To Err Is Human, To Kvetch Divine

 

Driving my daughter Samara around the neighborhood for her mid-day nap earlier this week I encountered the following bumper sticker:  “The more you complain the longer God makes you live.”  On the surface the meaning and humor of this bumper sticker is fairly straight forward.  It depends on an image of God as One who is as annoyed by constant complaining as the next guy, perhaps even more so since the offending individual is complaining about the universe that God Himself created.  As punishment for the crime of complaint, God sentences the complainer to more of what makes her miserable in the first place, life itself.  In handing down the sentence of long life, this God is clearly telling the complainer “Shut up, already.”

 

This is a God with whom we are very familiar, a God who makes us quite comfortable in the claim that we were made in His image. With this God, The Holy Spirit is encountered in that rush of righteous indignation you feel when your neighbor complains about the quality of the snow during his recent Colorado ski vacation.  To get on with this God, the annoying complainer must enact a change in attitude, a change that would not only please God but would also make the complainer less offensive to those mortals who have had to put up with all of the bellyaching.  To please this God, the complainer must learn to let go of the complaints by growing in awareness of the infinite blessings in her life; blessings that, of course, flow freely from God’s never ending grace.   Most specifically, this is the God who would abolish all of our worries by pointing out how well tended are those lilies in the field.   Implicit in this instruction to the complainer is the deeper message of how delightful these silent lilies are to all of the passersby, which is exactly why all of those annoyed by the complainer worship this God. 

 

There is just one catch.  If we follow the mandate of the bumper sticker, ceasing our complaints and replacing them with humble gratitude for the bounty of our blessings, if we become the kind of person who, when asked what kind of day he is having, automatically replies “I’m blessed”, then by the logic of the bumper sticker we are to be rewarded with… a shorter life.  

 

As the logic of the bumper sticker collapses in on itself, this God, the God we are all so comfortable worshipping precisely to the degree that we are convinced that He will not so much vanquish our enemies as He will punish those who get on our nerves, dies. In encountering the God of this bumper sticker, Nietzsche, with his proclamation of God’s demise, has never seemed more prescient. 

 

But God is, like Steven Seagal in his seminal 1990 action flick, hard to kill. In place of the late, overly familiar God of quiet reverence arises an altogether alien God, a God as unnerving as the stranger within each of us.  For, if truth is stranger than fiction, and if God is the author of all that truly is, then God’s creation is something stranger than we can even begin to imagine, though we inhabit it every day.   This God speaks to us directly through the unconscious of the author of this humble bumper sticker.  The unconscious, that source of crazy wisdom undergirding each and every one of us, spills forth unintended meaning ceaselessly, both in our dreams and in cases of Freudian slips of the tongue, but also in our everyday routine discourse.  In this case, the bumper sticker author’s conscious intention of getting a laugh was the sheep’s clothing, which cloaked the wolf sent to us by the author’s unconscious in order to devour our timeworn, and self serving, popular spirituality.

 

The unconscious or “secret” message hidden within this bumper sticker is revealed by the simple act of screening out the consciously intended humor.  Read the bumper sticker again, but this time read it as if reading a set of instructions for putting together a piece of Ikea furniture (which, I’ve found, is one of life’s most humorless moments): “The more you complain, the longer God makes you live.”  There.  It could not be any simpler.  God isn’t annoyed by our complaints, instead they are music to His ears.  In fact, given their righteous nature, the signifier “complain” just isn’t up to the task of supporting the weight of the signified.  So, once more we turn to the Jews (I mean really, my wife, Jesus, Einstein, Freud, Sandy Koufax, etc.; what are these people not capable of?), from whose sublime Yiddish tongue comes kvetch, a word as beautiful as it is flexible (it is both noun and verb).  With kvetching, mere complaint attains to its sacred role as existential song.

 

So what does it tell us about God that He would have us kvetch?  Just asking this question throws our accustomed relationship with God off kilter, an effect necessary to disrupt our complacency in our (mis)conception of God.  On the original Batman TV series, whenever the villain’s lair was on-screen the camera angle was tilted noticeably, a cautionary cue that the viewer was encountering a separate, de-centered realm where everyday rules and expectations did not apply.  In fact, the reality which we inhabit every day, God’s creation, has this same quality; everything is always a bit askew, which inevitably leads to a great deal of kvetching.

