Playing on the opening of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Vladimir Nabokov writes in the opening of his own novel Ada “All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike….” In Tolstoy’s original version we read, “ Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Their underlining questions are as follows: either there is one surefire way to fail and many ways to succeed or there is no one way to succeed but many ways to fail when it comes to the happiness of one’s family.

Jared Diamond, best known for his Guns, Germs and Steel book makes extensive use of the Anna Karenina principle applying it to all kinds of currents and events of history. In essence, this principle highlights how there is only one way that works or that the way that works avoids all of the factors that led to failure in any given social situation. Nabokov’s variation amounts to a twist where if one avoids the one way that guarantees failure one will be successful. Likewise, this would imply that there are a multitude of ways that can lead to success.

Regardless of whether there is a single or multitude of factors in success or failure, we would like to have a happy family.

For most of us, no matter what our position in our family, no matter how extensive  or intensive, nuclear or peripheral, it is easy to think that if we had the silver bullet, the magic touch, the secret key, then we could realize the domestic tranquility we’ve always wanted. Good relationships are hard to come by. We tend to think that there must to a root cause, a simple (or single) explanation, for what’s wrong. Uncover the part that’s broken and then it should be easy to fix.

But the trouble is that the trouble is rarely that simple. For instance, it’s highly unlikely that all the issues that my kids have with me can be solved by my buying them a dog despite their claims to the contrary. Perhaps we could revise the statements of both Nabakov and Tolstoy and suggest that all happy and unhappy families are dissimilar. Further still, we might suggest that all unhappy or happy families are dissimilar from themselves in the course of time and therefore need not invite any comparisons to each other.

While we might find limited comparisons from one family to the next (or within our own family from one family drama to another over time) ultimately some dimensions remain incomparable. As the argument goes, family situations can’t be neatly transposed because we are not all the exact same people in the exact same situation. Our core individuality individuates our family. We are unlike you [in the plural]. At the same time, we do learn from the experiences of others that only partially resemble our own. We forgive the differences in order to achieve mutual understanding and identification. Perhaps the intertwining of these dual considerations of sameness and difference lends itself to a formulation of our uncommon commonality and common differences.

In Kabbalah, there exists a positive tension between sameness and difference as manifestations of the twin poles of consciousness: lovingkindness (chessed) and severity/restraint (gevurah). Love pursues fusion–the loss of distinction between self and other. It address our impulse to con-form, to be alike. On the other hand, the nature of restraint that gives rise to judgement must retain distance and dissimilarity in order to retain a sense of distinction. Rachamim or ‘compassion’ synthesizes both of these tendencies into a third possibility of identifying ‘oneself as another.’ In this situation, I must remain myself, I must retain my individuality and difference even in the midst of substituting myself for you to the degree that I ‘virtually’ am you. Paradoxically this distance is both traversed and maintained at the same time.

Reinscribing this bit of mystical modeling back into our familial setting, we must take care not to reduce all families to a ‘common’ commonality. Nonetheless, we might investigate some of the conditions for our uncommon commonality or common differences. On such a tentative note, we will risk asserting that when our families are unhappy we feel ‘worlds apart.’ What we hope to demonstrate is that this sense of being ‘worlds apart’ really entails being lost in the ‘worlds of separation’ according to the Chassidic masters.

In order to comprehend the meaning of ‘worlds of separation,’ we must first digress and explain briefly the concept of ‘worlds’ in Jewish mysticism. Why settle for one world when you can have four? In Kabbalah, the concept of a tetralogy of worlds organizes the gamut of our experience. Each world behaves as a framework that accentuates an experience within its own purview while concurrently filtering out that which does not belong. As a result, we learn something new from our contemplation of the reality of the full fourfold set of worlds.

The four worlds and their focus of attention are all follows:

1. The World of Emanation (Atzilut): Life as it is lived, the pure encounter of experiences as they are initially encountered.
2. The World of Creation (Beriah): A re/mediation of life-experience wherein we re/present it to ourselves using the ‘garment’ of thought (i.e. I am reflecting upon or thinking about an experience that I had).
3. The World of Formation (Yetzirah): A further re/mediation of life-experience (and thought) wherein we re/present it to others using the ‘garment’ of speech (i.e. I am now attempting to express in words what I was thinking to myself ultimately in an effort to come to terms with an experience).
4. The World of Action (Asiyah): The final re/mediation of life-experience (the culmination of thought and speech) whereby we re/present ourselves through our actions.

The highest of these worlds (Emanation) remains relatively unexpressed whereas the lower three worlds are all articulations of that original experience (whether it be expressions of the experience of me to myself or myself to others). Our contention, building upon the ladder of these worlds, is that we have a hard time remaining connected in social situations at times when we become too highly reliant on these re/presentation worlds or garments of the soul.

Practically speaking, this means we can have a hard time relating to each other because we cannot feel comfortable unless we are doing some shared activity, or speaking about a subject of common interest or at least perceiving that we think alike. It takes a certain comfort level to just be present to each other in silence. While silence that silences productive speech is clearly negative (an unsettling silence), Chassidus explains that there is also a positive level of silence that exists beyond words (or re/presentation in thought or action). It is in this silence that we will attempt to uncover one of the deepest truths of happy families.

In Part Two we will explore family closeness and its relationship to the system of worlds with a particular emphasis on the therapeutic nature to silence.

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