Actor (and 50 percent Jew) Paul Newman once said the best direction he ever got on a film set was: “Crowd the guy.” Beautifully succinct, ain’t it? It has a nicer ring than most of the Hallmark card life prescriptions we hear every day: Don’t worry; be happy. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Floss daily.
I’ve been thinking about advice, the giving and the taking of it. We love to dish it out, but we don’t always follow it. Occasionally, we welcome pithy direction, especially if it has some real use, as opposed to the spoonful-of-sugar variety.
I can’t say whether Jewish advice is distinct, but I decided to survey friends in the Bay Area Jewish community to find out. I asked a simple question:
What was the single best bit of Jewish direction you ever got?
The responses surprised me in that the sources came from across the Jewish universe: from mom and dad to the Torah to Jewish joke books.
Lisa Geduldig, founder of Kung Pao Kosher Comedy, says the best advice she got came from her mother. “My entire childhood she said to me ‘Hoch mir nisht kayn tchainik,'” Yiddish for “Don’t hit me with a teakettle,” or “Don’t give me a headache.”
The second best tip from her mom was, “Don’t get married.” Says Lisa, “I don’t think she meant ‘Don’t get married, be a lesbian.’ But I did.”
San Francisco Jewish Film Festival Director Peter Stein told me, “When dealing with the festival’s vociferous audiences — who let us know at length, their opinions on the films, the comfort of the seats, the scheduling, the temperature in the theater, the quality of the coffee at the concession stands, — I was advised by our program director Nancy Fishman to bear this in mind: ‘Among Jews, complaint is a form of prayer.'”
Publicist Lawrence Helman says the best Jewish direction he ever got came from his Ukrainian-born grandmother, “who often told me when I wanted to do two things at once: ‘With one tuchus you can’t dance at two weddings.'”
Noah Alper, founder of Noah’s Bagels and Berkeley’s dearly departed Ristorante Raphael, went lofty on me, quoting from the Pirke Avot: “All Jews are responsible for each other.”
The best advice Congregation Sha’ar Zahav’s Rabbi Camille Angel got came from her father, also a rabbi. “He died when I was 12,” she told me, “but his legacy lives on in me for sure. He used to say, ‘Love Jews! Love Judaism! Give your whole heart to it and you will be sustained!’ Indeed, I am.”
And what about me?
Of all the brilliant Jewish aphorisms I’ve heard — from “Justice, justice shalt thou pursue” to “Repair the world” to “Eat, tatelah, you’re skin and bones” — the most useful I learned years ago from my rabbi in L.A.
During a Judaism 101 course, the rabbi stood before the class and pointed to his left coat pocket. “In this pocket,” he said, “I am but dust and ashes.”
Pointing to the other, he added, “In this one, the whole world was created for me. Take from each as needed.”
This said so much to me about Judaism, about its exaltation of the individual and its concomitant big-picture view of space and time.
Most days, like any baby boomer, I feel as if the world was created for me. After all, didn’t my parents tell me I was a genius? Wasn’t I going to change the world single-handedly?
Not exactly. That didn’t happen. Nor will it. Because, after all, I am but dust and ashes. And it is useful to remind myself from time to time that we’re all just dust mites on a forgotten planet in a humdrum galaxy far, far away. It takes the ol’ ego down a few notches.
Then, when I’ve had it with the dust mite shtick, when I do something worthwhile, when I catch an exceptionally gorgeous sunset over the bay, when I’m reeling from nachas over my son or love for my girlfriend Robyn, or when, in the quiet of night, I find myself glad to have been sustained and brought to this moment, then I dig deep from the first pocket.
So I guess it’s true: clothes do make the man.
Dan Pine can be reached at [email protected].