The Gift Must Move
In his beautiful exposition of gift economies and the artistic spirit, The Gift, Lewis Hyde outlines some of the principles of gifting, and illustrates them with examples from folk tales and indigenous traditions. Here are some of the laws:
There is an obligation to give, accept and reciprocate the gift.
The gift must always move! When it stops moving, its gift properties are lost.
A gift creates an experience of communion between giver and receiver. A commodity does not.
Hyde’s approach suggests that all exchanges live somewhere on the spectrum between gift and commodity. We could not live by gift culture alone, and a society based only in commodities would be utterly devoid of soul, joy and art. The Jewish tradition gets this too. The early book of aphorisms Pirke Avot says, “No flour no Torah, no Torah no flour.” As if to say, if you have no business how could you support wisdom, and if you have no wisdom all of your business is meaningless. Every exchange inhabits this dialectic. Where do we situate our lives between gift and commodity? Does the answer to that question affect our capacities for generosity and loneliness?
Let’s tease out some of the rules, beginning with #1) the obligation to give, accept, and reciprocate the gift. One of the first examples Hyde offers is the First Salmon ceremonies of the indigenous tribes that live in the pacific northwest, the Kwakiutl, Tlingit, the Haida, and others. In the native mythologies of the land, the people told stories in which all fish were really human beings, they lived in houses beneath the rivers and oceans just like people. But when the season approached the salmon would dress up as fish, swim into the rivers so that their sisters and brothers who dwelt on the land would have food to eat.
When the first salmon was caught, the event initiated an elaborate set of rituals. The first salmon would be welcomed as a visiting chief. Formal speeches of welcoming and gratitude would be spoken. It would be killed ritually and everyone would be given a portion to taste, and its head would be pointed upstream to give direction to the other fish. The bones would be cleaned and returned to the water. If all the bones were returned, the salmon could reconstitute its body as a human being, when it returned home. The devotion enacted through all the details of the first ceremony are a sign that we always aspire to this kind of generosity and dedication — we would treat all the fish of the season in the manner of the first fish, were time and presence to allow for it.
This tradition demonstrates the details, the ornaments of devotion, that elaborate what is possible in the acts of giving, accepting and reciprocating gifts. The gift is made first by the salmon themselves -- the choice to sacrifice what is “their own” for the sake of the other beings with whom they share life. The reception of the gift, with pomp and gravitas, demonstrates that the generosity of the gift has not gone unnoticed. And the reciprocation of the gift, the return of bones to the water. They could just have easily thrown them away. The ceremonial act, the time and attention it takes, the reciprocation of the gift ensures the continuation of the gift-cycle on account of the psychological foundation that is built from the act of reciprocation. When the gift is not reciprocated we begin to treat the world and its wonders as if they are owed to us. Every time we reciprocate the gift we inhabit more truthfully our place in existence.
2) The gift must move! We might begin with a negative example. How horrible has it been to watch, at a time where people don’t have money to eat or pay for their home, the richest people in our country are accumulating stagnant dead wealth. What does it mean to add billions to billions, which will not be spent, just hoarded. At that point of gluttony we have obviously strayed from a gift economy. We watched some documentary about Amazon and Bezos sometime in the pandemic. In the beginning, when the internet was a wonder, the idea of being able to sell any book in the world from an infinite library was a gift. You could see it in his face, rounder and less well kept, he was thrilled, not by the money but by the gift he had found a way to give people. How swiftly we can forget the gift inherent in our work.
In a time of profound economic inequality, the notion of a gift economy, and this rule, that for a gift to retain its life-bringing qualities it must move, begs this question: What if any wealth that you wouldn’t spend this year, or that you wouldn’t spend in your lifetime, you gave away? All the excess that is just sitting there for the sake of “security.” I imagine not only would we feel like more generous people, and be affected by that feeling of generosity, our insides mixed up in ways we can’t imagine -- but money and gifts would also flow through us differently. There is no reason for the gift to flow through stagnated water.
