Despite the vitriol in our public debates, what you believe is less important than what your beliefs have made of you. The Kotzker Rebbe taught that you can stand under the chuppah, the wedding canopy, and say one hundred times “I betroth you” but until you say ‘li’ — “to me” — it means nothing. Our beliefs are theoretical until they touch us.
We find it easy to criticize the beliefs and prejudices of others. But how difficult it is to reckon with our own biases and anger. Even as I write these words I know people will read them and think of someone else! (I’m thinking of you, by the way…)
Remember the student who came to his Rabbi and said “Rabbi, I do not mean to boast, but I have been through the entire Talmud three times.” The Rabbi nodded and smiled and said, “That is admirable, but what I wish to know is – how much of the Talmud has been through you?” Next time you attack the other side for indifference or anger or censoring others, think ‘li’ – “to me?”
For thirty years I have been writing a “Musings” column of roughly two hundred words each week for The Jewish Week. In time these columns went out electronically as well, titled “Off The Pulpit” and now appear in the Times of Israel. The Jewish Week is going digital, so this will be the final column to appear in an actual “paper.”
This week leads up to Tisha B’av. (Wait, there is a connection here!) The destruction of the Temple forced the Jews to transcend the physical message. We had to contend with the destruction of our central structure and recognize that the word could outlast any building.
In our history therefore the message has taken many forms: stone tablets, papyrus, scrolls, books and now pixels. Each change is a loss but also a reminder: the word is what endures, not the shape in which it is crafted or housed. The Psalmist (Ps. 137) cries, “How shall we sing a new song in a strange land?” But we have sung in every land over this vast globe. We will miss the actual Jewish Week paper, but while venues change nothing will stop us from talking, arguing, singing, preaching and praying.
The Rabbis ask — why is God said to love the righteous? Because their worth is due neither to their heritage nor to their family. Not anyone, they goes on to explain, can be a Priest in the Temple or a Levite, but anyone, Jewish or not Jewish, can be righteous and therefore loved by God (Num R. 8:2).
This may be the crucial Jewish teaching for our time. The deep premise of identity politics is that your group defines you. While Judaism certainly understands that being a Jew is part of what makes us who we are, it is also true that the quality of goodness stands apart. Goodness is the quality beloved of God.
The line between good and evil does not run between countries, peoples or tribes. It runs through every human decision in every human heart. Those who hate could choose love; those who are cruel could be kind; those who are wicked could be righteous. This Jewish teaching finds its echo in the best of America, a country where each person has the right to be judged on his or her own merits. A human being is never a type or a group, but a unique image of God.
In December 1950, a Polish construction worker unearthing the foundations of a building found a buried cannister. Miraculously, the legacy of a great spirit was preserved in that improbable vessel. Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw ghetto, who did not survive the war, posthumously gave his teachings to our world.
Known as the Esh Kodesh, Holy Fire, his is a mystical and complex Torah. They are lessons clearly wrung from the depths of suffering. As Nehemiah Polen writes, “That he did not allow himself to be crushed by the events of the war was surely his greatest teaching of all.” In darkness, writes the Esh Kodesh, we must “serve God with a broken heart and an outpouring of soul.”
Why does the Talmud teach that Rabbi Yose prayed in the ruins of Jerusalem. Why did he not pray in a synagogue? The Esh Kodesh answers that he wanted his heart to be even more broken over the destruction of the Temple. Our tradition teaches that God treasures the broken hearted. Today, in a time of pain and isolation, the Holy Fire reaches across time to teach us that pain can lead to prayer, and prayer can lead to God.
You can combat the anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic elements in Black Lives Matter and still fight side by side with the black community against racism.
You can be a staunch Republican and still believe that most Democrats are neither foolish nor unAmerican.
You can be a staunch Democrat and still believe that most Republicans are neither cruel nor narrow.
You can be a devout atheist and still be convinced that religious people can be both informed and honest.
You can be a devout believer and still be convinced that atheists can be both moral and deep.
You can be an Orthodox Jew and think that liberal Judaism is born of considerations that are both principled and important.
You can be a liberal Jew and think that Orthodox Judaism is neither simplistic nor rigid.
You can be a leftist on Israel and believe that the right is motivated by principle, not prejudice or lack of compassion.
You can be a rightist on Israel and believe the left is motivated by decency, not recklessness or ignorance.
I have strong beliefs concerning all of these controversies, but I do not assume that those who oppose me are therefore bad, cruel or less thoughtful than myself. I invite you to join those who try to judge issues, not character. God is bigger than our partisanship. Sometimes, we should be too.
