Journey chapter 3 Open to Learn

When the student is ready the teacher will appear. When the student is truly ready… The teacher will Disappear.”

― Tao Te Ching

Throughout our lives, people come and go. Each one has something to teach us if we are open to learning. I believe that is such an important quality that I know that I have, and I am so grateful for it.  Those who cannot learn are those who think that have all the answers, and that they are always right.

I loved being in school and always sat in the front so that I wouldn’t miss anything.  It started when I was 5.  I was put in the back row until the teacher told my mother that I could not see the blackboard.  I’ll never forget the day I got my first pair of glasses.  The optometrist pointed to a building and asked me if I could see anything on the roof. He knew of course that I couldn’t. Then he placed the glasses on my nose and asked again…I was so shocked to see things that I didn’t know were there. One of the happiest days of my life.  Of course that didn’t last long because a few years later, after being made fun of for wearing glasses, all I saw in the mirror was a female Groucho Marx without the mustache…big nose and glasses. But that’s not important for this part of my story.

Back to teachers…let me jump ahead to today. I’ll jump back and forth as memory serves.

My best teacher left in September 2020… I guess the student was ready.  This teacher was my best friend and my rabbi who was brought into my life after a series of teachers who never had my best interests at heart. This teacher had my back.  His name was Percy Johnson, aka Netanel ben Yochanan.  I have not met a wiser, more honest, diplomatic, truthful person in my life.  He led me to the Ultimate Truth! I would not have recognized it had it not been for the many teachers who led me in the wrong direction but I have to say that I learned from each of them and they added to the steps along my path.

Is there an Ultimate Truth?  I had been searching for it all my life and today I can say an unequivocal “YES”.  It lies in the book we know as the Torah.  Everyone I speak to says that the Torah is just another religious book like all the others.  That’s because they didn’t have my teacher.  He was the most brilliant man I ever met with insight and instinct and he changed my life.

He taught his students to think outside the box. Most of us are trapped in the paradigms that we have gathered throughout our early years and if we are unwilling to refocus our vision, then we will be unable to grow.  People think that I am the same person they knew years ago but all I can say is, “They don’t know me.”  Our opportunity for growth and change is substantive if only we allow it.

What are some of the paradigms we get trapped in?  There are so many it is hard to enumerate them but the one I wrote before when I was 16 years old.  I stopped thinking that doctors were gods; especially today.  Those who truly have our health in mind are few and far between whether they realize it or not. They too have been brainwashed because they have lost the concept that humans are holistic beings.  We are made of matter, in a physical body but we are also spirit; the spirit that was breathed into us at conception.  It is like we are an inanimate physical body that is brought to life by the spiritual body within.  That is what makes us different from any other human being in the world. Like snowflakes, each of us is unique.

When I learned that concept of my uniqueness, I began the journey of learning not to compare myself with anyone else but to work to be the best that I can be, with the help of the Creator who breathed His Spirit into me in the first place.

This last teacher, my rabbi, introduced me to the Torah as it was meant to be.  Not a book of “LAW” as some say but a book of principles to learn wisdom and how to be a human being, a mentsch.

In the Torah, I learned the history of humanity and the formation of my people, a nation that was given a very unique identity and purpose. Each of us has that and in the community, there is no end to what we can achieve.