We were moving out of our home in October, and I don’t recall if I’d read “the Gift” yet, and chosen generosity as our theme, or if these actions led to that decision. I started giving away many of my things, especially attentive to this rule -- the gift must move! If the things in my possession were moving, being used, interacting with my art and work, then they qualified as keepers, but if not. Pass em along! I gave a violin to Phil, and another one to Priya. I gave a type-writer to Jacob, who I hadn’t seen in a couple years since officiating at his wedding. He takes pictures for Rolling Stone of all the rock stars, Sharon Jones, Natalie Merchant. I gave away books and books, to friends, to people on the street. I gave away carpets and clothes, a fancy Jerry Garcia poster, a set of speakers. Folks were surprised by the unexpected generosity, and often moved to pay it back in some form or another, a CD that was lying around, a bag of semi-psychedelic plants. When we move the gift, its inclination is to come back our way.
But the harder work of the last months was the discomfort, beauty and truth of the disintegration that accompanies every movement of the gift to a new place, a new home. The job of being a rabbi is composed of many profound intimate connections, and it was very painful to feel the ways in which some of those relationships ended. I like to think I approach my work in the spirit of the gift. Of course there is an economy to the whole thing, and there is of course something strange about selling “spirit,” but when I walk into a home in which the spirit of the dead hover the presence I bring has nothing to do with how much money that person has paid for my service. The feeling of communion in this work is profound, spiritual friendship offered without condition. Each of us though situates our exchanges between gift and capital, and for some, the notion that my contract had ended, was cause for dissolution of the friendship. I can feel how much capitalism and its ethos has wounded us. There’s an entirely different ethos of gifts and spirit -- there is an awareness of abundance. God’s gifts are everflowing, and we live in that flow by blessing the movement of the gift, not fighting it, regardless of the exchange we might receive.
And finally, #3) the gift creates an experience of communion. If every culture sits somewhere on that line between gift and commodity economy, and rule #3 is true, that the gift is what creates the feelings of connection in a culture, then a culture that’s become toxified by commodity and capitalism will have a minimal experience of community. I would say some of that speaks truth to the reality of American culture right now. In the days when the subways were full, they were full of people not talking to each other. Tired coming to and from work, grinding so hard to make a decent living, sucked into phones and headphones with little draw to converse, even packed together we were so far from one is chasmic.
In his book, written in ‘83 Hyde used the phrase social distance, to refer to the degree in which members of a community feel connected to one another. I was bothered by that term when its use became necessary in mid March of 2020. What I realized when I stumbled across the term in another context was that before the pandemic struck, the social distance between us was already vast. When we live in a place unwilling to acknowledge the sins of its past or the injustices of its present, social distance increases because people don’t feel seen. Why would someone who is Black go out of their way to make small-talk on the train with a white person who is likely to hurt them with the micro-aggressions of the racism within them that our society does not ask them to confront? When people’s work is treated as a commodity, when it is stolen and abused for years and years, social distance grows.
And maybe we hit some kind of rock bottom. Maybe it was the time on our hands, the once-in-a-lifetime halt of the capitalist machine, or the anxiety and fear that was shared the world over, and the gruesome murder of George Floyd within all of that.We simply could no longer tolerate the notion of a “We” so divided. And maybe the rare respite from the system of capital exchange allowed us to yearn for another model of communal responsibility and reciprocity. The gift creates communion. For months on end in cities across the world, in the middle of a deadly pandemic whose science remains uncertain, protesters of all different skin tones left the safety of their homes for the streets. They made a gift, their voices, their body, their safety -- for the sake of something greater, justice, healing, truth. Many sitting in the comfort of their isolation criticized the protesters, for engaging in activities that might spread the virus -- this was a defense mechanism, defending their choice to choose self over community. Many criticized the looting -- this too a defense mechanism. The legalized looting of Black, brown, indigenous and poor people that continues in our midst is far more abhorrent than missing TVs and Gucci bags and police cars on fire.
But for those who joined in protest. And I haven’t always felt called to this work. I don’t feel called to it always. The feeling of communion in those streets, thousands and thousands of people on our knees in the middle of Flatbush with the world stopped for the last 9 minutes George’s life -- the gift we were giving to no one, to all of us -- created a feeling of communion in american society that hasn’t been felt in sometime. You’d see it on the faces of people who hadn’t felt seen in lifetimes, looking up at the world, smiling on account of the gift they’d received.
So what’s the Jewish equivalent of the salmon? The apple. As you dip apples into honey as a metaphor for the sweetness that will fall our year ahead, no matter what it entails, the sweetness of God’s gift of life -- treat that apple as if it were the visiting queen of the orchard. Eat of her fruit as if you are eating the body of a god. And hold the seeds in your palm, bless the source of life, and then give them back to the earth, that she might be a tree again.