Ours is a culture which maintains a paradoxical relationship to individuality. On the surface, America is a place which elevates the rugged individual above all others. "It's you and me against the world, the popular song reminds us. By ourselves, we build our lives around initiative, energy and a willingness to break from the past. American democracy is robust and passionate about personal liberty. Our ideals may stress individualism, but our reality is starkly different.
While praising the individual as the highest American ideal, we spend tremendous amounts of energy and money, assuring that we don't differ too much from everyone else. We work hard to wear the same clothes, live in similar houses, pursue similar hobbies and express remarkably similar opinions. A person who acts too much like an individual is regarded as eccentric (if rich; a kook, if not) and, somehow, a threat to everybody else's convention and habit.
From the very first, we socialize our children into the rules and standards of the general culture. Standardization requires that they forsake the pleasures of simply being, the joy of aimless discovery.
Instead, we foist a premature adulthood on our children, and then wonder at the immaturity which emerges from our adults. Rather than permitting our children a period of undirected exploration, rather than teaching them to do something because of their own inner interests, we cultivate conformity in terms of achievement, awards and ultimately career.
Once that child enters childhood, the preoccupation with compliance expands to include clothing styles, sexual expression and even recreational activities. To a large degree, our frantic pursuit of leisure time reflects the monotony and stress of having to be like everybody else. It's simply too exhausting to have to keep up with the Joneses. We have lost the notion of age-appropriate behavior, that there is no single standard for every single person, that a child needs to be able to live a child's life and that adults require the fullness of maturity, and that each individual will express his or her personality in unique and changing ways.
Just as human beings grow and change through every phase of life, so our expectations and our interests ought to shift and develop to incorporate new insight, new depth and new contentment.
The Torah recognizes the need for standards to fit the personality of each individual. In today's reading, we are told, "You shall not plow with an ox and a donkey together." Why not? Because the way an ox plows and the way a donkey plows are not the same. One animal would constantly feel pressured to adopt the standards of the other. In the process, the internal needs of that individual would be abandoned.
Each individual has needs and perceptions which change and evolve throughout their own lives. No two people are in exactly the same place emotionally at the same time. Indeed, no individual retains a static personality throughout time. One aspect of the genius of Judaism is its ability to blend the changing and growing of each person with his or her continuing need for structure and for belonging. Each different mood and though adds to the sum of who we are. Each requires different times and modes and expression. In the words of Kohelet, "a season is set for everything, a time for every experience under heaven."
To be fully human means to seek out avenues to express responsibility and spontaneity, playfulness and seriousness, love and solitude. To focus only on one particular aspect of our personality would be a diminution of our truest humanity.
Instead, by recalling the imperative not to link an ox and a donkey to the same plow, the Torah reminds us not to flatten our personality into a homogenous, unchanging mass. Rather, by providing appropriate vehicles to express the range of human emotions and insight, Judaism assures a meaningful place for each individual within a caring and sacred community.
Shabbat Shalom