From Hack to Hasid

It’s 2010. It’s just after five am. I am walking into an office in Chinatown Sydney clutching a coffee with all the strength I have. I am not the first one in the campaign office this morning. I acknowledge the Queensland campaign director, wondering if he actually made it home last night. I am holding five different daily newspapers and within the next hour I will look at almost 25 more.

It’s ten days before the Australian federal election, and I am a political Hack.

The Hack is a unique inhabitant of the world of politics. In profession, they are roughly similar to a salesperson. In political commitment, their enthusiasm rivals that of the mob who stormed the Bastille. Hack is a term of endearment, a term of praise, a title earned by someone who is able to “get things done,” someone who will “do whatever it takes,” for the party, the people and their own ambitions.

My life as a Hack was based around planning for as many circumstances as possible, and controlling as many factors in my environment as I could. Everything was about winning, and the only person who could win was me.

Fast forward four years and I am sitting in my apartment in Ramat Beit Shemesh, a Chareidi neighbourhood just outside of Jerusalem. A lot has changed and a lot has stayed the same. The designer pant suits and political career are gone, but I still drink far too much coffee and approach preparing food for our weekly Shabbat feasts with tactics borrowed from electioneering.

The most important change, however, is that I now live with a startling level of inner happiness. An inner happiness that for once has nothing to do with my external success. I have been able to stop asking myself the exhausting question, “am I changing the world yet?!” I am confident that living my happy, enlightened life and using that as a springboard to relate to others positively is all the change the world needs from me.

I drastically altered almost everything about my life to get here, but most of what I learned is applicable to anyone, even if they don’t see a move to Israel on the cards. My current outlook not only gives me infinitely more happiness than I experienced previously, but I am convinced that if given the chance, it would give me far more success in professional politics.

I wanted to try to crystallize what really changed, internally, to bring me to my new state of being. I settled on three pieces of timeless Jewish wisdom that I’ve integrated into my internal landscape and that I think anyone can benefit from. So, here it is: how I stopped hacking and started living.

You are not in control. I repeat, you are not in control.

Let’s do an experiment. Think about three things you would like to achieve today. Okay, I’ll go first. I want to finish writing this blog, learn a page of a Jewish text and finish some summaries for the epistemology subject I am studying at University. Consider how much control I have over each of these things. It’s easy to think “I have a free evening, what should get in the way? This is my time, I’ll manage it.” I’ll keep telling myself that until my husband walks in the door needing something urgently, or my landlord who’s doing renovations upstairs cuts my power by accident, or my computer crashes irreparably — I could go on. There is an almost endless list of circumstances outside my control that could prevent me from completing these relatively simple tasks.

The Hack in me would say this is immaterial, after all, you can achieve at all costs, can’t you?

There’s a truth to this, but the real question is: achieve what?

If the computer crashes, I can’t keep working as planned. I might have to find a new way of working, which takes time and will detract from number of words I will write in an hour. Perhaps instead of achieving the 500 words per hour I wanted, I might record an achievement that sounds more like “my computer crashed, I resourcefully found a solution and I stayed calm and happy.”

The Hack in me would say that we are accountable to ourselves for what we do and don’t do. Then, the Hack in me would prepare as best as possible, but if the plans didn’t work out, would then proceed to storm, rage, kick the cat and blame other people.

Lady! Relax, did you crash the computer on purpose? You didn’t control this. The only thing you choose in this situation is how to bounce back in a way that keeps you happy and healthy and achieves as much of the goal as possible.

The second I realized I wasn’t in control, I experienced a relief I didn’t know was possible. Suddenly I was free to stop worrying about the circumstances I had nothing to do with, and start thinking consciously about what I did control: my responses. If I had have been able to do this in my political career, not only would I have experienced infinitely more success, I would have been saner, healthier and much nicer to everyone around me, *embarrassed cringe.*

Every human being is an entire world.

