We Need to Understand Each Other Better - A Message for the New Year 5774

When I was a sophomore in high school, I was in biology class taking a test and in the middle of the test I needed a Kleenex.

I walked up to the front of the class to get one when I heard my teacher ask, “Are your eyes wandering a bit, Mr. Stecker?”  Implying that I was looking at someone else’s test paper on my way to get the Kleenex.  

Now I was not looking at anyone else’s paper and I was mortified.  Had she said, are you a bit neurotic about your academic success, Mr. Stecker?  Are you dreamy and unfocused, Mr. Stecker?   Even, do you feel nerdy and unworthy from time to time, Mr. Stecker?  I would have been put off, but ultimately not as offended.  There was some truth to all of those things, certainly when I was a teenager.

But to ask if I was cheating?  That hurt.  I was not, and am not, a cheater.

Her snarky question sliced right through me not just because I was wrongly accused, but because I felt fundamentally misunderstood.  If she implied that about me, then she didn’t understand me at all.  At 16 you tend to feel that sort of thing powerfully.

But it’s not just something you feel as a teenager.

At the beginning of the New Year, we read the story of Hannah who prayed to God in despair because she couldn’t have children.  Hannah was praying but could not be heard; her lips were moving but no sound emerged.

Eli, the Kohen, saw her and thought she was drunk.  He said to her, how long will you make a spectacle of yourself?  Stop the drinking!

And she said to him, “Lo, adoni.  No, my Master.  I am a very unhappy woman.  I have drunk no wine or other strong drink, but I have been pouring out my heart to God.” (1 Samuel 1:15)

This summer, in Jerusalem, I studied with numerous scholars at the Hartman Institute including Professor Tova Hartman, the daughter of the institute's founder, Rabbi David Hartman.  Tova Hartman received her doctorate in education from Professor Carol Gilligan, a pioneer in gender studies, and has taught and written extensively about education and gender.

She asked us to read the story about Hannah as it appears in the Bible and she asked us learn a passage from the Talmud where the rabbis imagine that Hannah said to the Kohen not, Lo Adoni.  No, my Master, I’m not drunk.  But rather, Lo adon atah badavar ze.  You are not the master over this matter, nor does the Divine spirit rest upon you, because you suspected me wrongly. (Talmud Brachot 31b)

Tova Hartman went on to say that Hannah was misunderstood by two key men in her life – Eli the Kohen, who thought she was drunk, and her husband, who said, in effect, “Why are you so sad?  True you don’t have a child, but you have me, babe.  What more could you possibly want?”

Listening to Tova Hartman, and reflecting subsequently on her teaching, I began to consider how much misunderstanding lies behind so many of the challenges that we face. The Jewish community seems less united than ever, men and women often seem at odds with each other, families are floundering as always.

And I decided I would use these holidays to make a plea for more understanding. 

I imagine that most of us have felt misunderstood at some point in our lives.  So while I’m speaking, I invite you to consider a time when you felt you were misunderstood.  When you felt that a teacher, or a parent, or a spouse, or a child, or a supervisor totally mis-read you or who you are or what you stand for.  Didn’t get you at all.

If we want others to understand us, then first and foremost we need to clarify what we need.  Just moping around feeling misunderstood is fine for a James Dean movie, but it gets tiresome in real life.

Moreover, in order to create an overall atmosphere of understanding, we should consider taking steps to understand others. 

Within communities, within families, across socio-economic lines, across gender lines, we can do a better job trying to show the kind of understanding that we want others to show us. 

I’ll start with the Jewish community.  The Jewish community is probably even less unified now than it was decades ago.  We’re getting more polarized in the United States and in Israel.  We seem to understand each other less and less and to be increasingly satisfied with sound-bytes and generalizations.

Arguments in Israel over who should be Chief Rabbi, Ultra-Orthodox Jews blowing whistles and throwing eggs at women gathered for communal prayer at the Kotel, showcase to the world how much animosity exists between Jews. 

Here in the United States, cooperative ventures between Jews of different ideologies are getting more and more rare.  Often I hear from members of our congregation about how their families are being torn apart by disagreements over Jewish belief and practice. 

