Jewish Advocate

Judy Bolton-Fasman

Judy Bolton-Fasman is a member of the boards of the Solomon Schechter Day School of Greater Boston and Temple Emanuel in Newton. E-mail her at jbfparent@gmail.com.

Chaos Theory

By Judy Bolton-Fasman - Saturday May 17 2008

To the naked eye chaos is lack of order, a randomness caused by unanticipated upheavals. But place chaos in front of the word theory and this seemingly lack of order obeys particular laws or rules.
My dearest friends Susan and Yossi exemplify how chaos theory plays out so beautifully in life and love. They and their five children live in three rooms on a kibbutz in the Negev. Their kibbutz house contradicts Newtonian physics by expanding to accommodate them and when needed, the four Fasmans. The more chaos, the more space, and the more intimacy among friends.
Chaos theory is based on a notion called dynamical instability, a condition discovered by the physicist Henri Poincaré in the early 20th century. Dynamical instability posits that there is a consistent lack of predictability in some physical systems.
Lack of predictability is what makes Susan, Yossi, and their children so wonderfully dynamical. Although the borders of their kibbutz are clearly defined by a barbed wire fence, the kibbutz can readily accommodate the phenomenon of predictable unpredictability that distinguishes their family and energizes them to repair the world.
The unpredictability that envelops them can transform a random visit to the grocery store into an opportunity to pursue social justice. Five years ago when Yossi and his two older girls reached for a jar of spaghetti sauce, one of his daughters insisted on buying “the one with the man’s face on it because he gives all the money from the sauce to charity.”
The other daughter asked, “Could there be a sign on food, just like the kosher symbol, telling people which food companies give money to feed hungry people?” In the coming months girls started an ongoing project to partner with the food industry to end world hunger.
This Passover we shared a seder with Susan and Yossi’s family and their Sudanese neighbors on the kibbutz in the desert. Our Sudanese guests told us of their own recent bondage in Egypt. Many of their fellow citizens were randomly arrested and tortured, and then sent back to certain death in Sudan. Under a still sky spackled with stars and ennobled by a full moon, they told us how they walked across the Sinai for three days before they reached Israel. The underlying order of the seder was not only consistently focused on welcoming these strangers in a strange land, but also about returning their dignity and their freedom to them.
After ending the seder with songs about peace and freedom, we packed up the mats we reclined on as free people and the special food that we ate to mark the beginning of Passover. One of the Sudanese women balanced a basket of food on her head for the walk back to the kibbutz. I imagined her in her ancestral village carrying vegetables home from the market. I saw a basket of billowing laundry sitting atop her head. She was the personification of grace.
My suburban kids were delirious with their own version freedom on the kibbutz. Ken and I said hello to them under the hot desert sun in the morning and didn’t see them until they came back to us in the cool moonlit night. They slept the deep satisfying sleep of kids who played hard and well all day
Chaos theory has been explored in earnest in meteorological phenomenon. A meteorologist named Edward Lorenz showed that very small changes in initial conditions in a chaotic system could lead to very different outcomes.
Our small gestures of kindness or seemingly minor spiritual investments can lead to dramatic changes in our lives. Twelve years ago Ken and I sent Anna to a Jewish pre-school. We liked living in Jewish time so much that Adam soon followed as we sent Anna to Solomon Schechter Day School. We told ourselves that we’d see how kindergarten went
Nine years later the pretend trip to Israel in cardboard planes that took off from the loft in Anna’s kindergarten classroom culminated in an actual trip. Last month Anna and her Schechter classmates prayed together at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. The experience was so achingly beautiful that these very composed teenagers cried together when they placed their hands on the Kotel’s ancient stones.
According to one scientist chaos theory is "a revolution not of technology, like the laser revolution or the computer revolution, but a revolution of ideas.” He goes on to explain that those ideas are connected to the inherent disorder found in nature—starting from turbulence in fluids to the writhing of the human heart just before it stops beating.
All of us embody chaos theory.
Susan and Yossi have moved to the desert where our ancestors wandered toward a land that was a divine gift — a gift that held infinite, unpredictable promise for the Jewish people
Eleven years ago I met Yossi. That was the beginning of a seemingly random set of events that brought Ken, Anna, Adam and me to a kibbutz in the Arava valley last month. A place where we experienced God’s complexity and presence in our lives. And under the desert sky I felt like God’s daughter.
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