No mask in court – Thoughts before Rosh HaShanah

Many years ago, I had a disturbing moment as a counselor when it became clear to me that a client with marital problems was out-and-out lying to me. I’ll tell you how I knew in a moment, but what a teacher said to me many years earlier hit me like a bat fleeing a cave and has stuck with me ever since: “Some people go into counseling in order to be someone else.”

When my teacher said that I recalled a line from Rilke’s Book of Hours:  “Keiner lebt sein leben,” “No one lives their lives,” (p. 164 in the Barrow/Macy translation).

From the German: “No one lives their lives. People are coincidences. Voices, plays, everyday routines, fears, many small happinesses, dressed up as children, wrapped up in mature masks, silent as faces . . . There must be treasure houses where all these lives are laid away, lives into which no real being has ever stepped, like garments that cannot stand on their own, sinking, clinging to strong walls of vaulted stone . . . all roads lead to the arsenal of unlived things”

In my naivete as a counselor, I thought by default that this fellow’s life “out there” was his real life where he wore the mask, and counseling was the opportunity to drop the mask and discuss problems encountered “out there.”  Perhaps instead with me he was trying on vestments that had hung limply on the wall his whole life.

“What is the real life?” I asked myself.  Perhaps people’s secret lives, their masks, are the real life precisely because some people try so carefully to hide that life from nearly everyone. In “real life” we wear a mask, we say; perhaps the mask is the face of the more real self. I don’t know. Perhaps the hidden life is the core, the unmasked self, and everything else is a shell. So complex – so we take this problem to court on Rosh HaShanah, the arsenal of unlived things.

How did I know the client was not telling the truth? In trying to get the “police report,” things just did not add up. I saw the person’s eyes dart about, and eventually deflect my questions, summing up, “That is not important.” Meaning, for me, it is the most important. “Give it time,” I thought to myself.

When I spoke to the spouse about their marital issues, she mentioned a significant event in passing and saw my surprise. “Uh oh,” she said, “did I out him?”  “Not important,” I said.  “Well, it’s on the internet. I assume you Google everyone,” she said. I do now.

An entire, rather unseemly part of his life, essential for the matter at hand, was left out. If my teacher was correct, the person was trying out a new identity on me, one where the unseemly past had not occurred. Put religiously, the day after Yom Kippur, the day after confession, but skipping Rosh HaShanah, the day in court where we tell the truth to the loving Judge.

The symbols of the Days of Awe are stable, but the meanings are as varied as the people arriving ready-or-not for transformation. The Shofar blast: awaken from moral slumber, or being awakened from a nightmare that insists on being interpreted as if your life depended on it?

The Courtroom: Arrive ready, yet again, for a truthful self-appraisal of our lives with a renewed sense of honest urgency, or maybe desperate, somehow finally ready to admit the truth about ourselves, no excuses, no extenuating circumstances? Knowing that you might flee the courthouse at the last moment, assuring yourself you have another year, when maybe you don’t.

Renewal:  Saying you ready for the death of ego, determined to shed the old skin and a find a new chance at living true? Or perhaps your ego self is secretly smiling just out of sight, knowing that of course you don’t really mean “death of ego,” perhaps mainly because you (your thoughts dominated by an ego terrified of death) have no idea what that death-of-ego really means, what is really required of you. Who would you be without your ego-self?

The tradition knows who you would be. A pure soul.

One name of God in the Days of Awe liturgy is “Chakham ha-Razim,” “The Wise Knower of All Secrets.” Obey the Shofar blast, go to court, and come out a pure soul. Go into Yom Kippur and confess all, by the letters, even the parts that don’t apply to you until they do. Maybe even admit to your counselor.

Granted, to live life on earth, we all have to wear a mask, or several. On these days, however, you don’t have to disguise yourself. You are not a coincidence. You don’t have to wear a mask in court. Take a deep breath. Go deeper than the pain. Go to the arsenal of unlived things. A pure soul is waiting to be born.