The Wisdom of Not Knowing

I was thinking just now that there are an awful lot of folks in this world proclaiming things, and that maybe the greatest virtue lies in admitting all that we don’t know, can’t know, and will likely never know.

So in the spirit of looking myself in the mirror, I have come to the conclusion that I have no idea how to make the world better. Now this might seem like a devastating conclusion at which to arrive but instead, it has relieved me of the burden of trying to achieve the impossible. Over and over and over again. And it also led me to what I think might be a better conclusion, viz., that while I might have no idea how to make the world better, I think I have a pretty good idea of how not to make it worse.

I am a micro person in a macro world. I’ve tried joining things that I think align with my values, but something always seems to break down. So I retreat. I’m a failed joiner, I guess, a club wannabee who always heads for the nearest exit when I find that I don’t know how to be who I am in those spaces any longer.

But that repeated failure has not diminished my belief in micro influence. In fact, it has reinforced it. I can think back to many times in my life when choosing my own path has led to something better than what the group consensus would have landed on, had it landed on anything at all.

One of my favorite examples comes from a trip my daughter and I took with our synagogue to Arizona in 2019 to try to understand the border crisis, and to somehow add our humanity and values to that understanding in a meaningful way. At least I thought that’s what we were supposed to be doing.

Some of the advocates we met with to me were problematic because of their dogmatic blindness to any understanding or narrative counter to the one they were wedded to. That’s always the case with ideologues, isn’t it? But I was determined to wring something meaningful out of this trip, no matter what, and even ideological idiocy was not going to deter me.

On our last day, in a visit I pushed for, a small group of us found ourselves at what was effectively a transit center for families that had crossed the border and were waiting to depart to destinations around the country to host families that were going to take them in while their applications to stay in the country were being considered.

I saw lots of young children in this center, and I had an idea. They all departed with backpacks full of basic supplies. “Why not books?”

When I returned to New York, I reached out to Sister Teresa, who ran the center, and shared my idea. A fellow book lover, she was immediately enthralled. With her approval, I went about soliciting books from friends and family, purchasing a bunch, and even found myself making a pitch — alongside my daughter — to the Hispanic Heritage Club at Hunter High School, whose members then contributed books as well.

In the end, I wound up shipping thousands of books to Arizona, books that wound up in the backpacks of children set to go on long journeys in a new country. I’m not a social media person, so the only “publicity” I have from my efforts are the photos I took of the piles of books in my apartment, and the photo of a beautiful, dark-haired girl immersed in reading one of the books I’d sent. Sister Teresa told me that she refused to leave the center’s makeshift library until she was assured that she could keep the book, and take it with her. Maybe that’s not much in a world of millions of followers, mass protests and the like, but in my world, and in my heart, it feels like a lot. And it is a foolproof way not to make the world worse.

Fast forward to the horrors of the post-October 7th world in which we live, a world in which people like me and my children are despised for being who we are: Jews and Zionists, but mostly just for being Jews, the indignant and dishonest protests of the “but it’s just about Israel” haters notwithstanding.

What can be done in the face of such a gigantic affront to our very existence? It feels overwhelming, crushing, really. And as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, Z”L, it all references and recalls a special kind of terror. But I promised myself and I’ve told my kids: Never, ever let anyone else define you, tell you who you are, what you stand for, and why you matter. Ever. That is my North Star as a parent, the thing that gives me the foundational commitment and courage to impart the same to my children.

And that is what allows — or even compels — me to make choices that are mine to make. And no one’s to take from me. So my response to these appalling, deeply threatening times has been multi-pronged. It has also been guided by deep feeling and instinct, rather than by politics or ideology, both of which I understand, and most of which I have utter contempt for.

Following October 7th, I joined the ranks of those putting up hostage posters. I went to Israel with my daughter in February 2024 to volunteer, and to see and hug family. I went back in May with my husband so we could do the same. I wound up participating in a film project by a gifted Israeli-American director, Nim Shapira. TORN describes and delves into what became the proxy poster wars in New York City. It shares the extraordinary vitriol that permeated the city at that time, but also gave me the gift of being able to share my own perspective about my experience, and the views of the “other side” to this endless conflict.

I am also a person who believes deeply not only in praying with my feet, i.e., in taking action that aligns with and supports my values, but also in using my resources, to the extent possible, to do the same.

So I have chosen to re-orient our family’s charitable giving entirely toward my own community. That does not mean every Jewish cause, because I have deep issues with members of my community on the far left and the far right. Instead it means choosing causes and organizations that again, reflect my values in meaningful ways, and in ways that I dearly hope make the kind of difference I would like to see in the world, that might not even make the world better (though that is my dearest hope), but will surely not make it worse.

So among those groups our family has contributed to lately are UnXeptable, an organization dedicated to continuing to push for the restoration of democracy in Israel, against the malign actions and influence of Israel’s corrupt, cruel, and craven current government. We contributed again to the Survivor Mitzvah Project, an initiative focused on providing humanitarian relief and assistance to the staggeringly impoverished Holocaust survivors of Eastern Europe. Again, we might not make the world a whole lot better with these contributions, but I am confident we are not making it worse.

Each of us will choose our own path. Mine also includes reviewing books for the Jewish Book Council, my contribution toward trying to right the incredible post-October 7th wrong of vilifying and ostracizing Jewish authors. I choose Israeli eateries when I can, and otherwise try to align how I spend with my values. It’s hard to get it perfectly right, but there is something in trying to work those values muscles over and over that creates some kind of muscle memory that triggers the decision-making I think my soul would be proud of, however imperfect it might be.