Sensitivity Leads to Strength

Last Tuesday night I attended the IAJF (Iranian American Jewish Federation) annual gala where former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley spoke.  It is a source of pride to TIGN that so many of our members are involved, including IAJF president Robert Kahen, president of IAJF.

Last Thursday, I attended the ADL’s Never Is Now conference where, among other things, Sascha Baron Cohen was given the International Leadership Award and British Parliament Member Joan Ryan spoke about her response to antisemitism in England.  It is a source of pride to TIGN that so many of our members are involved, including, of course, CEO Jonathan Greenblatt.  

On Wednesday night, I went to see an outstanding new production of Macbeth with my son Zach.  The production was terrific and watching Macbeth again solidified for me how I would, in this little sermon, frame the week and, more broadly, the way that I believe we must respond to the enormous challenges that face us these days as Jews and as human beings.

We know it’s important to be strong in the face of antisemitism and bigotry.  No one could convincingly argue, post-Shoah, and recently in the aftermath of the shootings in Pittsburgh and Poway and continued attacks of Jews on Brooklyn and just recently a stabbing of a Jew in Rockland County, that Jews should sit back passively.  We need to be strong and we need allies to be strong on our behalf and we need to be strong on behalf of our allies.

We also need to remain sensitive.  So that we can continue to feel what is natural to feel when we and those we know and those we don’t know are targeted with discrimination and violence.  So that we have the resolve to fight to protect those who are vulnerable, including but not limited to ourselves.  So that we can sense the difference between protective measures that are called for and protective measures that unfairly target the most vulnerable.  

Strength and sensitivity are not mutually exclusive.  In Jewish tradition they never were.  They always went hand in hand.  The Kabbalists speak of chesed/love/sensitivity on one side of a cosmic and human scheme and gevurah/resolve/strength on the other side and the idea is that in the world, and through us, they work together.

Starting with Macbeth.

Becoming More Assertive

Starting this Monday night, I’m going to be teaching a class at Temple Israel about Musar.  Musar loosely translated means ethical behavior.  We will be looking at texts that answer the basic question, how should we behave?

A depiction of Abraham conversing with God

Broadly speaking, texts about “how to behave” go way back in our tradition.  The Torah explores human behavior in numerous stories about our forbears and concretizes expectations of behavior through laws. 

The book of Proverbs and the book of Ecclesiastes provide advice.

Medieval Jewish philosophers wrote about how to define proper behavior. 

During the 19th century, the so-called Musar Movement developed and musar instructors wrote and taught about how one might change one’s behavior for the better.

They established frameworks for self-reflection and behavior modification.  A recent framework, established by the Mussar Institute, offers the following guidelines:

In the morning, you identify a type of behavior that you want to embrace. 

You say it, think about it, meditate on it.

In the afternoon, you do activities that strengthen the behavior.

In the evening, you write about your efforts. What went well?What didn’t go well?

When it comes to improving our own behavior, lots of things get in the way.

Often we aren’t aware of how we’re behaving.  We say and do things that are angry or timid or selfish and we aren’t even aware.

When we look at other people who behave in positive ways, we might be intimidated by them.  If we get as far as saying, “Gee, I’d like to do that,” we don’t necessarily know how to go about it.

In this morning’s Torah reading alone, we see examples of behaviors we might want to follow (and perhaps some that we don’t want to follow).

I’d like to focus on one behavior of Abraham that I would say is a positive behavior, one that we might want to emulate.

Engaging With a Scary, Unjust World

We tell a lot of stories to children that are terrifying.  The Brothers Grimm - two German scholars - are best known for their fairy tales and they are quite scary.  But we don’t even need them as examples.  The Bible has plenty of scary stories.  

To be sure, when we tell the story of Noah, we focus on the cute little animals and there are even cute songs about them walking onto the ark which I’ll spare you.  But the overall story is terrifying.  Destruction by flood is terrifying and if children use their imaginations to consider what that would be like, it might keep them up at night.

There’s another scary aspect of the story, and that is, that God decides to give up on humanity.  And at least as scary as that is the fact that the human that God picks to be saved along with his immediate relatives says nothing and starts to build a big boat just like God commands in order to save himself, his family, and certain animals.

Giving up is one answer to the fact that human beings are various shades of imperfect/dismissive/downright cruel.  There are lots of ways to give up that don’t involve wholesale destruction, though we’ve certainly done that to one another as a species.  We give up by allowing injustice and violence to continue without saying or doing much.  Ignoring and denying are very common ways that human beings give up on one another.

The first thing Noah does when he leaves the ark after the flood is plant a vineyard and get drunk.  Usually we don’t teach children that part.  I imagine he gets drunk in part because it is too painful to face sober the reality of the destruction that occurred and the reality of his own complicity, his tacit agreement to “give up.”

There is an alternative to giving up. It occupies the rest of the Torah, such that the Noah story becomes the exception rather than the rule.  The alternative to giving up is engagement.