In Judaism we describe every person as a miniature world. This has many different levels of meaning, but one of the most important aspects is simply the recognition that people are different and complete within themselves. They have their own internal logic, their own way of seeing the world.

This means that to stand any chance of communication we have to be able to speak to each other the way G-d spoke to Moses: face to face. To see the other person’s face is to be willing to communicate with them where they’re at and not try to drag them off somewhere else, somewhere that you think is better.

I already had some idea of this when I was a Hack, but I would never have been able to describe it. I used to spend a lot of time listening to people. Often, just listening to someone and validating their perspective would change a vote.

If you’re trying to sell someone on an idea or vision, don’t take the British East India approach and send in the troops to colonize their mental terrain. Speak to them as a person who is just as much of a person as you are. Listen to them and reveal from their perspective how your vision is relevant in their miniature world.

This means beginning to see the differences between our ‘worlds’ as a source of fascination and a desire to learn more, not a cause of frustration, judgement and condemnation. It’s a subtle one, but if you can really internalize this, the world — or worlds — will never be the same.

Finding “identity” is less rewarding than identifying your “reality”

Perhaps it is because I was barely post-pubescent when I started doing politics, but I remember the constant struggle to define myself, to reveal my identity. This sounds innocent, even positive, right?

Not necessarily. Identity can be a dangerous thing, given how the process of creating identity usually works for us humans.

Judith Butler, a wise Jew who writes in philosophy and gender studies, describes our identity as being constituted internally through an “exclusionary matrix” (Bodies that Matter 1993, p. 3). That’s academic for: “we define ourselves by who and what we’re not.”

Practically, we all know how this works. I am a girl because I am not a boy, I am kind because I am not mean. I am a sociologist because I am not an anthropologist, etc.

The real pitfall of this kind of thinking is that it leaves you with an identity whose content is primarily negative. It also bars you from the expression of anything found in the opposite camp, not because it doesn’t work for you, but because it destabilizes your identity.

I recently had a fellow student approach me at University and ask me if I define myself as Chareidi. I had no idea how to answer her, and not just because the conversation was taking place in Hebrew, where I am significantly less eloquent.

If I said yes, how would I explain the fact that I am currently studying in a PhD program in Gender Studies. If I said no, how would I explain the long black skirt, the wig and the need to intersperse my lectures with afternoon and evening prayers?

I ended up saying something like “I don’t know, can I be Chareidi?” Then I continued being my same old, rather paradoxical self, doing a bunch of things that don’t fit me nicely into an identity category, but fill me with real content and connection to a deeper sense of my self.

The reality is that I live in a primarily Chareidi town, my husband learns in a Hasidic yeshiva, but we’re both still not letting go of our iPads any time soon and I am in a PhD program in Gender Studies. The Hack in me would think this is totally contradictory and needs to be streamlined into one clear identity position. These days, with a lot of self reflection and help from mentors, I have been able to let go of the need to “know who I am.” I don’t need to be the coolest, most successful identity. I am worthwhile, now the question shifts from who am I to what do I want to do, who do I want to be, where do I want to go.

Stop trying to be something and just be. People can identify me however they want, I am in touch with my reality.

The transition from Hack to Hasid wasn’t an easy one. I lost a lot and gained a lot. I lost my shot at Prime Minister of the only island continent, and to put it bluntly, I lost the illusory freedom of believing I was in control. I gained the exhilarating truth that there really are “no worries, mate,” because I control nothing beyond my reactions. I gained a way of relating to people that honours their separateness while making room for co-operation and I gained a reality in place of an identity. My life-revolution was neither simple nor easy, but what I have found is nothing short of happiness itself. And what’s more surprising, the Hasid would be infinitely better at politics than the Hack. #justsayin’

Sara Dvora Tuttle is a recovering political hack who now resides in Ramat Beit Shemesh with her husband. She divides her time between learning Torah, running a home and working towards her PhD in Gender Studies. Go figure.