OUT OF PROPORTION

(For the SoundCloud audio, scroll down)

In 1544, a Flemish instrument-maker named Gerard de Kremer was arrested in Rupelmonde, near Antwerp, and thrown into the castle dungeon on suspicion of heresy. The charges amounted to very little: he had travelled widely, more than was considered normal and healthy, and he had written letters to the wrong kinds of people.

Others arrested alongside him did far worse than he did — some were burned at the stake, one was beheaded, and others were buried alive. But de Kremer just sat in prison for seven months until his friends, his neighbors, the town officials and one brave local priest petitioned on his behalf and he was let out for want of evidence.

Twenty-five years later, under the Latinized version of his name, Gerardus Mercator, he published a map that made him famous for all time.

The problem Mercator set out to solve is easy to describe and almost impossible to fix. The earth is round, maps are flat, and transferring the surface of a sphere onto a flat sheet of paper cannot be done without doing violence to something. Peel an orange and try to flatten the peel onto a table without tearing it, and you will understand the difficulty within about four seconds.

You can preserve direction, or shape, or distance, or area, but never all of them at once, which means that every flat map ever drawn is in some measure a lie. The only question is which lie you have decided you can live with.

Mercator’s answer was to tell exactly the lie a sixteenth-century sailor most needed told. On his map a navigator could plot a constant compass bearing as a straight line, which in an age when ships were crossing oceans with instruments barely worthy of the name was worth much more than staring hopefully at the horizon and trusting in Providence.

But there was a price to be paid. At the top and bottom of the map, the distortion of size grew increasingly outrageous the further away it was from the equator.

Greenland is the most famous victim, sprawling across the North Atlantic at roughly the size of the entire African continent, when Africa is in reality fourteen times larger. Mercator was not attempting to deceive anybody, but the result was certainly deceptive.

It has occurred to me over the years that every one of us walks around with an inverted Mercator projection of our own life, drawn from the only vantage point available to us, which is the precise spot where we happen to be standing.

And because that is where the projection begins, whatever stands nearest to us seems to be enormous. A minor insult occupies more mental territory than a hundred kindnesses, and somebody’s failure to invite us to an event causes the emotional equivalent of Greenland to expand until it covers half the map.

Meanwhile the genuinely vast things shrink into background scenery for no better reason than that they are permanently there — our families, our health, our freedom, the ability to practice Judaism openly and without fear, and the privilege of living at a time when almost half the Jews in the world inhabit a sovereign Jewish state. These are continents, but most of the time they barely register as tiny specks on the map.

What is most striking about the prayers of Rosh Hashana is how little they resemble the prayers any of us would have written to say on such an auspicious day. Ask any ordinary person to compose a petition for the new year and you will get a shopping list, and a perfectly reasonable one: health, livelihood, children, success, a marked reduction in the number of difficult people one is obliged to deal with, and — depending on the year — lower interest rates.

And yet the centerpiece of Musaf is not a list of what we want, but Malchiyot, the declaration that God is King: מלוך על כל העולם כולו בכבודך — “Reign over the entire world in Your glory.” Not over my street, or my community, or my particular set of anxieties. We want God to be King over the entire world, which is an almost incomprehensible change of scale.

I suspect that is exactly the point. Rosh Hashana redraws the map with God at the center rather than me, and everything else is forced, sometimes uncomfortably, to find its true size.

To be clear, Rosh Hashana does not suggest that our problems are imaginary, nor does it propose that pain stops mattering because someone, somewhere, has bigger problems than ours.

Judaism doesn’t ask anybody to be emotionally dishonest, and a person lying awake at three in the morning worrying about a child can’t simply be told to “put it in perspective.” Nevertheless, allowing one region of the map to keep expanding until no room is left for anything else is no good either.

It is remarkable how much trouble begins with nothing more complicated than getting the scale wrong. When all is said and done, exaggerated self-regard is a cartographic error. When you draw yourself too large, everybody else has to be squeezed into the margins to make room.

Jealousy is the same error in reverse. When somebody else’s success swells so much that it obscures everything I already have and never think about, that is a Mercator-sized Greenland. And it is this that makes the kingship theme of the day rather than self-improvement so important, because a program of self-improvement can leave me exactly where I started, still comfortably at the center of my own map.

I would like to be calmer, because I will feel better. I want to be more disciplined, because I will get more done. I want to be on better terms with my estranged relative, because then family dinners will be less of an ordeal. Don’t get me wrong: all of these are worth doing, but in the end all of them are about me. Meanwhile, Malchiyot cuts me down to size, and makes us think about God.

Our own point of view is much like Mercator’s projection – superbly useful for the purpose it was built for, but at the same time distorting our perspective. Truthfully, we have no alternative to it, since nobody can conduct a life removed from their own vantage point.

But once a year, every year, Rosh Hashana aims to lift us off our idiosyncratic map and invites us to look again. And what we generally discover, if we are willing to look honestly, is that Greenland is nowhere near as large as we had assumed.

The insult we have been nursing for months deserves a rather smaller country than the one we allotted it, while the amazing blessings in our lives we have barely glanced at all year deserve an entire continent to themselves. Because a life does not only become distorted when bad things happen to us – it becomes distorted when we quietly lose our sense of scale.

Mercator gave sailors a map that helped them find their way across an ocean they could not see the end of. Rosh Hashana hands us a rather different sort of map, and its purpose is not to show us where we are standing, but to remind us how much larger the important things are — and, just as importantly, how small the silly things are.