How many of us have felt that someone else is looking down at us for the way we choose to believe or practice Judaism?

There are bright spots, however, that are changing the dynamic and I want to share a few that might be able to guide us.

When I was in Israel, Rabbi Dov Lipman, a self-described ultra-Orthodox Jew, came to speak at the Hartman institute.  He is a Knesset member who belongs to Yesh Atid, a party founded by a secular Jew.  He told us that the party’s founder, Yair Lapid, brought together all of the leaders of the party to get to know each other.  They talked about their approaches to Judaism, debated each other and, over time, learned to understand each other a bit better.

On the night of the election, Dov Lipman was standing next to a female, secular party leader watching the results come in.  It occurred to him that if they did well, she might naturally get excited and want to give him a hug, which would be awkward for him since his practice does not allow for physical contact between men and women.  The cameras were broadcasting the scene all over Israeli TV and a big hug from his female colleague would require a lot of explaining when he got back to his neighborhood. 

Turns out that the results that came in were very favorable, more than anticipated.  Lipman and his colleague and others won seats.

The cameras were rolling, recording the candidates’s reactions just as the results were announced. Lippman’s colleague was so excited by the news, she turned to him, held out her hands and then gave herself a hug.

And they both started laughing.  He said it was the most affectionate non-hug he ever received in his life.  She could have said, “it’s really silly that you don’t touch women.”  And maybe she thinks that, and maybe she doesn’t.  Instead, she chose to acknowledge his beliefs, so much so that she overcame her natural inclination.

Weeks later, Ruth Calderon, another leader of that party who started a yeshiva for self-described secular Israelis, gave a talk about the Talmud in the Knesset.  And an ultra-Orthodox rabbi listened quietly and then respectfully raised his hand to offer his own input. 

Months later, Dov Lipman, representing this party, led the charge for a government policy insisting that all ultra-Orthodox schools include appropriate secular education.   This is extremely important for Israel’s future.  He’s taking a huge beating for this within the ultra-Orthodox community, but he continues.  And he has become an advocate for greater understanding of different approaches to Judaism.

Yesh Atid, the name of the party, means, “There is a Future.”

Ignorance tends to lead to more ignorance.  Understanding tends to lead to understanding. 

Martin Luther King famously said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that.  Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

Way up north in the US in the state of Maine, an Orthodox rabbi welcomed his Reform colleague, a woman, to his synagogue when she had yahrtzeit for her father.  He invited her to lead a portion of the service to honor the memory of her father, not in keeping with the practice of his congregation or with general Orthodox practice. 

When asked about it later by a colleague, the rabbi said, “I figured, either way, one of us, she or I, was going to be uncomfortable and I thought – why shouldn’t it be me?”

Now some of us may be thinking, “Well, that’s Maine.”  What about the Kotel, or right here?  I’m not guaranteeing specific outcomes anywhere, but there is more potential for understanding between people of different religious practices and beliefs if we talk to each other.

Suppose you have a discussion with a neighbor, family member or friend in front of your house or in your kitchen, over a cup of tea, and you talk about your attitudes and invite the other person to talk?

Don’t we want our choices to be understood?  Don’t we want our friends and neighbors to respect our choices?  Would we rather go on feeling suspicious, resentful and misunderstood? So perhaps we need to start the conversation.  Or try again if we already started.

Have a cup of tea.  Ask, how are you?  And suggest, in your own words, I want to talk to you about my beliefs and my practices and to hear you talk about yours.

There are numerous ways that this can go wrong.  But assuming good will and basic humanity, if it goes right, then you may have increased understanding between neighbors, cousins, whomever, and that’s how it starts. 

And by the way – as you pour the cup of tea, ask yourself, honestly, how open and understanding am I in this regard?  After all, are we always so accepting of people who think or observe differently than we do?  Are we always so open-minded? 

Little steps.  One conversation at a time.  A little darkness is banished by some light. 

