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Let us begin with two stories, from two renowned—and very
different—twentieth century rabbis.
The chief rabbi of pre-war Palestine, Rav Avraham Yitzchak
Kook offers his tale in a commentary on the book of Genesis, so let me set the
scene. After twenty years of working for
his unscrupulous uncle, Laban, Jacob decides the time has come to go his own
way. He gathers his wives—and Laban’s
daughters—Rachel and Leah from the fields and tells them:
Ro-eh anochi et p’nay avichen, ki
aynenu eylai ki-t’mol shilshom
It is time to take our leave of this place—
for your father’s face is not the same to me as it used to be
What does this mean?
Most of our Sages read the reference to Laban’s face as an insight into
his shifting attitude: once he looked upon Jacob with favor, now he eyes him
with hostility and envy.
Simple and straightforward—but there’s one problem with this
reading: there’s no indication that Laban ever
viewed or treated Jacob kindly. At least
in the plain sense of the Torah text, Laban was cruel and cunning from the get
go. Thus Rav Kook offers an intriguing
alternative explanation. He teaches that
Jacob told his family:
We have to get out of this place
because when I first came here, I looked at Laban and saw the truth of how he
lived. I was keenly aware of his
deception. I was repelled by his ethics
and loathed the way that he did business.
But now that I have been here for two decades, I have gotten used to
him. I have reached the point where I’m
starting to think that what he does is what you are supposed to do, that it is
normal and proper to deal deviously.
When I look at Laban today, I am no longer shocked or offended. His face is not the same to me as it
used to be. Therefore, we’d better leave quickly—because
if we stay, I fear I will get so accustomed to him and his ways that I will
become like him.
**********
Rabbi Stephen Wise was a leading social activist, Reform
Zionist, and personal advisor to Franklin Roosevelt. He illustrated the impetus behind his
activism with a story about the first time he visited China:
When I arrived, I realized that the
only available means of transportation within the cities was by rickshaw. Most of these rickshaws were hauled by
impoverished, feeble people, who would cough and groan as they dragged their
wagons through the streets. At first, I
couldn’t stand the sound of their hacking and moaning; it riled my conscience
every time I reluctantly hired a driver to take me around. But after I’d been in China for awhile, I
realized a shocking thing: I had grown so habituated to their groans that I no
longer heard them.
That’s when I knew I had to leave.
**********
Avraham Yitzchak Kook and Stephen S. Wise came from vastly
different worlds. Kook was an ultra-Orthodox messianic Jerusalem mystic; Wise a
classical Reform American activist. And
yet, as my colleague Jack Riemer notes, these two rabbis shared a critical
Jewish sensibility—rooted in our sacred texts and learned, again and again,
over the long course of our people’s history—that we must not, dare not, ever
get so hardened, so callous, so accustomed to evil that we take it for granted
and think that’s the way it is, the way
it was and the way it always will be.
Because when that happens, we are spiritually dead.
Rabbis Kook and Wise remind us that it is precisely when we
realize we are acclimating to evil—when the constant daily affronts to basic
human decency cease to bother us—then we must rouse ourselves out of our moral
torpor and change course before it’s too late.
**********
Such moral numbing is an age-old phenomenon. In our personal lives, at work, school and
home, each of us knows, all too well, how to inure ourselves against unpleasant
realities. Who among us has never
consciously or unconsciously turned a blind eye to unethical conduct?
But my friends, while the practice is ancient, our current
hour is urgent.
The constant barrage of bullying public policy and crass
attacks emanating from our nation’s highest corridors sorely test our
ethical attention spans. In her final
Facebook post before she was murdered by white supremacists in Charlottesville
just over a year ago, Heather Heyer famously wrote, “If you’re not outraged,
you’re not paying attention.” She’s
right, of course—and yet it’s extraordinarily hard to stay focused when
surrounded by so much bad behavior. And
sometimes it seems we’re paying too much
attention—to the wrong things, which only harden our hearts in unconscious
increments, like the frog placed in tepid water only to be slowly boiled alive.
One culprit is the 24/7 news cycle. As writer Aaron Ragsdsale reminds us, “What
was once compressed down to an hour of the most pressing issues one would need
before facing the day, has mutated into a never ending farce of desensitized
violence and talking heads. . . Viewers
become much more attracted to sensationalized media that can attract the most
shares based off a shock value.”
