The folks who brought you the thin, double-spaced best-selling book called The Secret are coming to town.
Written by a television commercial producer with a team of “experts” (a feng shui counsellor, a personal coach and a metaphysician – which medical school does one attend to become a metaphysician?) it has a powerfully positive message with a quasi-religious feel, all in a package designed to look like an ancient scroll.
The message of the book – I can have everything I’ve ever wanted if I just focus on it – comes complete with miracle stories of wealth and finding the partner of your dreams if you just send out the right vibes.
The talk by a member of The Secret team is part of a series by several other “you can get rich by just doing X” speakers, including some of the famous and never-ending series of Chicken Soup for the You-Name-It Soul authors. The series is being touted on the radio and in the news as being able to help you become “a phenomenal you.”
These speakers remind me of an old-fashioned tent revival meeting. Selling miracles without religion, guilt or obligation (except buying their books, of course), they promise to grant my every wish.
It’s so un-Jewish.
What I really love about Judaism is that it isn’t about me fulfilling all my desires, and it’s supposed to make me less self-centred and more aware of my responsibility to others. Judaism comes to conquer that selfishness and to constantly remind us that it’s not all and always about us.
We matter, Judaism says, because we pull our weight. We matter because we are part of a system, a wheel that turns slowly and surely, and moves toward progress and tikkun olam. We make this world a better one because we are in it – not because we think certain thoughts and get certain things, but because we do things that actively change the world.
We devour books like The Secret in the millions – self-help books are the fastest selling books on the market – not so much because we want to escape who we are, but because we desperately want to be in control of who we will become. We want to believe that we can control our lives as easily as we control our TV remotes. The sad secret of these kinds of books is that when we believe only in ourselves, we will believe in just about anything.
Judaism’s secrets go against the popular culture. They aren’t easy or self-serving. How I wish Judaism could promise you unending health and happiness, fewer worries and a way to bring you everything you need and want. How I wish Judaism could make you healthy, wealthy and wise (and thin, but not too thin), and could replace all your fears and sorrows with nothing but unlimited simchahs and security.
But the Judaism I practise is not that simplistic, and it doesn’t have a genie-in-the-bottle God who grants you three wishes and then goes away.
So let’s ask ourselves: why does our society encourage this kind of self-aggrandizement, self-conceit and self-centredness? And why have these kinds of books become our new bibles and these TV gurus our new rabbis?
If you can figure out an answer that challenges you, you may have discovered a real secret.