Let’s move a little closer now.  I want to talk about families.  Families are often hotbeds of misunderstanding.   Brothers and sisters, parents and children, grandparents and in-laws, we’re constantly surprising each other with things that beg to be understood but are often misunderstood.

The Israeli author, Amos Oz, wrote an autobiographical book called A Tale of Love and Darkness.  I read it just recently when I was staying in Jerusalem, not far from the places the author describes, and I highly recommend it. 

At one point, Oz describes feeling ashamed of his typical adolescent thoughts.  “How could my parents know what I was feeling?”  He wonders.  “And what did I possibly know about what they were feeling?”

And then he writes:

“And how about the two of them?  What did my father know about her ordeal?  What did my mother understand about his suffering?

A thousand lightless years separated us.”

Factoring in an author’s poetic exaggeration, factoring in that there were some particularly painful elements to Amos Oz’s family dynamic, I nonetheless say with the experience of 20 years as a rabbi and 48 years as a person that more families than we might want to admit, and maybe most, and maybe all, have felt the distance one from the other, the sometimes overwhelming misunderstanding, that Amos Oz identified feeling about his own family.

Each family is different, the degree and nature of understanding and misunderstanding are different and there’s no way that I will be able to paint a picture that is universal to everyone’s experience. 

But I’ll mention a few dynamics that I’ve observed.

I’ve observed spouses who orbit one another with little conversation about substance who gradually grow apart because no matrix of understanding was ever cultivated. 

I’ve observed parents who maintain their image of what their children should be, or do, even as they discover that their children are incapable or disinterested in fulfilling their parents’ expectations. 

I’ve observed children who don’t understand that it sometimes takes parents awhile to start to understand.

It’s hard to begin to understand our loved ones, especially when we have to stretch beyond what’s comfortable or familiar. 

A high school friend of mine was extremely academically gifted – things came very easily to him.  He had little patience for people who were not as sharp as he was. I lost touch with him and saw him years later at a reunion where he spent an hour telling me about his son who has multiple learning challenges.  It’s not easy at all for my friend to understand his son, let alone to accept him as he is.  But he spoke about his effort to understand and support his son, which was inspiring.

Albert Einstein said that everyone’s a genius.  But tell a fish it has to climb a tree and it’s going to feel very stupid.

How often do we push loved ones in unhelpful directions that show little understanding of who they actually are?

So here too, I’m making an appeal for small steps. 

One family member making room even just to consider what the other actually wants or the way the other actually is. 

Getting appropriate academic and emotional support for the way children actually are, rather than continuing to imagine them the way we’d like them to be. 

Hannah’s spiritual leader rushed to judge and her husband rushed to try to solve, but that’s not what she needed at that moment.  She needed some understanding.

Men don’t easily understand women and women don’t easily understand men, causing men at times to dismiss women as moody and women at times to bemoan men as insensitive.  I’m generalizing, but not without basis, I believe.  

Straight people often don’t easily understand gay people and people who are comfortable in their gender often don’t easily understand people who are not. 

But there are couples who work hard to understand each other and there are people who, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes easily, sometimes painfully, come to understand that their sense of who their friends and loved ones are, and what they are looking for, needs to be reconsidered. 

My son saw a Facebook posting from a boy he used to play Frisbee with at camp.  Over the past several years, the boy transitioned from male to female and explained, in the posting, that for the first time in her life, there is harmony between her body and her mind.  My son told me about it, shrugged his shoulders, and just said, “Wow.  I had no idea.” And he started to try to use the feminine pronoun when talking about his former teammate.  I witnessed in him, at that moment, the beginning of an attempt to consider and understand.

People who are well have a hard time understanding people who are ill.  I recently found out that someone I knew well in college, but kept in touch with sporadically in recent years, is going through chemo.  I didn’t want to burden him with a call so I sent him an email telling him how much I enjoyed hanging out with him in college, how much I’ve always admired him, and that I hope he handles his treatment with strength and humor.  I wrote a few more things and hit send. 

And then I thought.  Did I just ask this guy to handle chemotherapy with humor?  I’ve never been through chemo.  What was I thinking?  It was kind of a clunky, tone-deaf thing to write.

