Each of us is a story; an infinite series of stories contained in a book with a sometimes hard and sometimes soft cover.
We are fiction, non-fiction, fantasy, reality and occasionally all of those at the same time. We are the characters, narrators, writers, scenery, readers and critics; and because we are wonderfully and mysteriously human our characters are happy, sad, wonderful, miserable, generous and stingy in ways that would make even Ebenezer Scrooge blush.
We withhold what those we love want the most -- because we also want more of it -- and we withhold our very best from ourselves because we fear it is finite; but it is not.
Only the cover of our book is time-limited and can wear out. But our stories, placed in the hands of a Skilled Binder can be rebound, reframed and recirculated. Our children and grandchildren read and interpret them and what was formerly background moves into the foreground, and a metaphor emerges from the shadows.
What seems so minor becomes major, and the reverse is true, also.
In our Book of Life there may be a table of contents or list of chapters and an index listing important people, events and maybe even places we have been. Oddly, but perhaps universally true, we sometimes discover ourselves -- too late -- by reading the index at the end. There we discover how and what our life was. But by then it is memories and the moments of meaning may be missing.
The rabbis tell us to live each day as if it were our last; making amends and seeking forgiveness. I wonder, though, what would happen if we lived each day as if it were our first and every sight, sound, feeling, taste ... every experience were new? No book or CD could contain all that we each are; the life that is ours.
Maybe, before we were stories, when we were safely embedded in the womb that would deliver us into life, maybe we were letters of the alphabet influenced by ancestors and the flow of the amniotic world. Sometime after birth we developed into words that formed sentences.
Looking back, in what seems now like seconds, we became paragraphs that filled pages. And, in the brevity or length of a lifetime our stories rose from the pages. Our story is our life. And it is written and rewritten in each generation.
Albert Micah Lewis is rabbi of Congregation Beth El in Traverse City.
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