Open Letter To My Students 49: Happy Birthday!

Today is my birthday, an unimportant one, mind you, my 81^st, nothing like the big “80” of a year ago. Still, it is a birthday, so now what? 

I have come to see birthdays not just for their cake and parties; nor even as enforced moments to celebrate (or to rue) the passing of time; but as opportunities to look back and ahead, to take stock of what we have become and what we still can be. Life is properly likened to an art, the art of living, as if we are both the work of art and the artist. Artists regularly step back from their work to get perspective. We artists of life can use birthdays to appreciate ourselves as our own artwork.

The art of living is more like a collage than a painting, because collage is three-dimensional, with layers on top of layers. So too with life: as we grow in years, we are never completely able to erase the more difficult or painful layers of what we were, but we can apply new layers over them. If we look honestly at our life as art, we see layers that are bright with joy, but also somber hues of unhappier times: traumas that came out of nowhere; the multiple ways we went wrong; times of embarrassing foolishness, even stupidity. Yet here we are: survivors.

Our Jewish ancestors who had survived an external threat to their lives developed the custom of declaring the day of their escape a personal Purim. I think birthdays should be a personal Yom Kippur, an introspective look at who we are, but with a friendly feeling, not the dread, the accent on sin, the heaviness, and the fasting.

This very view accords with a halachic study that I discovered many years ago, on whether Jews should even keep birthdays in the first place. I gave it to a then still Student-Rabbi Elaine Zecher, who analyzed it as her rabbinic thesis.^[1] Good news: the majority of rabbinic authorities say we can, and probably should, celebrate birthdays, especially as aging makes us increasingly grateful to be alive—certainly at age 70 and older; but some say, “Start at 50”; and, yes, some say “any age at all.”  

We are to say the blessing thanking God for “bringing us to this moment” (shehechiyanu); maybe even frame the birthday party as a religiously incumbent feast (s’udat mitzvah); certainly give charity (tz’dakah); but most important, “look back and take stock of what we have done” – like my friendly Yom Kippur.

Taking stock, however, implies not just looking back but looking ahead; and that, I think, is where our customary birthday wish comes in. Only after we blow out the candles and make a wish, do people sing Happy Birthday, as if to say, “May your wishes come true!” Who knows what wishes people make? You’re not supposed to say, so I have no evidence. But I bet they vary with the stages of our lives. 

I divide our life cycle into five such stages, one for each book of Torah, each one with its own inbuilt cluster of wishes. Genesis (B’reishit) is childhood, when wishes are elemental, unplanned, and transient. Exodus (Sh’mot) brings young adulthood, with wishes that revolve about the excitement (and insecurity) of becoming our own person, establishing our name in the world, and taking on responsibility, as Israel did at Sinai. In Leviticus, the middle book, wishes emerge from the mundane stuff of ordinary life, our middle years, when we are “called” (as in the Hebrew name, Vayikra) to everyday work and sacrifice, for ourselves and for those who depend on us. Numbers (B’midbar –“in the wilderness”) brings frantic wishes to get out of the desert of our mid-life crises. In Deuteronomy, we, like Moses, look back on what we have done, and formulate wishes for life’s final chapter, before we die. 

But wishes, by their very nature, are unlikely to come true – hence the expression, “wishful thinking.” So regardless of our stage in life, no matter what our circumstances, we need a birthday wish that is dependent on our own internal resources, not the external buffeting of pure sheer luck. And we get that too from treating birthdays as a friendly Yom Kippur.

The Yom Kippur of the High Holy Days is much more than just a day to acknowledge our sins. More broadly speaking, it is the opportunity to appear before God exactly as we are and without pretense — something we dare to do, because God is imagined as the ideal parent, the mother or father who sees right through us, acknowledges our shortcomings, but nonetheless, knows us, loves us, and insists that we are good. A million forces and people here on earth do their best to frustrate our wishes and leave us feeling bad: about what goes wrong, about who we are or think we ought to have become, about how we have failed, about how we are unloved or even unlovable, and on and on and on. The thing about Yom Kippur, even with all its somberness, is that we know in advance just how it ends: with assurances we are worthwhile, loved, of value, able to go on.

All the more so on birthdays, then, the friendlier Yom Kippur that I have in mind. On the actual Yom Kippur, we appear before God. On birthdays, I picture God appearing before us, an invisible invited guest who applauds our blowing out the candles, and leaves us with the gift of self-esteem, inner strength, and assurance that, come what may, the next year can be at least manageable, and maybe even more: joyous, rewarding, the happiness of “Happy Birthday” spilling over to sustain us. Armed with this divine gift, we may greet the next year of life — my 82^nd, your 28^th, 47^th, 64^th, or whatever – with peace of mind and with confidence, once the candles are blown out, the cake is eaten, and the party is over.   

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^[1] Elaine Zecher, Birthday Celebrations and Personal Spirituality in the Rabbinic Tradition (Unpublished Rabbinic Thesis, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, 1988). Cf. Chagigat Yom Huledet B’yisra’el,  Or Hamizrach 31:2 and 31:3-4 (1983).