The Censored Life is Not Worth Living: Reflections on Our Land, Our Tradition and Our Lives

The poet Yehuda Amichai imagined what it would be like to go through the Bible and censor the parts that are distasteful or painful.

To explore this concept he wrote the following poem:

From the Book of Esther I removed the sediment

of vulgar joy, and from the Book of Jeremiah

the howl of pain in the guts. And from

the Song of Songs, the endless

search for love. And from the Book of Genesis,

the dreams and Cain. And from Ecclesiastes,

the despair, and from the Book of Job: Job.

And with what was left, I pasted myself a new Bible.

Now I live censored and pasted and limited and in peace.

A woman asked me last night on the dark street

how another woman was

who’d already died. Before her time – and not

in anyone else’s time either.

Out of a great weariness I answered:

Shloma tov, shloma tov

She’s fine, she’s fine.

The fantasy of living a censored life, adhering to a censored Judaism, pledging allegiance to a censored Israel certainly has its appeal.

To the question, how are we doing, on all fronts, we can say, “fine, fine” thank you for asking.

But I wonder – and I guess this may well be Amichai’s point – what is the cost of all of the censorship that we inflict on our lives, our religion and our land? 

Those of us who have lived more than a few decades know full well that life comes with its share of anguish.  We also know that being Jewish has its ups downs and that the State of Israel isn’t Disneyland.

When we offer a censored version it doesn’t really serve us well, and if we think that the censored version that we offer – of our lives, our tradition and our land – is making things more appealing for the younger generation, then we’re totally missing the boat.  They know when we’re cleaning things up beyond recognition.  They know when our Israel, our Judaism, our lives are censored and pasted and limited and not in a good way.

Let’s start with Israel.  I want to speak from my experience as a rabbi, as someone who teaches children and teenagers, and as a father of one college student and two college graduates. 

The under-30 crowd doesn’t expect Israel to walk on water.  They don’t expect Israel to be right all of the time.  When I traveled to Israel with several Temple Israel families a few years ago, I had a great time with everyone and I especially enjoyed talking with a small group of 16-year olds from a few of the families and watching them absorb the various things they were seeing and experiencing.  They saw and heard graciousness but also rudeness, they heard comments that were visionary and inclusive and comments that were myopic and prejudiced.

They saw the insecurity that Israelis live with, especially when we visited the bomb shelter in Ashkelon, and they also got the sense that Israelis live with enormous courage and that they don’t allow the threats of their enemies to prevent them from enjoying life’s blessings or just having a good a time.

All of them told me, as we were leaving, that they loved their time in Israel and had a strong desire to go back.

I think that we do ourselves, our children and our grandchildren a disservice when we present Israel in a censored way.  High resolution, multiple opportunities to visit and explore and understand will, based on past performance, yield the deepest affection and support for Israel. 

Let’s move on to Judaism as a whole.  We’re going to cover a lot of ground this morning. 

Our tradition, from its Biblical origins through to the present, is complicated, multi-textured, very difficult to reduce to an elevator speech.

There are two stories of creation and multiple theologies in the Torah itself.  Do the righteous get rewarded and the wicked suffer?  The answer is yes, if you read much of the book of Deuteronomy. 

But many of us sat here on Saturday and read through parts of Ecclesiastes, and got a different answer.  The same fate awaits the righteous and the wicked, he wrote.

The book of Job presents an extended critique to the Deuteronomic mindset.  The man who does everything right lives a life of misery.  The prose at the beginning and end presents that concept in a rather simplistic way; the poetry in the middle is much denser, and it resists easy understanding, kind of like the way most of us experience life.

The Biblical tradition emphasizes outreach to the vulnerable, except when it doesn’t.  One chapter of Leviticus talks about not putting a stumbling block in front of the blind, and a nearby chapter speaks about keeping those with physical imperfections away from certain aspects of ancient worship. 

The problem with much Jewish education across the lifespan is that we cut and paste, we take out the “offensive parts”.  It’s a problem because soon enough our children discover the troubling parts and as they discover them, they say some version of, “This isn't real" or "I don’t need this.”

Far better for us to deal with the difficult parts, far better for us, across the life span, to present Torah fully, to engage the sweet and the not-so-sweet, to acknowledge multiple perspectives, and to allow everyone, from 5 to 95, to find his or her own way in the vast yam hatorah, the sea of Torah, unfiltered, uncensored. 

I do finally want to say a word about how we censor our lives.  I don’t suggest that we should say the first thing that comes to our minds, that we should always present the unvarnished truth at any point, or that we live in a way that is vulgar and irresponsible.

But do we always need to say that everything is fine, even when it isn’t?  Has the “it’s all good” premise of American culture obliterated our awareness as a people that life, in addition to joy and laughter and achievement, also includes sadness, yearning, anger, disappointment and pain?

My grandparents didn’t always say, “I’m fine, thank you.”  If they were disappointed, they said they were disappointed.  They didn’t have the expectation that everything would always turn out ok. 

I don’t remember thinking as a kid, they’re so negative.  I remember thinking, they’re funny, they’re angry – there was something very real about being with them.

That was true of my parents too, but I’m thinking back a generation because my grandparents were less influenced by what I’ll call the American notion, for better or for worse, that if you try hard enough, everything will be ok, and that no one wants to know how you really feel.

She’s fine, she’s fine.  Yehuda Amichai says about this woman, and the irony of course is that she’s no longer alive.  “Fine, fine” is sometimes true, but as a consistent description it’s not compatible with life.

Our people, God love us, do not do well with censorship.  We have statements attributed to Moses and Job and Esther and Rabbi Akiva and Bruria and I could go on and on through the middle ages and into modernity that are not just “I’m fine, thank you.”

And we transmit and study texts and traditions that present sensitivity and coarseness, satisfaction and yearning, things going right and things going horribly wrong.

And we love a land which embraces optimism and cynicism, where people display broad vision and myopia.

On this day, Shimini Atzeret, according to the often quoted midrash, God turns to us and says, stick around one more day.  Kashe alai preidatchem.  The thought of you leaving is hard for me.

The relationship between us and God, as recorded throughout our tradition, is not censored.  We’ve pleased God and God has pleased us.  We’ve disappointed God and God has disappointed us.  We’ve had our doubts about God and God has had doubts about us.

And yet we imagine God saying to us, kasheh alai preidatchem, hard to see you go.  We imagine it, we create such a midrash, perhaps because we need to feel that God needs to have us around.  Who knows for sure?

The Bible without lust, violence and despair would not be the Bible.  It all exists along with the compassion and the joy. 

Israel without rudeness and hot-temperedness would not be Israel.  All that exists along with the idealism and the optimism.

Each of us without our anger and our disappointment would not be who we are.  All of that and more coexists with our kindness and our many achievements. 

Yes, we should try to refine our land, our tradition and our selves.  No, we should not allow the basest elements to take over.

But at the end of the day, we, our children, our grandchildren and, let’s hope, our Creator – will be more likely to fully embrace that which is uncensored.  And when we say, sh’loma tov, it’s fine, Israel is fine, Judaism is fine, we’re fine – it will be an overall endorsement, a mature embrace.

The thought of life without our land or our tradition, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the thought or acknowledgment of life without our loved ones, with everything they bring and everything they brought, is truly hard indeed.

Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck on Shemini Atzeret, October 5, 2015