Notes on the Wandering Mind 7: Wandering as the Jewish Paradigm for Rejecting Toxic Cultural Myths

“When this great one was weaned, he began to wander in his mind…”

– Maimonides on Abraham

In Jewish tradition, the forefathers are all assigned little nicknames or epithets meant to shine a spotlight on the quality responsible for their greatness. Joseph is “Joseph-the-Righteous,” for remaining steadfastly connected to God through a life of radical upheaval replete with reversals of fortune, from tragedy to triumph and back again. Isaac is known as “Terror-of-Isaac” because his relationship with God was seared in sublime surrender and traumatic awe at being bound on an altar and nearly sacrificed by his father. Abraham is “Abraham Av-inu,” usually translated as Abraham-Our-Forefather.” 

But the Hebrew word Av (“forefather”) can also mean “paradigm case,” and both senses are clearly embedded in the epithet. Jewish tradition very consciously positions Abraham not merely as an esteemed figure of the past but a model for timelessly persistent, reliably recurring dynamics of human life. As a prominent midrashic saying often applied to segments of his life-journey goes, “The stories of the ancestors are signals to the descendants.” If we see Abraham as a Wanderer, we should also see him as a paradigm-case for Wandering as a new kind of sacred path. 

As a paradigm of Sacred Wandering, what can we learn from him? How can we practice Avrahamic Wandering here and now? 

Of course, the perils of Wandering outside the societal status quo are in no way confined to the distant past. Nor are the needs, the pressures and contradictions, that invariably catalyze such Wandering in the first place. That make it the indispensable safety valve, the transformative yeast that forces powerful cultural interests to wake up and respond, or die in their sleep as they are overtaken by the next Wandering wave. How is any society supposed to grow and evolve – and thereby survive – without elements within it continually testing, stretching, and expanding its boundaries? These are the Avrahamic Wanderers. 

Some can be found on my bookshelf. Some I’ve interviewed on my podcast. 

An example of someone here and now who imo is masterfully practicing Avrahamic Wandering is the physician and author Gabor Mate. Mate spent four decades accruing clinical experience as a family physician. During that time, he also accrued many questions about the range of factors impacting health, healing, and medical treatment – as compared to the narrow lens of the contemporary medical establishment and the mindsets and practices it promotes, so often distorted by perverse incentives and toxic practices normalized as axiomatic and natural. “By its very nature,” Mate writes in his recently published masterpiece The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, “our social and economic culture generates chronic stressors that undermine well-being in the most serious of ways, as they have done with increasing force over the past several decades.” (Myth of Normal, p.3) 

Mate arrives at this pregnant insight by mind-wandering all the way outside of our current, shared culture to “unfasten the myths that keep the status quo locked in place.” He shines a spotlight on some of the most insidiously inhuman, pervasive (and thus largely invisible) ideas,  ideals, practices, and norms that we’ve somehow become conditioned to accept as normal. “Those features of daily life that appear to us now as normal,” he writes, 

are the ones crying out the loudest for our scrutiny. That is my central contention. My core intention is to offer a new way of thinking and talking about these phenomena, bringing them from the background to the foreground so we might more quickly find their much needed remedies…much of what passes for normal in our society is neither healthy nor natural. And that to meet modern Society’s criteria for normality is in many ways to conform to requirements that are profoundly abnormal in regard to our nature-given needs. Which is to say unhealthy and harmful on the physiological, mental, and even spiritual levels. 

Mate has choice words and compelling arguments against many of society’s pillar institutions and unquestioned verities – particularly our assumptions, ideologies, and cultural practices around health and healing. 

…when we can look soberly at what we as a culture have normalized about health and illness, and realize that it is not in fact the way things are meant or fated to be, there arises the possibility to returning to what nature has always intended for us…healing — a word that at its root means “returning to wholeness”…If we could begin to see much illness itself as an expected and therefore normal consequence of abnormal, unnatural circumstances, it would have revolutionary implications for how we approach everything health-related. The ailing bodies and minds among us would no longer be regarded as expressions of individual pathology, but as living alarms directing our attention toward where our society has gone askew, and where our prevailing certainties and assumptions around health are in fact fictions. Seen clearly, they might also give us clues as to what it would take to reverse course and build a healthier world.