The older I get, the more firmly I believe in the philosophical concept of duality. Light and dark, mind and body, love and hate. In its most basic form, duality describes how we often experience the world in terms of opposites or complementary pairs. Things exist in relation to their opposite—we understand warmth because we know cold, joy because we know sorrow.
But duality isn’t merely about recognizing that opposites exist. It’s far more transformative than that. It’s also about how understanding the relationship between opposites actually can transform us. Duality creates change and possibility rather than static opposition.
Put another way, it’s not about life or death: it’s instead about life and death. It’s all things wrapped up in one incredibly messy bundle. As Yossi Klein Halevi taught on a podcast, don’t trust a Jew who is not ambivalent. Leaning into a single perspective does not create understanding. A yin without a yang is dogma.
I mulled over these thoughts as I sat on the third floor of the Beth Israel Shapiro building in the waiting area for the urology department. It’s a big area, a ring of chairs that surrounds a wide-open center from the lobby to the floors above. My fellow patients and I wait to hear our names called. It’s like an old WWII movie: Smith! Sanchez! Chou! Fitzpatrick! Stern! All nationalities. And all ages in all phases of treatment. Some of us are in wheelchairs. Others are mobile. No one is happy about whatever treatment is waiting for us. But a glance around the circle spots no one running away. We know we have to be here.
Spend enough time in a waiting room and you learn its rhythms, how it hums. Most of the time, the third-floor waiting area is very mellow. Everyone sits quietly, phone in hand. We mind our own business. But yesterday, it was wild and crazy. Twice as many patients waiting our turns, staff scurrying a little more frantically than usual. Of course, we don’t know why, not that it matters. But it does redirect my thoughts in a different way.
Which, I suppose, is how I ended up here, pondering duality. Happy to be done with my treatment. Sad to contemplate how I ended up sitting here in the first place. So excited to be gathering for Thanksgiving. So sad remembering my sister, Marta, now gone. So thankful that a Canadian urologist, Alvaro Morales, figured out that the tuberculosis vaccine BCG had significant anti-tumor effects in bladder cancer. No one knows why, but it most definitely works. A bit muted, because bladder cancer has a high recurrence rate. So happy when they call my name. So disappointed that my very last round of BCG will not be done by Brian, the guy who’s given me all eight previous treatments, but instead will be administered by a new person. Oh well, I sigh as I get up from my chair, it’s the mess of life delivered to my door.
Thanksgiving underscores the essence of duality. In my joy for all the great moments in my life lived to this moment and the promise of unbridled simchas to come—including my son’s upcoming wedding and my grandson’s upcoming bar mitzvah—there is a running tally of loss and separation.
That’s not happiness or sadness; it’s happiness AND sadness. Which is what duality and life are all about. The relationship between my opposites actually continues to challenge and transform me.
This Thanksgiving, I’m learning to hold both the joy and the ache, the gratitude and the grief. That’s the wisdom point—it’s the mess of life, and it’s teaching me how to live.
The Stern Gang joins me in wishing you a beautiful Thanksgiving.
Before Shabbat 