Introductory note: I wrote this blog in the amidst of my joy following the return to their families of the first three Israeli hostages and my hopes that more will be released this weekend, and amidst my trepidation that #47 is back in the White House:

A long-time friend and colleague asked me last week: “John – did you ever think you’d become a writer when you retired?” The answer was no. I had actually little clarity about what I was going to do five plus years ago, but I trusted myself enough that I’d figure it out in time. Though I always wrote as a part of my congregational rabbinate (e.g. sermons, divrei Torah, poetry, blogs, reports, etc.), I never considered myself a mamash (Heb. “a real”) writer because good writing is an art and I’d done nothing in my life to enhance my writing skills to that high level. I didn’t take creative writing classes in high school or at the university, nor had I ever been mentored by a writer, or even read literature critically until relatively recently. My goal in reading was to gain knowledge and wisdom from great thinkers (e.g. historians, philosophers, theologians, political figures, and social scientists) in order to become a competent teacher and leader.

I’ve read a few books and essays over the years about writing (e.g. Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and Stephen King’s On Writing), become more keenly attuned to what good writing looks and sounds like in film, television, fiction, and non-fiction works, and considered what a wide variety of writers have characterized as essential virtues they understand to be part of their writing process, how they discipline themselves to write daily, and what are common frustrations and goals.

I recall as an undergraduate studying art history and reading an interview with Picasso as an old man. The interviewer pointed to a work Picasso drew that included a few flowing lines evoking a feminine figure and asked the master: “How long did it take you to create that drawing.” Picasso paused and said: “A lifetime!”

I understood even then as a 20-year old student what he meant, and I yearned and hoped that one day I might develop the consummate skill, expertise, understanding, and wisdom to produce something unique, creative and meaningful, recognizing of course that a Picasso is a once-in-a-generation-artist and I am definitely not that.   

Writing well for me always has been difficult. I knew that my congregation expected me to say something important whenever I spoke (especially on the High Holidays), and so I painstakingly edited myself, over and over again, feeling at times tortured by the process. I felt a persistent fear that what I wrote and delivered wasn’t nearly good enough for the very smart, educated, experienced, and wise communities I served in Hollywood, Washington DC, and San Francisco. I understood that my congregations were populated with experts in their fields whose IQ points were far superior to my own. I so often threw to the garbage what took hours and days of research, thinking and writing to produce because what I eventually wrote wasn’t worthy of my community.

Two virtues I do possess are that I’m persistent and that I learn from my missteps and failures. I learned from a very young age that no one was going to hand me anything, that I had to work hard to succeed at whatever I did, and so to write well and say something meaningful became important once I became the rabbi of my community.

I write most mornings now, usually before dawn when it’s quiet and dark and I can think clearly with focus and intention. I consider what I’m reading, what I did, learned and failed at yesterday, and how today I can improve myself.

An actor and director friend used to quote to me what the 19^th century American stage actor Edwin Booth once called the “solemn whisper of the god of all arts.” Quoting such a god, Booth said: “I shall give you hunger and pain and sleepless nights, also beauty and satisfaction known to few, and glimpses of the heavenly life. None of these shall you have continually, and of their coming and going you shall not be foretold.”

Booth was right. Tapping into the so-called “heavenly life” comes rarely, but is enough to keep one writing and working the words and ideas, and hoping that as a writer one might experience that which great actors, orators, artists, athletes, writers, poets, dancers, and musicians experience from time to time, or what the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Robert Csikszentmihalyi named the psychological concept of “flow,” a highly focused mental state in which everything a person is and knows becomes integrated effortlessly in a moment.

Think, for example of the finely and exquisitely toned nearly perfect Olympic athletes scoring nothing but 10s, a Kobe Bryant scoring 81 points in a single game when he could not miss a shot from anywhere on the court, a Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel writing his greatest works, and of so many composers, dancers, musicians, and writers who once they perfected their craft they transcended themselves in their art. Think also of great scholars in medicine, the law, education, and business who know their subject so well, their skills are so finely tuned and whose long years of experience, of failure and triumph, enables them intuitively to see clearly, as if from ten thousand feet, the totality of the matter at hand and understand what is true and false and what is the wisest course of action.

To be an effective writer, one has to know first and foremost what one thinks, and then with clarity and passion, nuance and balance, focus and intention, and with a vibrant and visionary imagination put words to the page truthfully without extraneous fluff. Great writers dig deeply into their ideas, throw their fears of self-revelation aside, and with simplicity take everything they know and feel into account. When all that’s done, with honesty finally they put their writing onto a page.

For me, I’ve chosen to write because I need to do so, not only to quell my often restless heart and soul, but to clarify for myself, at the very least, what I think, feel and know. In retirement, I gratefully have the time to do this. My reward is the product, and if what I’ve written is good enough, I offer it even if it doesn’t quite reveal the “solemn whisper of the god of all arts.”