, I would tell you it was there, right then, that I started to become a man.

What I think about is how lucky I was to have those hands in my life, how lucky I was to have the years leading up to them. I think about the rabbi who made space for the obnoxious twelve-year-old in his mostly senior citizen classes, the cantor who taught me, word by word, how to understand what I was reading. The love that I saw in both of them for what they were doing. Not love for me as an individual, precisely, but a higher love for what I represented, and for what they saw a sacred duty.

Those men gave of themselves, quite selflessly, for me and for God. And with whatever foibles I have as a person, I am grateful that, as a young man, I was pointed in their direction.

Only a few weeks ago, some people held a night rally not far from here, in Charlottesville. You may have caught it on every single news outlet in the country. They carried a bunch of tiki torches, and there was a barbeque somewhere that was really, really sad as a result. But even those stupid torches couldn’t cover up their menace. “You will not replace us,” they called as they marched. Almost every one of them was male.

I can’t help wondering about how those marchers grew into being men. As much as they would love to get rid of me – you all know that “Jew will not replace us,” was the other chant – I’m not sure that I’m ready to disown them. I have been surprised by how many other men sound like them, many Jewish, many of other ethnicities, as our country keeps descending into this alt-right nightmare of a reddit thread.

There’s a question that I want to ask tonight, which is, what happens when boys grow into men? And, perhaps, what could happen differently? And yes, I’m being gender specific and heteronormative: boys, mostly cis-gendered, into men, mostly straight.

And the reason that I want to ask such a caveman question is because, when looking at the world, what I see is a lot of human beings who are women, queer, trans, standing up. Fighting for a greater good. Putting themselves on the line for what is good and right.

But I see a lot of men standing up for causes and ideas that, honestly, I’m embarrassed by. I’ve got to say it, it feels like an embarrassing time to be a straight man. And I’m not sure that we have anyone to blame but ourselves.

Before I really dig in, I worry that this drash will be hard for a lot of people in the room. Boys, this one’s going to hurt a little, I’m just letting you know. But for all of you, and there are a lot of you, that are queer, women, trans, of fluid genders, or feel that the dominant description of masculinity doesn’t describe you, it might be excruciating. On the one hand, I want to talk about the problems with contemporary masculinity, and maybe you’ll feel that, finally, one of the people those articles are talking about is standing up and saying something. But on the other hand, a whole lot of what I’m going to say will be directed right at the group who’s been the intended audience for most of human history. I can only hope that the truth of what I’m going to say, and the urgency I feel to say it, will act as an amends for not speaking directly towards your spiritual lives.

I know a lot of guys who feel a little bit like society’s out to get them these days. Some feel frustrated, or like there’s nothing they can do right. And most often, most often, they feel like they did the things they were supposed to do, but aren’t getting the things they were promised.

They went to school, where’s that successful, high paying job? I date, where’s the partner that adores me. Why isn’t that woman flattered by my interest in her? And why is it that society always seems to be point to me as the root of its problems?

That last one there, that’s a big one. Why do people keep telling us that we’re a problem? Where are the people telling us that we’re upstanding members of society? That we’re doing the right things? Where’s the respect that a man deserves?

Gentlemen, I think we’ve have fallen into a trap, and that trap is that we think that life owes us those things, because historically, society has been set up to give a lot of them to us.

The things that I’ve described, the right job, plenty of money, the “perfect partner,” the approbation, the approval -  guys, what everybody else has figured out is that those things aren’t promises. Some of us get really lucky, and maybe get a few of those things. But wealth, success, and love are not guarantees that life makes to us. God makes us no deal as to our circumstances. If you don’t believe me, go ask some people who don’t look like us.

But that’s not how we act. The way we act is if we’re entitled to all that stuff. We act like it’s already ours. It’s incredible what we do. We act like conversations belong to us, and talk twice or three times as much as other kinds of people. We act like all the most dominant positions in society belong to us: leader, provider, the innovator, the warrior. Warrior? There’s a woman running for Congress in Kentucky who flew F-18s for the Marines. I spent my twenties studying Talmud!

And more than anything, we feel like women’s bodies belong to us. Like they owe us their attention. Like they owe us access.

If you could only hear the stories that I hear, in my office. The stories that I hear from women about what’s happened to them, even what walking down the street is like – and how many of these stories there are? It would break your heart.

So this is the trap, we feel like we are owed. Not only that, we expect to be first in line when that which is owed is paid – because we’ve always come before others in this world, and we’re used to it! We feel like there are privileges due to our position. And therefore we try to take. Nothing good comes from that.

Those guys, the ones marching in Charlottesville? They’re an extreme version of the problem. They can’t figure out why they haven’t gotten what they’re owed. And since they haven’t gotten it, and it’s clear to them that they deserve it, then it follows that someone is keeping them from it. And then they look at the Jews in this room, and at women, and queer people, and people of color, and immigrants, and say, “You. You must be the ones who have taken it from me.”

And that’s so bankrupt. That’s such a perversion of the way things are.

