Polish-born American author Isaac Bashevis Singer attends Shabbat services at a synagogue in Stockholm, Sweden, the morning of December 9, 1978. He was in Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded at a ceremony the following day. Photo by Chuck Fishman/Getty Images
Contributing Columnist
Emily Tamkin
December 20, 2024
If you are feeling down or maybe a bit lost at the end of this long year, I have some advice. It won’t make everything magically better. But it may help a little. The advice is this: Let Isaac Bashevis Singer teach you a lesson.
Earlier this week, I read his short story “A Piece of Advice” at the end of a long day. I was tired and sad. This time of year is always difficult, in a way — the trudge from Thanksgiving to a holiday break can feel long — and is especially so this year. I don’t know anyone, really, who has had a great 2024. And I know many, many people who are looking toward 2025, and the incoming presidential administration, with some mix of dread and resignation.
The premise of Singer’s story: A young man has a father-in-law who is, and knows he is, a bad-tempered man. He wants to deal with his anger. And so the young man takes his father-in-law to see a rabbi. The rabbi tells him to flatter everyone he meets, even scoundrels. This suggestion enrages the father-in-law; he hates flatterers.
But later, at Shabbat service, the rabbi offers the following wisdom, on the question of what a Jew should do if he is not a pious man, “Let him play the pious man. The Almighty does not require good intentions. The deed is what counts. It is what you do that matters.”
And so they go back home, and the father-in-law listens to what the rabbi said. He stops snapping at people. He still feels angry, but he speaks softly. “One could feel that he did this only with great effort,” our narrator, the son-in-law, tells us. “That’s what made it noble.” And in time, the father-in-law becomes less angry, too.
The story concludes with the narrator remembering that the rabbi once said that “thou shalt not covet” is the last of the Ten Commandments, because the main thing is to change one’s actions, not one’s desires. “And so it is with all things,” our narrator tells us. “If you are not happy, act the happy man. Happiness will come later. So also with faith. If you are in despair, act as though you believed. Faith will come afterwards.”
I read the ending and then read it a second time, aloud.
It is so easy to despair, at the end of this generally miserable year. It is so tempting to believe that nothing matters. President-elect Donald Trump ran a campaign that, as far as I could tell, primarily consisted of saying things that were not true, and insulting various minority groups and women. With these brave tactics, he won not only the election, but also, for the first time, the popular vote. Fewer Americans are following the news closely, so who even knows if any of what we journalists reported and wrote through the whole slog actually reached people. So many things are bad and will get worse. It is so tempting to believe that nothing matters.
I am not saying that it’s a mitzvah to pretend that things are actually good, or lie to ourselves about reality. But I do think that it can’t hurt to see if the rabbi in the story has a point. Acting as though not all is lost won’t necessarily help us find our way. But giving up and conceding that all is lost is guaranteed to keep us mired in the dark.
I think Singer probably knew this as well as anyone.
Born in the early 1900s, not far from Warsaw, he moved to the United States four years before the Nazi invasion of Poland. The third part of his memoir is called Lost in America, suggesting that he was not someone who always knew exactly what he was doing, or the purpose for why he was doing it.
And yet he also found it within himself to write this story — and many others, and novels, and essays, much of which first appeared in Yiddish in this very publication. Yiddish scholar Saul Noam Zaritt wrote that Singer was “beholden both to the demands of the transcendental and to the banalities of the everyday without always finding common ground between them.” Perhaps he wrote as though one day he could find that connective material, and make sense of it all.
I read the story and thought about, and Singer, and myself. If I acted as though things are not sure to simply proceed from bad to worse, who would I try to help? How would I spend my time and my money and my energy?
And maybe it’s true that journalism is dying and nobody is reading the news and nothing I write gets through to anybody. But what if I wrote as though it did matter. Which ideas would I advance? Whom would I try to reach?
In this case, the answer to that latter question is you. And what I am trying to say is that the days will get shorter and darker this week, but then they will get longer and brighter again. And horrible things will happen next year, but none of them are written in stone yet.
And for now you are here, and I am, too,
Because we are here, I think we should act as though what we do and say matters.The deed is what’s important. Faith — or whatever you want to call it — may come afterwards.
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