Every minute of every day, folks tell us that the sky is
falling. But if the sky is always
falling, then no one will be paying any attention when it actually collapses.
This media bombardment is bad enough on its own, but it is
now aided, abetted and played by politicians that strategically employ compassion
fatigue to deflect attention from their own egregious ethical failings. Outrageous tweets and crass rants are
calculated to distract us, to wear us down, to further lower the bar and dull
our responses to the dismantling of the ideals upon which our nation was
founded.
Alas, the so-called normalization of aberrant behavior seems
to be working.
**********
So. . . how do we resist this incremental atrophying of our
moral sensibilities? Can we—like
Jacob—recognize the loathsome place we’ve come to accept—and find a way out?
I believe that our tradition offers us an ethical path
forward, grounded in three principles: communal solidarity, Torah teaching, and
the rest and renewal of Shabbat.
First, community.
A few months ago, author and professor Roxane Gay received a
letter from a reader, who wrote:
Dear Roxane,
Back in January, I emailed a group of
friends asking if they planned to attend the Women’s March in New York
City. A progressive black woman like
myself replied: “Can’t make it.
Completely swamped this weekend.”
My first reaction was irritation. . .
but in the months since then, I’ve slowly realized, with considerable shame,
that I am no better. I have what seem
like good excuses: having a baby, illness and death in my family, a challenging
job, etc, but the truth is, these mask my underlying condition of
paralysis. I continue to be outraged . .
. but I’m struggling to summon a response.
Do you have words of wisdom to help me understand and perhaps overcome
my feelings of apathy?
Signed,
Apathetic Idealist
Dr. Gay’s response speaks to the enduring power of
community. She replies:
Dear Apathetic Idealist,
I have no doubt that many people can
relate to your letter. I can relate to
it. It’s hard to know what to pay
attention to and what to respond to and how.
It is damn hard to expand the limits of our empathy when our emotional
attention is already stretched too thin in a world run through with inequity,
strife and suffering. It’s not just
overwhelming, it is exhausting. . .
I don’t have any easy answer for you,
but I think many of us get overwhelmed because we think we have to care about
everything all the time, as if that’s even possible. We get mired in solipsism and delude
ourselves into thinking the proverbial struggle cannot go on without us. This is rarely the case. The
grand thing about collective effort is that we can generally trust that someone
is out in the world, doing important social justice work when we are too tired
or burned out to join in. Your
friend didn’t go to the women’s march, but hundreds of thousands of other
people did. Every day, everywhere,
people are doing the work of resisting oppression and tyranny in ways great and
small.
Life is hard. The
burden is heavy. Our world is badly
broken and the work of repair is indeed daunting. The heft of the load can crush our souls—but
only if we insist on carrying it by ourselves.
Rabbi Nachman of Breslov offers a poignant parable for our
time, the tale of a king who summoned his prime minister to deliver some
impossibly difficult news:
I see in the stars that every ear of
grain in our kingdom is afflicted with terrible blight: whoever eats of it will
go mad. What is your advice?
The prime minister replied, “You and I must somehow find a
way to bring in just enough grain from outside so that the two of us can avoid
partaking of the local harvest.”
The king objected: “But then we will be the only ones who are
sane; everyone else will be mad—therefore, they will think that we are the crazy
ones.”
They sat in silence, pondering their fate. Finally the king decided, “It is impossible to set aside sufficient outside
grain for everyone. Thus we, too, must
eat of this year’s store. But you and I
will each first make a mark on our foreheads, so that when we see one another,
we, at least, will know that we are mad.”
Like the king and prime minister, we cannot entirely escape
the madness of our world. But if we hang
together and support one another, we will at least remember that we are mad—and
thereby keep alive our hope of ameliorating the madness.
**********
The second source of sanity in our culture run amuck is the
moral compass of Torah.
When we start to stray into apathy and inattention, Torah
calls us back to what matters most and restores an ethical perspective.
To learn Torah is to remember what should and still might be. As the Baal Shem Tov reminds us: Forgetfulness
leads to exile; memory is the key to redemption.
When we remember that God
saw all the work of creation and called it very good,—then we remember that willful inaction in the face of human-caused
climate change is a sin against the Creator and a betrayal of future
generations.