Our problem isn’t that other people are taking from us. Our problem is that we were used to taking from them, and now that we can’t, we feel empty.

That’s it. That’s what we’ve got to solve. That’s what we’ve got to find, a way to make our lives feel full, and full of value without pushing other people down to do so. That’s what we’re talking about.

So how do you do that? Well, if we’ve been leaning on the lives of others, using other people as a crutch, maybe we need to develop a kind of inner strength that allows us to stand on our own.

What would that kind strength look like? Its definition is that, when one is in 

possession of it, a person can find contentment, satisfaction, a sense of purpose in life, not because of what the world gives you, but in spite of it. One is insulted, but does not insult back. One’s patience is tried, but is maintained. Such a person becomes bigger on the inside than what the world throws at him from without.

There’s only one way I know to achieve that kind of strength, to build that inner skeleton, to strengthen the spiritual anatomy. And that is to change one’s orientation towards the world. If you are facing in the direction of what you are supposed to get out of life, then I ask you turn – like the world teshuvah, turn – in a new direction and ask instead what you have to give to life instead.

It is in giving that a person finds purpose. If you want to be happy, take your mind from what you can get; learn how to give. 

And that turning, that growing – it takes work.

An example.

Gluckel of Hameln lived in the 17^th and 18^th century. I’m sure her name made sense back then. She is famous because of a kind of moral will that she wrote to her children, which survived the ages and came to us.

Amongst other things she was married to a jeweler, and took an active part in his business until she was widowed, at which point she took over the business. That business ultimately spanned four countries.

But after her husband died, she wrote about him, describing him to her children. She says, “So good and true a father one seldom finds, and he loved his wife and children beyond all measure.” It’s clear that she appreciated him. That is how I want them to talk about me when I'm gone.

When she describes what his life was like, what made him so special, she focuses on two things:

The first is that he had an incredible spiritual discipline: “However much my husband toiled, and truly the whole day he ran about upon his business, still he never failed to set aside a fixed time to study his daily portion of the Torah.” “Even among the great rabbis, I knew but few who prayed with his fervour. If he were praying in his room, and some one came to fetch him forth where something could be bought up cheap, neither I nor any servant in my whole house would have the heart to go to him and speak of it.”

And the second is that the expression of his spirituality was the way he treated other people, “All that he had to contend with, and often, from friends and strangers, he bore in patience. When many times, in human weakness, I could no longer contain myself, he laughed away my impatience and said…”I put my trust in God and give small heed to the talk of men.”

All this is to say that here is a person who, relative to other people, thought less about what he could get out of life than what he could give to it. The praying and the studying – especially when they got in the way of business – those are acts of devotion. And the way he answers his wife about why he doesn’t get more annoyed, or more aggressive with other people, was that he trusted in God, which I understand to mean that he treated people not as they treated him, but as God would want him to.

Guys, this isn’t about him being religious. It’s about how he used his religiosity. Look at the way he was devoted to a higher cause! He wasn’t thinking about what he deserved. he was thinking about how he could serve.

His life was filled with a higher love. That’s what gave it purpose. That’s what gave it meaning. And it’s what filled mine up to the brim as well.

Look, I am not exactly a paragon of virtue. My list of character flaws would elicit the kind of low whistle that you give a particularly fascinating wrecked car.

But when I was a young man, rough hands bound me to something higher than myself. Kind eyes showed me, by their example, how I could be kind. And men of devotion pushed me, gently, to devote myself, to try to give as they had given to me. And because of them I learned that the world isn’t just a place where you can get. It is a place where you are meant to give.

Men, is it possible that the life of the spirit is not a weakness, but that our inability to see its necessity in our lives is? Is it possible that everybody else has figured out something that we’ve forgotten – that a person must have a spiritual life, a strong purpose, as sense of devotion, a willingness to sacrifice for something greater than ourselves? Is it not that the men who embody these crazy ideologies have found a twisted replacement for the spirituality that many of us lack?

You need a spiritual life. I’m just going to say it. You need one. It’s what directs and orients you, grounds and propels you. Otherwise you will grow self-oriented, disconnected, and disillusioned, and that is only a step away from selfish, angry, and looking for someone to blame.

Do you feel angry, or lost, or frustrated? Then you have my compassion, for I have felt the same, have been the same kind of angry, have been lost in the same way.

But what I tell you is a life of worth and esteem, of purpose, of connection, never to come through demanding that life give to you. It will only come from figuring out how you can give to it. How you can serve the higher cause. And what that’s going to do is to abolish this fallacy that life is a zero sum game, and that we’ve lost anything. In fact, it’s going show us what we’ve gained by the inclusion of so many kinds of people unlike ourselves.

Change your direction. Learn, with me, to demand to give of ourselves to it. And then you will find the peace you seek.

We have a group here, open to anyone who identifies as a man, called Man’s Attempt at Thoughtfulness. It is in fact a group of men, attempting to be thoughtful. These are the kinds of questions we talk about there. Let me see you there, and we’ll turn together.

Shanah Tovah.