The Spiral Staircase

I have read from at least one author who uses the metaphor of a spiral staircase to illustrate various points about how we interact with other people. In this piece I am planning on extending this metaphor to illustrate some important ideas regarding our interactions with other people.

If we take apart the concept of the spiral staircase we might first ask “Why not a ladder, instead of a staircase?”. After all there are verses in our holy Torah that we relate to the vision that Yakov saw in a dream the well know idea of Jacob’s Ladder. The mefarshim (explainers of Torah) do a good job explaining how Jacob’s (Yakov’s) vision is about how neshomas (spirits or souls) are on different rungs of a ladder which goes up to heaven and back down to our world.

If I remember the explanation correctly Yakov could have stopped what ever he was doing right then and there and could have taken his place on the ladder. However Yakov did not do this for reasons which are beyond the scope of this piece.

In our own individual lives we are all somewhere on this great spiral staircase.

 

Life as we experience it is rarely just one straight and direct line from point A to point B. Perhaps if life was like that then perhaps life itself would not be so very interesting. I imagine one of my readers dropping his head into his hands at this point and saying to himself “interesting, that’s what you call my endless tsuris, struggles and aggravation, interesting!”  yes exactly!

If you think deeply about it (as us philosophers often do) just about any single happy memory you may have, most likely has some aspect of sadness or melancholy contained within it. Or, if you prefer, perhaps some of our sadest moments may hold some aspect of joy (even if it is of a bittersweet nature) within it.

Continuing with the above idea we might adopt a similar but somewhat different analogy to explain life’s ups and downs and that might more appropriately be called the Chutes & Ladders metaphor for life. Like the board game for small children we may find ourselves to be continuously on this cycle of working, climbing, building, and then perhaps falling, coasting, or maybe we are just letting ourselves slide. You can aply the Chutes & Ladders concept to just about any endeavor in life. It could be the student who pays attention in class, slacks off (coasts) in his homework, but somehow aces his tests. It could be the dieter who rigidly sticks to a diet (climbing) but then maybe for a day or two goes of the Derek (slides down the chute), but then maybe hopefully gets right back on.

Finally it could be someone who throws his entire self into his work, giving it his every ounce of effort, and then after anywhere from (fill in the blank) three, five, seven or even thirteen years, finds himself back exactly where he got on (at the bottom rung) unemployed.

 

As unfair as the entire thing may sound, that’s life, that’s what people say. However, kudos to those who saw this coming, that is not what this piece is about. Remember, we were first going to take apart the concept of the spiral staircase, telling you what it is not about, so that we could then attempt to put it back together (humpty-dumpty style) to get to the essence of the thing, or at least the way I understood the metaphor when I first read about it.

The spiral staircase is the perfect metaphor to use when we attempt to compare ourselves to any other individual, or theoretic individual. Even though we intuitively understand that we are not supposed to compare ourselves to others, it is still an extremely difficult piece of advice to follow. Indeed it is perhaps a particular building block of society (don’t worry no more elaborate analogies will be introduced) that people compare their accomplishments or achievements at any given age or stage to others.

The spiral staircase analogy is useful when we use it to understand what we might perceive as character flaws in someone else. I will use a simple example, not a perfect example just a simple one, from my own life as a relatively newly observent jew, or BT. I was at shabbos table and they were passing around the mayim achronos (after waters), I carefully poured the water over my fingertips and then used the same water to gently wipe my moustache and beard. Then after the water got passed down to a few more people I watched another BT, who happened to neither have a beard nor a moustache, carefully pour the water over his fingertips, and then wipe his mouth with the same water. I had already known that this particular man, had less BT time in then me. My midos (manners) are well enough established that I would not even dream of pointing out (at least not right then and there) that I only did this additional step because of my beard and moustache. Instead I just shot a quick glance over to our shabbos host, and saw no reason to give it another thought and simply remained silent sporting a big inner smile, to go along with my moderate outer smile.

Let me point out right here, right now, that even right at this very minute I am not sure if there is any reason to either wipe one’s mouth with the mayim achronos or not when one does or does not have a beard. I only know that at other people’s shabbos’ tables I have seen people wipe their beards with the after waters. I say the example is simple albeit not perfect, because this fellow BT was not displaying a character flaw of any kind, he simply was imitating me. The spiral staircase metaphor explains exactly why this was a significant moment for me.

As a BT who was brand new to the frum or what I use to call the orthodox scene, I also used to use the monkey-see-monkey-do method in so many different instances.
 

For example, if someone put their talis over their head, then I did the same thing. If people stood up when they answered a particular phrase in kadish, well then I did to. If I saw someone wipe their beard or moustache with the mayim achronos (after waters), even if I did not have a beard at the time, I remembered it, and then when I sported a beard, I did the same. I did not have an ear to ear smile because I thought what the fellow did was so silly, or funny. Instead I saw a vision of myself, at an ealier phase (maybe just rung or two lower on the spiral staircase) and started to wonder how many things like that I might have done.

Aharon Moshe Sanders-The Writer’s Cafe.org August, 27, 2008

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