Hear, O Israel, the Lord is Fun

I’m an American Jew living in Southern California, so it’s logical that I’m just the kind of guy who’d say something like “The Lord is Fun.” I mean, for Lord’s sake, I live half-way between Disneyland and Hollywood! From my vantage point, you pretty much have to believe that fun really is our most important product. And, after all, as an American, I am of the people who made the pursuit of happiness an inalienable right.

Interestingly enough, American Jew that I am, son of a Rabbi that I also am, I find myself pretty much inexorably drawn to a certain, especially loving, somehow Jewish, monotheistic kind of fun – the kind of fun that transforms us by connecting us, as one, to Oneness. Maybe the belief in, the very idea of Oneness is an exceptionally Jewish idea. Maybe even behind Einstein’s search for the One grand unified theory of everything.

I find this kind of One Fun most readily in the games that no one really cares who who wins - Pointless Games, really, where no one even keeps score. Like in the games I’ve developed and played and taught for the last four decades with my wife and kids and students and clients, for neighbors and whole cities, and for the world, which now includes my grandkids. Like the deeply loving, pointless fun we manage from time to time to create for each other. Like the fun of playing Pointless Games with the family – you know, games like “let’s see if we all say the same color,” or New Games like the Lap Game, whose sole objective is to see if everyone, thousands even, can wind up sitting on everyone else’s lap. Or like trying to juggle giant, 6-foot diameter balls with 25-foot diameter parachutes.

Actually, it’s the very same kind of fun you can get watching the sunset with your lover, or giving names to clouds. The kind of fun you get loving someone who’s loving you. Profound. Mutual, powerful, all-embracing, unifying Fun.

I don’t honestly know if Oneness really is Funness or vice versa. But for me, as an American Jew, fun is something I have come to believe in. So, for a living, I invent new games and new ways to play. This way, I can be part of the fun. I can be always making it more fun. I seek and cherish The Big Fun that I find in community, when we play together.

And, for when we can’t play together, I’m inventing new games and new ways to play on the “inner playground.” Games and ways to play that bring us in touch with the One Fun. The fun of being at one. The fun of Oneness.

This particular experience of Oneness is the very stuff of fun. Dr. Mihaly Cisikszentmihalyi, author of many books exploring the social and psychodynamics of fun, points to the state of being “at one” (with oneself, with the environment) as key to the experience of what he calls “flow” and I call “really fun.”

Such a wonderful experience is this “flow” or “really fun” thing that, as Csikszentmihalyi notes, people are willing to risk their lives for a timeless moment of it. Snowboarding, bungee-jumping, hang-gliding flow. Playing in an orchestra or on a basketball team, being on a surgical team or in a marching band, the “really fun” part of the experience is when you find yourself part of that Oneness.

And, humorously enough, when you are in flow, when you are really having fun, you feel as though you are being someone in touch with something other than yourself… Think about it. There you are, in flow, having something really fun. It’s as if you have become larger than yourself, funnier than you think you are, stronger than know yourself to be, other than yourself.

You feel you are other, and you feel connected to something other. To Otherness. Other than yourself. Other than everything and everyone else. A transcendent spirit, manifesting itself in fun, in joy, in laughter.

In other words, you are at one with Oneness. With The One.

I think this is why “fun” is such a big word for me. It covers so much of my reality – from what on the one hand can seem so trivial, to the other, so real, so present, so universal, so transcending. Sometimes, I do think I see evidence of the Divine - every time, come to think of it, I have real fun. But even as a Jew, even as an American, it still feels somehow rebellious to believe that fun is really what it’s all for - that fun is what we’re really supposed to be, commanded to be, having.

I think fun is directly related to the experience Martin Buber was talking about when he wrote I and Thou – the experience of being in relationship, of connection and uniqueness, unity and otherness. You and the sea at sunrise. The taste of the divine.

I think the most fulfilling things we can do with our lives are also the most deeply fun. And I’ve also noticed that when we’re doing these things together, it’s even easier, touching that deep kind of fun. It’s closer, more accessible, longer-lasting.

Sometimes, I even think the spirit that manifests itself to us as divine is that very same spirit that manifests itself when we are really having fun. Sometimes when we’re alone, but especially with each other. Especially when we are making things really fun together. Making our very world really fun.

Yeah. The Really Fun. Something divine about it.

I recently realized that it was probably my father who first taught me all about this Oneness I have learned to call both “God” and “Fun.” It makes sense. My father was a Rabbi. Certified in seven different Rabbinic specialties from Hevron Yishiva Rabbi, including Rav Kook, then Chief Rabbi of Israel. And we played a lot of games. Get it. God and Fun in the same presence, as it were?

My father was the author of Siddur Mifurash, an annotated prayer book that has made its way into synagogue and Hebrew school libraries throughout the world. On the other hand, financially, we didn’t do so well. And my family had to move from state to state, synagogue to synagogue. But we played a lot of games, my father and my family. Chess. Word games that we played whenever we were waiting for something better to do. So we managed to stay connected: the Rabbi who taught us about God, and played games with us.

So maybe I probably made this whole thing up about “The Lord is Fun,” because somehow it echoes my relationship to my father, the Rabbi. Or maybe because I’ve devoted my entire professional life, from even before I lived in California, to figuring out how to make play and learning and work and everything else more fun.

On the other hand, maybe the Lord really is Fun – especially when you think about the fun of oneness, or the oneness of fun, or some combination thereof.

So, what do I know? I’m an American Jew. I don’t even know enough about Judaism to tell you that fun is a particularly Jewish message. But I do know that there are a lot of Jews in Hollywood. And on Broadway. And then there’s Jewish humor, for example.

Like any American Jew, I know a good joke when I make one. And I appreciate it, too. Jew-wise, I know you can find writings about joy in the Bible, the prayer book, Mishna and Talmud. I know that the Rabbis believe that there is no greater joy than being in the presence of the Divine. And I know that the original Hasidim celebrated those who celebrated life, not just with prayer, but with every act of their joy-prone beings. Like in Fiddler on the Roof.

Even if Fun is not the Lord, or, vice, Lord forbid, versa, I have come to most definitely conclude: fun is a face of the truth, a taste of the Divine. I believe the delight I get from the beauty of shared laughter is just like the delight I get from laughing with God.

Speaking of which, what if I were like God and I personally happened to be responsible for all of creation? My sole purpose and joy would come from seeing my creation having fun: at play, in play, appreciating, enjoying, delighting in the life I have given it. God-wise, if it were me, speaking to my creation, I’d be talking Glee. In words that sounded like the laughter of love. If I were God, on the sixth day of creation, for example, and I was looking around at all I had made, I would behold it and say to no one in particular: "now, this is fun."

I know, I know, there’s more to it than that. There’s beauty and truth and stuff – which, of course, is very much the stuff of fun. And there’s all that stuff we haven’t figured out how to make fun yet - like pain and suffering and cruelty and stupidity – which is, oddly enough, also the stuff of fun.

But I have to tell you, as an American, and as a Jew, I am ready to believe that having fun, being at One, is the point of it all – that our reason for being in the world is that we enjoy it, that we delight in it, that we have fun, totally.