Are you a man or a chameleon?

The other day I came across a paragraph that stopped me dead in my tracks. It read as follows:

“In order for a person to have a meaningful, constructive identity, it should be one which he gives to himself. If a person has no other identity than that given to him by others, he really has no identity at all. He must change like a chameleon, being one thing to his wife, another to his parents, another to his children, another to his employer, another to this friend, and yet another to a different friend”.

What was it about this paragraph that so gripped my attention? First, it struck me as being so completely wrong that it could not withstand any serious analysis. Secondly, it was written by Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski and appears in his commentary on Pirkei Avot, Visions of the Fathers, a work that I enjoy reading and from which I have learned a great deal.

Why do I find Rabbi Twerski’s words here so unacceptable? Perhaps it is because I am a chameleon at heart. I believe strongly that one has to be different things to different people and that this does indeed shape one’s identity. Let us start with our parents—the first and most influential relationships in most people’s lives—and then go on to our teachers, friends, colleagues, partners and children. Anyone who lives in a society that is comprised of other people will immediately recognise that they are bound to be shaped by them. It is simply impossible to be the same person to each of them in every situation and live a fulfilled and meaningful existence, as the Torah’s narrative of Moses’ personal relationships seems to suggest.

Pirkei Avot itself seems to require us to be different people in different circumstances. Thus Rabbi Yishmael (Avot 3:16) encourages us to play different roles depending on whether we are dealing with our superiors or those junior to us. The principle of al tifrosh min hatzibur (“don’t separate yourself from the community”: Avot 2:5, 4:7) reflects the notion that we should commit ourselves to a shared position rather than stand out alone). Also, we are supposed to make ourselves loved (Avot 6:1, 6:6), which is certainly easier when one adjusts to the circumstances of each relationship in our lives rather than stick to our chosen identity and wait for others to adjust to us.

Moving from morality to metaphor, is it even such a bad thing to be a chameleon? While these creatures change colour to match their immediate environment, they do so for the sake of their safety and survival. This is the same survival technique that many of our fellow Jews employ when mixing outside their comfort zone: hats are exchanged for caps; tzitzit are tucked in, and so on. But in the real world, despite their camouflage, chameleons still recognise one another—just as Jews tend to do in business centres, airport terminals and shopping malls around the world.

Ultimately, since I have no wish to quarrel with the words of Rabbi Twerski, I shall endeavour to read them as applying to the starting point in a person’s life, before the question of familial and social interaction becomes a problem. We should all have a default position, something that defines our essential individuality, before we find ourselves engaged in the lifelong task of compromising it when we encounter other people. After all, an identity remains an identity even when it is compromised.