So I apologized and just said I hope he’s OK and he said he was.

People who were born in this country don’t easily understand the unique challenges of what it means to come to a new country.

I just spent a month in Israel and I have a tiny sense of what it’s like to spend time in a country where the spoken language is not my native tongue and the customs are different from those I’m used to, a tiny sense of what it might be like to come to a new country, learn a new language, adjust to a whole different set of expectations.  But still, it’s hard for me to understand.

People who can afford to eat don’t easily understand how it might be that a person doesn’t know where his or her next meal is coming from.

There’s a lot we don’t easily understand.  The Dalai Lama, a keen observer of contemporary life, once wrote, “Nowadays we have so much information, but so little understanding.”

So Hannah calls out to us from eternity and urges us to try to understand.  If we don’t understand, if we rush to judge or to solve, we are masters over nothing.  The control we think we have is an illusion and it will likely crumble. If we do try to understand, we can help create a different vibe and our influence, individually and collectively, will actually be greater. 

And you never know.  Perhaps the understanding we show will find its way back to us when we need it.  And we will need it.  As Rabbi Paul Simon and Cantor Art Garfunkel sang decades ago, “I don’t know a soul that’s not been battered.  Don't have a friend who feels at ease.  Don't know a dream that's not been shattered.  Or driven to its knees.”

Every one of us at some point needs a little extra consideration. 

If darkness separates us, as Amos Oz said of his own family, then only we can let in the light.  50 years after the Reverend MLK, Jr. spoke at the March on Washington, let’s remember that only light banishes darkness, only love banishes hatred and understanding is the energy that fuels the light and the love.  Not always with perfect success, but if you don’t try, you’ll never know. 

More often than not, I discover a few things about the “other” person. He wants to love and be loved, she wants to find adventure and security, he has a bunch of problems to deal with.  She wants to do something worthwhile in life.  How incredibly incredible and un-incredible we are.

I want to conclude with something I learned this summer which blew my mind.  It comes from kabbalah, Jewish mysticism.

I started in biology class and I’m going to end with reference to a kabbalah class I took with 27 other rabbis where we built on each other’s interpretations and, curiously, no one was accused of cheating.

The Zohar, perhaps the most famous book of Jewish mysticism, begins with the story of creation. 

Bereish hormanuta d’malka.  In God’s head, the world began to form.

In God’s imagination, God made room for the world.  At first there was a spark of darkness, then a cluster of vapor with no color at all, but from the spark and the vapor gushed a spectrum of colors, and those colors formed into a single point of radiant light. 

What does this mean?  To my understanding, it means that the sun, moon and stars exist because God made room for them.  The lion and the mosquito exist because God made room for them.  We all exist because God made room for each of us.  According to this understanding, no one has more or less right to exist because God made room for everyone in God’s expansive imagination.  Room for me.  Room for you.  Room for everyone. 

My friends, at the beginning of the year we celebrate the creation of the universe.  And creation is about making room.

So I say, let’s celebrate creation by making room for one another.

How remarkable it would be if we at Temple Israel could imitate God’s creative impulse so that the full spectrum that we bring might be unified in single points of light.  That doesn’t mean that we all become the same.  It means that to the extent that we understand and even harness our differences, we draw communal strength and a shared sense of purpose. 

We become a single point of light that brings food and clothing to those in need. 

A single point of light that brings melodies from the full range of our cultural experience to our sacred sanctuary. 

A single point of light that respects the unique gifts that each child, man and woman brings to this sacred house. 

A single point of light that fights for justice for every human being within and beyond this sacred house.

We turn to God on the Birthday of the world and say with extra meaning what we say every day, ten b’libenu l’havin ul’haskil.  Give us the capacity to understand. 

Help us make room for one another in our heads and our hearts, just like you did when the world was created.

I have a dream that as we take steps to increase our understanding, the brightest lights and the bravest new worlds will emerge. 

Dear God:  A new year is beginning.  Give us the capacity to understand and the experience of being understood.  

Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, September 2013