A Call to Normalcy
Whenever I bring my family to the East Coast for camp, they pick up little verbal nuances from the New Yorkers. “The counselah said I should take two dollahs and pick myself up a nawmal swim cap,” my six-year-old daughter told me. Somehow in a NY accent, the word “normal” contains subtleties we don’t have in the Midwest. That word in the mouths of many native English speakers means “not unusual”. However to some it means “the way you should be and if you are the least bit different you are are a freak, oddball, or from Mars.” It seems that lots of people place an importance on keeping the status quo and not doing anything unusual. “Just be “normal”.
Even those who want to be hip, cool, and avant guarde still have their limits. I found this out the hard way. While after I graduated art school I hung out with some hip, different, avant garde types. However, when I became an Orthodox Jew most of my friends couldn’t handle the change. I wasn’t “normal” anymore. Because “normal” is not having any strong feelings about God. Normal is being quasi atheistic, sort of agnostic, not professing any particular point of view on religion. As part of the hip crowd, you can grow your hair long, shave your head, quote Sartre or Scoobie-Doo, take drugs, be a bi-sexual prostitute, or meditate in a Buddhist monastery. But traditional religion in the form of Judaism or Christianity is just going too far. Every group has its own status quo or range of behavior and attitude they consider normal.
In the introduction to a book on gossip written by a traditional scholar in Poland, Rabbi Kagan mentions a natural internal voice that tells you that following the laws of gossip in Jewish law carefully will make you abnormal. You won’t be able to have “normal” conversations. We are afraid not to be Normal. Jewish consciousness stresses strict adherence to a code of law that regulates what kind of derogatory things can be said, and what can’t. Just like the movies where a little angel pops up on one shoulder and a little devil pops up on the other, it is our belief that inside of us a moral dilemma causes several internal voices to speak up. Sometimes when we are inspired to be a better quality of person on the planet, a little voice speaks up and says, “But if you do that you won’t be normal.
What is normal?
The question is asked sometimes – What if everyone acts weird? Is that the new normal? What if everyone gossips? Is that normal? What happens when there’s so much corruption around you that you stop noticing it? Does humanity really have the potential to get along at all times? Do we really have the ability to stay married, not be jealous, and figure out what to do about Social Security? When we stop having expectations for the world and think of our problems as normal, we lose the desire to change things for the better.
We live in a time period where evil people in power control others, there’s constant, seemingly unsolvable conflict in the Middle East, much of the world lives in poverty, meanwhile most people seem disconnected from a type of spirituality that is practical and uplifting. This is not normal. None of this is normal. It’s easy to fall into a daily routine and at the same time relate to the world’s problems with indifference. We think divorce is normal. Well it may be common, but it is certainly not normal. What “normal” should mean is the way of life that we believe the Almighty wants and we have the potential to make happen. If there is enough food on the planet to feed everyone, which a research group in Washington said there is, then we have the ability to feed everyone. It’s not impossible, just difficult.
In other words, normal is not necessarily the way things are or look, normal is the way things ought to be. We’ve gotten used to a pretty messed up world.
It’s about time we brought back to being ….normal.
