Moving and Growing

[This week's Haveil Havalim is here]

Jack is moving, apparently, and he seems a bit down about it. [Unless this is yet another mix of fiction/fact, which Jack likes to do from time to time.]

I've moved too many times. After a lifetime in one house, from pre-school through semichah (dorming doesn't count; neither do two years in Israel), I've lived in three cities, and numerous homes.

In Rhode Island, we had an apartment and then the first floor of a house and then the second floor of a different house.

In Pennsylvania we had our one, beautiful, spacious home, for eight years; I still keep a picture of it on my cell phone. Here, take a look. It had a two-story library, 5 bedrooms, hardwood floors, double-sized yard, and three aravah bushes I planted.











Here in Toronto we're in our third year in a rented house, and we know we need to move out at the end of this year. Where in town is as yet unresolved.

I never wanted a peripatetic life. I always wanted to live in one place, be part of one community, preferably in Israel. The Israel piece didn't work out, for very good reasons that won't be on this blog. But I still wanted to be in one community, for the sake of my relationships and work, for the sake of my children and their stability. I've written about this before.

But so it is, a life of transitions.

I cope by trying to make it an experience of transformation, rather than mere transition, so that I have sense of going toward something rather than simply shifting locations. Every move should be adding something, broadening or changing me in some way.

Picking up and moving is hard, confusing, alienating. If it happens without growth, it's just all of those emotions without any payoff. The newness of a place may relieve boredom, but that's about it for most people. We naturally need some fulfillment to go along with it.

Biblically, Yosef's travels were supposed to teach him something, make him greater, transform him. It was more than a move to Egypt, to prison, to the palace; Yosef was to grow. And it worked, and he was patient and it paid off.

On the other hand, the Jews' travels when they left Egypt were supposed to teach them and make them greater, and it didn't work. They were the same people, just in a different setting, and it showed as they travelled for 40 years largely without outgrowing their original problems. Frustration. And consequent disaster.

The same applies to our many life changes – birthdays, marriages, bereavement, illness, job changes and so on. If we only transition, then we just get frustrated. We need to grow.

So I need to keep asking myself whether I am transitioning or transforming.

As a new year begins – I pick up our new Sgan at the airport tonight, and the new avreichim arrive in the coming days, and I'm planning new shiurim and chavrusos – I need to maintain that question on the front burner. Am I transitioning or transforming? And if it’s the former, how can I make it the latter?

Dangerous Doppelgangers

Has this ever happened to you?

Standing on line at the supermarket checkout, davening next to someone in shul, sitting next to someone at a meeting, you notice that the person beside you bears a strong resemblance to someone you know, and like. Instinctively, you feel and act more friendly to him than might be expected, perhaps drawing a suspicious look.

Alternatively, she looks like someone with whom you’ve had a run-in, and you start to shy away, perhaps drawing nervous glances.

This happens to me all the time. One person I met a few months ago resembles a cousin of mine. Another looks like the principal at a school in a community in which I once lived. A third matches a regular from one of my shiurim in Allentown, and a fourth strongly resembles a boy I taught for his bar mitzvah. Yet another looks like my children’s former pediatrician, and another like a person who gave me an incredibly hard time in my shul – a dozen years ago.

The result: I meet people and instantly feel friendly or cold, paternal or jokey or turned-off or trusting, based not on any experience with them but on experience with people whom they resemble.

I know it’s happening, I l know my reaction is just the product of a resemblance, but I feel it anyway.

Where does this come from?

1. Part of it is from the general disorientation of being uprooted from a small-to-mid-sized city where I lived for eight years, to a megalopolis with a ton of people I’ve never met. Since moving to Toronto in August, I’ve meet many hundreds of people, in all parts of the city. I see people in one place, then, weeks or months later, run into them in a completely different part of the city. I meet someone at Shopper’s Drug Mart, then in shul, then at a shiur, then at a shiva house… it’s all very disorienting, and remembering people’s names and associations and roles is occasionally a real challenge.

2. Part of it is from the mind’s natural urge to categorize: We make intuitive leaps in order to simplify our input, grouping people and interactions in different ways – and some of those leaps are just wrong.

3. And part of it is that physiognomy – the practice of reading people’s character from their appearance – is real. Posture, facial expression, alertness and more are often a product of personality, and so we tend to intuit, based on experience, that people who look alike will also have similar personalities.

And so I find myself asking myself, not infrequently (and agrammatically): Who do you think you’re talking to?

Weird.

For Sale

I’m not sure why the “For Sale” sign bothers me so much.

It went up in front of my house yesterday, and, more than anything else we’ve done so far in the moving process, it really got me. And I don’t know why.

I used to love House For Sale signs, because my first real sensitivity to them came when we move to Allentown and were looking for a place to live. Every new sign signaled a new opportunity.

Then, having moved here, I came to dislike them, since they now indicated a family was looking to leave.

And now I have one of my own, Re-Max Red (is that a Crayola color?), on the grassy curb.

It’s not that I am in love with our house itself. I actually always wanted to live in a hovel, a barely-furnished apartment with bookcases and a card table, to be one of those people who doesn’t really pay attention to physical surroundings, and although I’ve made the concession to shared family life of having a nicer home, nicer furnishings, etc, I’ve never really grown attached to it.

Well, yes, I love the beautiful two-story library.
And the big backyard is great.
And the space in front for my plants and flowers, too.
And the spacious living room and dining room.
And the kitchen skylights.
And the large bedrooms, and hardwood floors.
And I know that there’s no way we’re going to be able to afford anything half as good in our new home.

But, really, I don’t think that’s what’s driving my dislike for “For Sale.”

It may be the finality of placing the sign, even though the deal has been “final” for some time now.
It may be my discomfort with advertising to the entire neighborhood, every dog-walker, every jogging Muhlenberg College student, every everyone, that the Torczyners are moving. (Granted it's all over my blog...)
It may be the yuckiness (there’s probably another word somewhere for this, something stronger than dislike and more toward creepiness) of feeling that people are going to be stopping by the sign and examining and assessing our home.
It may be the automatic nostalgia I know I’m supposed to feel, and so I reflexively create for myself kind of like the faux-Thanksgiving-feeling I get towards the end of November just because it's advertised everywhere.

I don’t know. But I definitely don’t like it. So if you’re planning on buying our home, please do it soon, so we can take down the sign and get on with things.