 

This tilted nature of reality is best captured through the lens of psychoanalysis (from the viewpoint of psychoanalysis we are all like Batman’s villains, in the sense that the prevailing symbolic order would indefinitely banish those Joker or Catwoman elements within each of us to the unconscious).  In his discussion of the film “The Matrix”, Slavoj Zizek, psychoanalysis’ current Mother Ship, insightfully points out the film’s explicit rendering of reality’s bent nature.  Zizek highlights Agent Smith’s speech to Neo in which Agent Smith describes a virtual reality designed for humans without suffering; Agent Smith informs Neo that a life without suffering led to the death of the humans immersed in that virtual reality.  Zizek quotes Agent Smith:  “I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.”  With nothing to kvetch about, humans literally die, which is precisely the secret truth of the bumper sticker.  The requirement of suffering is illustrated in real life by the heroin addict, whose escape from suffering and misery through a needle is a slow fade out of reality.  Zizek encapsulates this truth succinctly: “(T)he experience of an insurmountable obstacle is the positive condition for us, as humans, to perceive something as reality.  Reality is ultimately that which resists.”  I would take this argument to its logical extreme, with a psychoanalytic reformulation of Descartes cogito: “I kvetch, therefore I am.”

 

Look up the word kvetch on Wikipedia and you will encounter the following enlightening passage from Glen David Gold’s novel, “Carter Beat the Devil” (to which I now owe a karmic debt and will have to check out from the library): “Make a commitment, Charlie.  Go with life or go with death, but quit the kvetching.  Don’t keep us all in suspense.”  But the human condition is exactly the inability to make such a choice, and faced with this eternal impasse the only sane response is to kvetch.  The crowning insight of Freud’s genius, what allows psychoanalysis to bring us in direct contact with the God who would have us kvetch, was his postulation of the death drive, the human drive towards the nothingness found only in death.   The death drive, placed in tension with the life force visible in Freud’s concepts of Eros and the pleasure principle, is the last necessary step in Freud’s unrivaled contribution to our understanding of the human condition.  The human subject is at last revealed as a clearing where the irreconcilable elements in Man (and in Woman) endlessly slip and slide past one another. 

 

Against the harmony of yin and yang, Freud gives us the (unavoidable) neurosis of life and death.  I don’t know about you, but I’ve met a lot of neurotics in my day, especially the one in the mirror, but the only Zen Master I’ve encountered is Hall of Fame basketball coach Phil Jackson, and that was on TV.  If nothing else, Freud has sheer numbers on his side; if a billion red Chinese can’t be wrong, then 6 billion neurotics would seem to close the book on the elusive goal of realizing basic goodness, as its called in Tibetan thought.  The kernel of truth in the eastern notion of non-attachment, as developed on the meditation cushion, is the ability to weaken the attachment to one’s neuroses; the notion of abolishing these neuroses altogether through the act of meditation, however, is fool’s gold.  In the kvetch, however, there exists an alternative path through one’s neuroses.  And it is only with the kvetch that we can laugh at the joke God has played on all of us.  As my wife often implores me, apparently afraid that the Joker within me will dissipate on my meditation cushion, go ahead and Google the list of great Buddhist humorists….

 

Lest we Christians feel that the heights of kvetching can only be reached by the Jews, we would do well to remember that Jesus’ last, and perhaps most important act before his death and resurrection, was his kvetch on the cross.  In his last moment clothed in mortal flesh, Jesus cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.”  With this kvetch, relying for the moment on the definition of kvetch as “to be urgent, or insistent; press; strain”, rather than the more common definition of “a nagging complaint”, Jesus demonstrated the fullness of his humanity in his complete acquiescence to the tragic human condition of being caught inescapably between life and death, symbolized perfectly in his last hours on the cross.  (That Jesus answered the tragedy of his fully human life and death with the fully Divine resurrection, whatever that was, and what he accomplished in doing so, is a conversation for another occasion).

 

Of course, the kvetch, as act, does not stand alone.  In clearing the ground of existence, kvetching opens up the space for its most important counterpart, the kvell:  “to be delighted; to be extraordinarily proud; rejoice”.  Without the counterbalancing effect of kvelling, kvetching, which at its best includes at least a grain of humor (or as in Jesus’ case, heartrending urgency), shrinks down to mere whining, in the process losing its life giving vitality.  That kvelling occurs most often in the context of pride in one’s children informs us that the necessary companion to kvetching is compassion for the other.  If God’s Kingdom ever does come, there will still be plenty of kvetching.  But there will be even more kvelling, by all of us for each and every one of us.