Shabbat Sermon: Blue's Clues with Rav Hazzan Aliza Berger

What do we do when the way we feel on the inside doesn’t match what we feel we have to project on the outside? Or even more generally, what do we do when our insides don’t match our outsides?

I was thinking about this recently as I was reading a fascinating New York Times interview with Steve Burns, the actor on Blue’s Clues. If you weren’t tuned into preschool television in the late 90s and early 2000s, Blues Clues was a show on Nickelodeon wherein the host, Steve Burns, invited little kids to help figure out what Blue the dog had been up to by interpreting Blue’s pawprints.

On the show, Steve was a gregarious, curious, engaging adult who reveled in the joy of simple discovery. Viewers saw him ensconced in a cozy, cartoon living room and surrounded by friends including the cheery dog, Blue. Viewers saw him as a star—the show became immediately and wildly popular. In its heyday, it was the highest rated American tv show for preschoolers and was syndicated in 120 countries and translated into 15 languages.

But, in the interview, Steve shared that his experience on the show was very different. He would show up at work wearing his signature green shirt and walk into a plain blue room. There were no props, no pets, no visual stimulation, no one else—just him, the blue screens, and the cameras. And, because the show was designed to help kids to think creatively and to spark their own problem-solving skills, there wasn’t much to the script either. Much of his time was spent asking questions to the air and pretending to hear the responses. It was exhausting and intense. He says his years on the show were some of the loneliest years of his life. And yet, what is so interesting is that he got caught up in the hype of the show. At the time, he didn’t recognize what he was feeling. It was only years after he left the show that he began to process what it was like for him then. And it took decades for him to discover that he had been battling undiagnosed clinical depression for all that time.

In other words, here is someone who looks like he’s having fun and is so happy and fulfilled, who feels exhausted and depressed on the inside, and yet swallows those emotions to get through the day. That dichotomy is one that many of us can relate to. We too sometimes move through the world with seemingly happy smiles and cartoonish well-being that covers up the challenges we are struggling with on the inside. Or we’re filled with joy, but our inner happiness is juxtaposed against the world’s tsuris in a way that makes us feel like we shouldn’t be so happy. Or we’re trying to broadcast smart, capable professional all the while we feel on the inside like an imposter and a failure. No matter what the difference is between what other people see and what we feel, the experience of living in multiple realities can feel painful.

What do we do with this dichotomy?