Carlebach’s sad, dark story of the Shvartze Wolf (“Black Wolf”) has always captivated me. Listen to it here, if you don’t know it already:
What is this story about, really? When I first heard it, it touched me deeply, but I think I didn’t know what it was about. It’s mostly set in a forest on Shabbat, and it touches the themes of hidden/revealed, of the pain of despair, of the power of redemption at the last moment, and of course offers us a glimpse that the world we perceive isn’t as real as it seems. And the music — ! So much beauty, I loved it, but I don’t think I knew what it was about…
Listening again, probably 10 years since I first heard it, it’s “obvious” to me what the story is about:
There are aspects of ourselves we are so distrustful of, so fearful of, which we reject with all our might – we have to actively spend lots of energy rejecting these parts! – because we are sure that they make us bad, ugly, wrong, obnoxious, disgusting. Maybe these are parts that want to be violent, be greedy, be lustful, be wild, be lazy. We can’t bear to see ourselves in these ways. We can’t bear to experience these parts of ourselves.
We effort so hard to keep these parts hidden so that we can keep up the illusion that we are good, and that we deserve love from others, that we are worthy. And yet those darker parts of us – our “black wolves” – still follow us everywhere we go, lurking. We call them ugly, we deny that we feel these dark feelings, we suppress and reject what arises inside us over and over, because we think by ignoring the bad parts, we’ll be able to enjoy the good, bright parts of life, where we want to be. But why do we feel a strange fear, a strange unease, in that sunshine? Something that isn’t right … something missing …
We may attempt to use our clever minds to defeat these parts of ourselves, which we feel so much shame about. We may try to get their “blessing” to finally just be happy, just do the right thing and just be a good person. But these parts must be honored: they don’t want to give up so easily, and certainly not if they are treated as less-than. Certainly not if we are trying to push past them.
Instead – we can feel those parts. We can feel how we have those pieces in us, we can just take a breath alongside the sometimes angry, lost, vengeful, sad, selfish, perverse parts in ourselves. See what it feels like to own how often we aren’t “good”. And just sit with that and see if we can avoid the powerful urge to RUN from this acknowledgement. From accepting the reality that we are … humans.
When we have the courage and self-connection to befriend these parts, to not wish them to go away, to accept that they are here – to accept that shabbos is over, and we weren’t invited in to heaven, and that’s tragic – then finally there is room for us to relax into the vulnerability of our full being. And from that place, we really are the whole, good person we’ve been pretending to be. And we can see that these dark parts of ourselves, our “black wolves”, are more precious and more beautiful than the parts that seemed so easy to love – they are our most tender, most vulnerable parts, the parts we protect with so much efforting. Allowing these parts to be present gives us the blessing of a expressing our full humanity, our delicate essence.
The path to our fullest aliveness – to the pure aliveness that a child is born into – lies in reclaiming those parts which we rejected. Accepting that those parts are in us too, and that either we’ll be running from them our whole lives, or we can get intimate with them, embrace them as our long lost brothers and sisters and selves. We’ll then receive their blessings and let the illusion of their ugliness die, when we finally can just be, as our whole, essential, unguarded selves.