On the deep level of the Jewish wisdom tradition, what has happened in the fallen world is that love and wisdom -- whose pulses can but don't have to be mutually supportive -- have been knocked out of whack with each other. God's mercy and Justice are likened to love and wisdom, but being kind and telling the truth, as our experience proves, is very hard to do, especially at the same time, because the two may be in actual or apparent conflict. When the right and left hand of God-- the wisdom hand and the mercy hand -- are not cooperating -- the fault is not in God but in us. When the two hands fight each other it is because we haven't made the turnings from below that would help unite love and wisdom in the pulse of our own creative lives. This image brings us close to the heart of Jewish dukkha.
(Malachi 3:7)
In true growth we often endure spiritual crises. Perhaps they come from the pressure of the energies of love and wisdom on each other. Sometimes love provokes inwardness, because to let someone into your life where none has gone before you need to open up inside and change the model by which your expectations and possibilities form. Sometimes inwardness generates love, as in recognizing love for an absent partner, or outwardness in new meetings. And sometimes separation evokes the wisdom of solitude as much as the longing of loneliness. And sometimes the power of loving unity suggests its own transience, bringing out the wisdom that this too shall pass.
Because we are free, we are not constrained to integrate love and wisdom, but neither are we always incapable of doing so. Perhaps because love and wisdom, after which we quest, are not unified, they await their culmination in some new expression of humanity in action, humanity struggle to unify wisdom and love under prevailing conditions, prevailing but always passing away, hopeless and hopelessly noble, uncertain and unstable. And this "loving wisdom" or "wise loving" becomes an act of unification briefly reassembling what has been torn apart by the centrifugal forces of creation working out through our culture -- creative deeds that evolve all planetary life and then unravel.
It is from all the turning points in love and wisdom that the fan of possibilities in fan-shaped destiny radiates out along the four paths of love and wisdom or other paths and possibilities. At the nexus moments one can switch planes, change paths, revolutionize one's life. In love when sex changes to eros and you "fall in love with each other" it happens, when eros becomes philia and the lovers become friends it happens, and from philia to agape, love of the creation, and with tikkun as a response to love, it is the same growth. In love, the turning points serve to weave the interpersonal world together in rich and variegated textures.
In wisdom. at the nexus moments, healing can transform to personal growth, or personal growth to healing; then personal growth can become creativity, or creativity personal growth as from the turning points the fan of possibilities widens out. In wisdom cultural evolution occurs. But because we're by nature problematic animals, born to suffer, born to die, riddled with inner contradictions, we can never find permanent happiness or peace. Even to consider happiness or peace the goal or meaning of life brings suffering. It must be that nature ordains the meaning of human life to be something different: something like the full play of our propensities, the exploration of our genome, the expression of our potentialities, diversity, even if our explorations entangle us in situations that give us suffering. Perhaps the creativity through which we evolve culturally is itself a response to our inner conflicts, a neurotic conflict only being the personal coloration of a species-wide conflict coming from our creative and problematic natures, from which the some of us, having been numbed by fear of life, no longer suffer.
Our real task in life is to struggle imperfectly with love and wisdom. We are not to cease to individuate because our temporality limits us or because we must inevitably fail. But we must find the core of ourselves for the very sake of doing, so that we can do for the sake of the world from the center of our uniqueness, sometimes through pleasure and sometimes through pain, and with no assurance of success.
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Copyright 1998 - Ira Rosenberg
Last Updated 09/19/98 (rge)