The Theme Song of Life
Then the Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper [a]suitable for him.” Genesis 2:18 NASB
Alone – We all die alone. From birth to death we struggle to find connection. Sometimes we succeed. Sometimes we don’t. But the drive is there, only to be extinguished at the very end. The goal of life is not to be alone.
The Hebrew term expresses it powerfully. lĕbaddo – “toward itself this.” Internally focused. The world of fantasy inside where a man is his own god of creation. Where the external world can be bent to whatever he desires. To live apart from reality, because in reality loneliness is a constant threat. Even the saying “Man does not live by bread alone” communicates the necessity of relationship with another. Man is not human in the isolated world—and we know this. So, when we feel that cosmic loneliness begin to wrap its icy fingers around us, we retreat “indoors,” inside our fantasy lives where it’s safe, where we can have the pretend connections we desperately need to survive. Man is “hardwired” for connection and he must find it in order to become himself. It is precisely this estrangement from himself that Jacob encounters at the brook.
Rabbi Shraga Freedman makes an interesting and applicable observation. “The Torah enjoins us in the strongest terms to eschew dishonesty of any sort. This admonition takes an unusual form: ‘Midvar sheker tirchak – Distance yourself from a word of falsehood.’ Nowhere else do we find that the Torah not only adjures us to refrain from something but even admonishes us to distance ourselves from the matter. . . What about sheker makes it so much worse than anything else the Torah prohibits? . . . The grave sin of sheker is an attempt to escape from reality, to envelop oneself in a world of fantasy and to avoid facing real life.”[1]
“All by myself” is a lie, a fantasy that perpetuates another uncreated world, a distance from the God of connection. I can’t become me “all by myself.” All by myself is death. But my real world, the brokenhearted fragments of God’s creation, is filled with “all by myself” experiences. The Jewish psychiatrist Irvin Yalom underscored the point: “As death approaches, many are aware that when they perish their whole unique separate world will perish as well—that world of sights and sounds and experiences unknown to anyone else, not even life partners.”[2] The truth is tragically harsh. We are alone. No one, not even the closest other, really shares our unique experience of life. It is a completely solitary journey. That’s the reality that we run away from. That’s the truth we don’t want to admit. Sheker creates the lie that pushes away these terrifying thoughts. It creates the un-real world, the world where we imagine we are safely connected. But it’s all vanity, as Qohelet writes, except . . .
God knows.
And He’s the only One Who really does. A life without that relationship is a desperate cry in the dark for something the world can never give—final connection. If we need God for nothing else, we need Him for this. I don’t want to be “all by myself” anymore.
Topical Index: alone, lie, lĕbaddo, sheker, connection, Genesis 2:18
[1] Rabbi Shraga Freedman, Living Kiddush Hashem (ArtScroll Mesorah Publications, 2014), pp. 230-231.
[2] Irvin D. Yalom, Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir, p. 198.
Amen… emet!