Throughout the desert, the Israelites rebel, quarrel and fight. They demand meat, have fond (and false) memories of Egypt, seek to usurp the leadership of Moses and demonstrate repeated ingratitude to God. To a reader who comes to the story for the first time, it can often seem that Berthold Brecht’s quip about unsatisfactory government, that one should dissolve the people and elect another, is the only solution. Indeed, God proposes it more than once.
In experiencing the long days of the pandemic however, we can perhaps develop more sympathy with the situation of our forebearers. For a difficult, prolonged situation sorely tests the nerves of even the most patient. Slight disagreements erupt into full-throated arguments. Different strategies become polarizing fights. People get on one another’s last nerve.
That is why the vision of a promised land is so important in the story of the wilderness. We have to envision a better world at the end of the trials. Like the Israelites, we need not come through the desert empty-handed. We can come through it understanding more about ourselves, one another, and believing that at the end of the journey there will be peace.
David had the strength to defeat Goliath. Yet he had moments of despair, as expressed in the Psalms “I am worn out calling for help” (Ps. 69:3). Jeremiah was a prophet of legendary power and will, but he called out “Oh, that I had a refuge in the wilderness that I might leave and go away from the people” (Jer. 9:2). Elijah fought with the Priests of Baal and defeated them. Yet he cries to God: “I have had enough, O Lord, take my life.” (1Kings 19:4).
If you have low moments in this difficult time, you are not alone. The most powerful spiritual figures in history have felt sometimes that the burden was too great, the battle too overwhelming.
The secret we learn from them is not that there can never be moments of despair, but that those moments cannot define us. Rising again, rising anew, is the debt we owe to ourselves, to each other and to God who fashioned us. Feel dismay, express despair, experience defeat; fall and fail. Then stand and breathing deep, carry on.
“Every person who becomes angry, even if a sage, his wisdom departs from him. If he is a prophet, his prophecy departs from him. (Pes. 66b).”
There are many reasons to be angry in this world, and to feel anger at injustice is a natural and salutary thing. But to act in anger or to express yourself when angry is far more likely to be destructive than productive. Expressing anger rarely quenches it – it generally increases it. As the old saying has it, the only people who hear both sides of a family argument are the people in the next house.
Anger, our Sages teach us, is like a boiling pot – it spills over into other things. The least controllable of emotions, it convinces us of its own justification. We may doubt why we are sad, or even happy; few people can feel doubts when in the grip of anger.
If sages lose their wisdom and prophets their prophecy, what do ordinary people lose from anger? Their judgment and capacity to listen. Be angry; but wait until it subsides to act. Rage feels good but right feels better.
“To gather the congregation you shall blow tekiah (summons) and not truah (alarm)” (Num. 10:7).
There are many ways to unite people. One is to frighten them. When pointed at a common enemy, people tend to gather in frightened solidarity. The Torah teaches in this week’s reading that the proper way is through summoning people to what is good and right rather than scaring them about what is wrong and bad.
Gatherings of hope are better than gatherings of fear. Unity from love is greater than unity from hate. Bringing people with the sound of tekiah is the way to create a society that will enable us to heal.
Lincoln called on the United States to be moved, not by animosity, but by the “better angels of our nature.” At the worst time on our history he chose a tekiah. Ours is a difficult and divided age. We have learned to our cost how calls to fear the other are ineffective to bring a society together. It is time to ask ourselves and our leaders to sound a tekiah, a note of hope, a summons to common goals and the common good.
How important was respect for our Sages? The Talmud discusses whether one can carry a lit candle on the Sabbath. In Talmudic times of course, without a candle the night was entirely dark. It relates that when Rabbi Abbahu was with Rabbi Joshua Ben Levi, he would carry a candle, but when he was with Rabbi Johanan, he would not (Yebamot 14a).
Explaining the difference, we are told that Rabbi Abbahu would act in accordance with the beliefs of his colleagues. Although he shared Rabbi Joshua Ben Levi’s belief that it was permitted, out of respect for Rabbi Johanan, when he was with him he would follow the practice of not carrying a candle.
I have often seen people accede to the desires of others but also making sure their sentiments are known. “I’ll take my shoes off in your house, but I think it is silly. I will wear a mask if you insist, but there is no good reason for it.”
That is not how Rabbi Abbahu behaved. He simply accommodated the beliefs of Rabbi Johanan because he understood that derech eretz, decent and thoughtful behavior, was more important than insisting upon his own position.
Rabbi Abbahu, how badly we need your example in our day.