When we remember that God
created humanity in God’s image, male and female, then we remember that
racism, misogyny and homophobia debase both the human and the Divine.
When we remember God’s proclamation in this morning’s
haftarah portion, Is not this the fast I look for: to unlock the shackles
of injustice, to undo the fetters of bondage, to let the oppressed go free, and
to break every cruel chain. . . to share your bread with the hungry. . when you
see the naked to clothe them, and never to hide yourself from your own kin—when
we remember this clarion call, then we remember what a shande it is that the world’s most powerful nation has by far the
world’s highest rate of imprisonment, with gross racial disparity and with
funding for incarceration growing three times faster than that for public
education. And we remember that homelessness
in a land as wealthy as ours is not normal; it is unacceptable.
When we remember God’s call to seek peace and pursue it, to beat
our swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, then we remember
that our failure to pass any significant form of gun control in the face of
horrific violence in our schools and cities is a moral abomination.
And when we remember—as we are commanded in Torah, no less
than thirty six times, to remember that
we were strangers—refugees—in the land of Egypt, then we remember that
calling people illegal aliens, separating children from their parents,
threatening America’s Dreamers, imposing travel bans, imprisoning immigrants
and turning away tens of thousands of desperate asylum seekers is un-Jewish and
un-American.
When evil and apathy lulls us incrementally into their embrace,
Torah is our wake up call, goading us to remember and to act.
**********
Torah and community preserve our souls. So does Shabbat.
Over two hundred years ago, the poet William Wordsworth wrote:
The world is too much with us; late
and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste
our powers
What was true for Wordsworth is even truer now. The world is, indeed, too much with us. If we wish to preserve our moral sanity, we
must regularly take the opportunity step away and turn it off.
Rosanne Gay speaks to this in her reply to Apathetic
Idealist. She tells her readers:
Lately, I’ve stopped watching cable
news because the 24-hour news cycle has become an incoherent mess. . .
I recognize that I don’t have all the
answers [but] what you describe in your letter is not apathy. You aren’t indifferent to the current state
of the world. You are human, a woman
trying to balance your own needs with doing good in the world.
Take the time you need. There is no shame in that so long as you
remember to extend your empathy as far as you can when your emotional stores
have replenished.
My friends, Shabbat is how and when we Jews unplug—to
replenish our emotional stores and re-set our moral compass.
What a blessing we have!—a day for rest and rejuvenation, to
hear and remember the voice of Torah, enfolded in the loving embrace of our community!
Each week we have the opportunity to take our leave, like our
father Jacob and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, just in the nick of time.
There is a special Hebrew word for this sacred endeavor: Va-yinafash.
Many of you know the term from V’Shamru, which we sing every Friday night and Saturday
morning. It’s straight out of the Torah,
from Exodus 31:
U-va-yom ha-sh’vi’i shavat
va-yinafash—
On
the seventh day, God rested and was refreshed
But va-yinafash
doesn’t really mean either “rested” or “refreshed.” Its Hebrew root, nefesh, refers to soul, breath, or life-force. So the verb, va-yinafash, is, literally, to be re-souled. As Rashi says in his commentary on the
passage, “God restored God’s own soul by taking a calming break from the burden
of the labor.”
And we, created in God’s image, are called to do the same: to
restore our souls, each and every week, by turning away from the work of the
world for just long enough to return to that sacred labor rested, with open
eyes and caring hearts.
For ethical numbness and compassion fatigue are real and
inevitable—unless we learn to take the time to rejuvenate our weary spirits.
**********
On this most sacred morning of Yom Kippur, the Holy One calls
us all to the ultimate accounting:
I set before you life or death, the
blessing or the curse—
Choose
life, therefore, that you and your descendants may live.
In this new year, each of us will face that choice:
The spiritual death that comes as the inevitable end of
incremental ethical atrophy—
or the fullness of intentional life that we regain through a
commitment to justice anchored in our Jewish ideals of communal solidarity,
Torah teaching, and Shabbat rest and renewal.
This is the hour to rouse our spirits, to open our eyes, to
offer up our hearts and minds, to speak and act to save our souls and the soul
of our beloved nation.
My friends, let us choose life.
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