This Week: Improv Hour
On rules of conduct, in many different ways.
Dear fam,
Last week, during a conversation with a dear friend, I mentioned that parenthood feels like a very high stakes improv show to me sometimes. My pal loosed his wonderful deep laugh and asked, “High stakes how, exactly?”
Which gave me pause. I’d made the statement without thought, and now I needed to figure out what I’d meant. “Well, it’s like… every second is another prompt and you have to just keep saying yes and to whatever comes your way,” I offered. “Or else what?” he asked. “I guess… or else one or both kids could lose it,” I said, “and then wow, you never know what could happen.”
It’s true, to an extent. Kids are wildly associative beings and their play is unleashed, liberated from any adult notions about what is or is not correct. As a result, they’ll provide endless prompts for new scenes. “You’re a parrot!” Big Kid announced to me the other day, “And I’m a pirate and there’s a sea monster! Aahhhh!!”
And away we went. My parrot impression is quite good, if I do say so myself.
Spending time with my kids allows me to access those free parts of myself, the ones that spend a lot of time in the cage of pretending to be a serious person. And it feels freaking incredible to spend time uncaged.
One day last week, Big Kid and I spent 40 glorious minutes at a playground improvising play. I spent an interminable amount of time in meetings last week,1 and just stepping into the fresh (albeit frigid) air was a respite. “Ok, kid, you do whatever you want,” I told her, “and I’ll try to do it, too. Let’s see if I can keep up.”
We ran, and climbed, and hollered at the imaginary lava monsters. We hung upside down from the monkey bars, and climbed on top of the structures,2 and swung so high our toes scraped the clouds. We hollered some more.
Then we went to look at some ducks — they were cold, too — and spent some time climbing across a stream without getting wet. The whole time, Big Kid was the leader and I was her willing disciple. The lesson? How to act without thinking, to follow the joy in one’s gut to its clear eventuality.
I used to know how to do this, of course. I was a child — a wild one, at that. I climbed more than a few trees, and played tag until I was fully breathless, and smeared myself with mud because it was there and so was I.
Improvisation is innate — it’s the rules that are learned. And, as the Mother of Us All, Joni Mitchell, once sang, “There’s something lost and something gained // in living every day.”
Rules are important. We need norms. Otherwise, we might scream at every stranger that pisses us off. As someone who tends to walk into people or miss my turn off the highway, I recognize the importance of these concepts. And it’s good for us to have guidelines that dictate how we treat one another, and that we don’t just holler at lava monsters at any ol’ moment.
Last week’s Torah portion was a veritable litany of rules. Indeed, the portion is called Mishpatim (Laws), and it includes dozens of laws for social conduct. Interestingly, the laws do not (for the most part) deal with the relationship between G-d and humans and the obligations therein. It’s kind of a grab-bag of human-to-human commandments, including such gems as “You shall not ill-treat any widow or orphan.” (Exodus 22:22) alongside “When one person gives money or goods to another for safekeeping, and they are stolen from that person’s house: if caught, the thief shall pay double…” (Exodus 22:6) Related, but only tangentially3.
I was raised to read the biblical text with the basic understanding that nothing is there by accident. Some of my teachers believed this was because everything was divinely written by G-d, others believed that divinely inspired human authors wrote a perfectly conceived text. Either way, if something doesn’t make sense — it’s our job to figure out the hidden meaning.
Many, many words have been written about these verses and I could add to them — but I don’t want to get off track. Instead, I’ll just note one thing that jumps out at me: the sheer volume of them. Especially considering the narrative context in which they occur.
Just two chapters ago, the children of Israel received the ten commandments at Mount Sinai. Thunder, lightning, smoke billowing in every direction — the description makes the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark look like a damn picnic.
Now we’re talking about how much a thief pays for stolen goods? Seems a little, um, lukewarm, no?
Except that I’m looking around the world, and it sure looks to me that folks could use a reminder or two about how to treat one another. I could Google “News Today” and the first half-dozen results would be excellent examples of cruelty and profiteering at the cost of human lives.
Defunding Medicaid, banning gender-affirming healthcare, criminalizing abortions, cutting supplementary aid to low-income families, dismantling environmental protections, war-mongering and siding with tyrants over allies, deporting immigrants — all of these will lead to senseless death.
And that was literally just a quick brainstorm of things I’ve read in the past week, in no particular order.
I believe human life is valuable. All human life. No asterisk. This seems straightforward to me, but when I open the news I think maybe it’s not as clear-cut for everyone out there.
The long list of commandments in last week’s portion suggest that whoever was writing the text had a notion the readers might need a reminder, too.
In his commentary on Exodus 22:22, 11th-century renowned scholar Rashi writes, “That is also the law regarding any person, but Scripture is speaking of what usually happens and therefore mentions these in particular, for they are feeble in defensive power (i. e. they have no one to protect them) and it is a frequent occurrence for people to afflict them.” (emphasis mine)
So, even all those years ago, it was clear humans had a tendency to prey on the least fortunate among us. And, of course we did. We are capable of so much, us humans. We can perform acts of unspeakable cruelty. We can achieve feats of unbelievable kindness and compassion. We can light up the world with a beacon of love. We can burn the whole place down.
This morning, I was sitting with Big Kid at the table during breakfast. Toddler eats quickly (because she doesn’t get up 12 times a minute like her sister does) and was already on the sofa reading a book. Well, look at one, anyway.
I was waiting for Big Kid to finish her apple and peanut butter, (Did you know it’s possible to take 35 minutes to eat an apple? It is.) and we got to singing. It was pure improv. She started a melody, and I made up something to go along with it, then we switched, then we switched back. For ten minutes, maybe more, we vibed off each other, making up gibberish words and squawking and humming and just… flowing in the melodies.
No rules, just flow.
This weekend, I spent a good hour or so building a marble run with Toddler. We built, then took it apart, then built some more. We tried some structures, decided we didn’t like them, and tried something else. We followed our joyful guts to a strange plinkety-plunkety structure that kept morphing. And morphing some more. Then we watched the marbles make their way through the pathways we’d created. Plunk, swoosh, plunk.
Some rules we make up. Some we bend. And some should be self-evident.
Wishing you a week of joyful liberation. Wishing us all a world of caring and compassion. May we build it together, one day at a time.
Love you,
Mikhal
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Meetings are the kryptonite of ADHD-ers. We are just pretending to hear anything you say, I promise. If you get an ADHD-er to be truly honest, I will bet anything they will admit they do not remember anything you said at the meeting. Because they were too busy wondering what it feels like to be an octopus or something. Unless it’s a walking meeting or something.
That’s probably not allowed, but hey.
Side note: There are a lot of knotty commandments in this portion, including more a few that have to do with how one should treat one’s slaves. And I want to write about these, but I want to do it properly, not at 11:00 pm when my head isn’t right. Please know this is on my mind, I just want to do it right.