I have always wondered why many of the issues that occupy other people’s time are of no interest to me.
For example, I noticed a while ago there was a gentleman in shul who was wearing a Donald Trump “Make America Great Again” hat. I overheard him explaining to someone that he was doing this in order to show his solidarity to the former president regarding his policy to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. The listener, who worked for the government, expressed his dissenting opinion as the desire to build the wall was causing government shutdowns, which meant a loss of income for him. I heard both sides but didn’t really have an opinion either way. I figured it’s because I’m not that passionate about politics. (Pretty ironic coming from a political science major.)
More recently, I was in shul on Friday night, and not many people sang together with the chazan. The president of the shul even commented during his announcements that appreciation should go to the few people who joined the singing with the chazan. Some approached the president afterwards and took offense at his remarks, explaining why it was not appropriate for him to call out people for not participating the way he would like. I am usually pretty passionate about the goings-on in shul. I heard both sides but didn’t have a strong opinion either way.
On the radio, I heard a sports talk-show host supporting a college coach for having screamed at a player during an important game. Many people called up and expressed their anger towards their coach for having disciplined his player in such a humiliating way. As a teacher and a parent, I am extremely passionate about both discipline and educating children. Yet, I listened to the radio dispassionately.
Finally, I had started working on a project for work and was going to finish it in the evening. When I sat down to complete it, I found that the work had been deleted. I would now need to start from scratch. I am extremely passionate about my work and my time. Yet, I found the incident more amusing than anything else.
Had any of these incidents occurred a few years ago, I believe my reaction would have been much stronger. However, when recently discussing this topic with a friend, I found myself saying, “It’s hard for me to get too upset about these things—we [my wife and I] have other fish to fry. And the fish we need to fry swim in a whole other ocean.”
The person chuckled and we moved on in the conversation. However, I have found myself thinking about it over and over again.
The above statement explains so much about our life—there are a lot of important things going on—but most people have a hard time understanding them because we are swimming in a whole other ocean. Our ocean doesn’t have nearly as much fish in it, but they are a lot harder to catch. We feel like we spend most of our day and our energy doing other things—but the end goal is always the same—to fry the fish in an ocean which is very sparsely populated. We get to visit the popular ocean and converse with the people there—we just need to go back to our ocean when it’s all said and done.
It often feels lonely there, but it certainly helps us stay focused and not get too bent out of shape about many other things—we just have different fish to fry.
Rabbi Yehuda Minchenberg is a fifth-grade rebbe during the school year and teaches Torah at Camp Regesh during the summer. At home, he (together with his wife, Laurie) is the parent of six children, four of whom have varying special needs.
