weekly column
Each week, find a commentary on something connected to verses of Torah or another source of wisdom
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Each week, find a commentary on something connected to verses of Torah or another source of wisdom
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![]() Wisdom Wherever You Find It Introspection is also interpersonal. Benjy Forester Any system of personal belief worth its salt includes a demand of true self-awareness. In religious language, the believer with integrity wants to be conscious of sin and, awakened to personal shortcoming or transgression, moved to contrition and repentance. That vocabulary of faith is merely a fancier way of what your parents said when you did something wrong: You know what you did, so say you are sorry. In Jewish tradition, the process of introspection is called “accounting of the soul” or perhaps “inventory of life.” It is meant to lead to repentance, called “teshuvah” in Hebrew, from the word that means “to turn.” In other words, having done an inventory of your conduct, you turn away from bad conduct. You know what you did, so say you are sorry. (And, don’t do it again.) The medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides wrote a comprehensive guide to Jewish life a thousand years ago in which he discussed (among many other things) this process of teshuvah. He identified the twenty-four hardest things facing a person intending to live a better life, and it was one of those things that prompted Benjy Forester to make his remarkable observation. Some of the twenty-four are predictable – intentional and habitual misbehavior, public disparagement of others, gaming the system by saying it’s easier to apologize than to ask permission, and more. But the one that caught Forester’s attention was this: the person who refuses to listen to reproof. As Maimonides says, a person who discovers that his faults are known to another should rightfully be ashamed, which opens the path to regret and repentance. But if the person has closed his ears and his heart to the criticism of others, he has also closed a way to being made whole again. The Bible actually expects each of us to act as a lifeguard to others by offering compassionate criticism when we notice them taking a self-destructive path. While you may have just conjured an image of a harangue being offered from pulpit or street corner, I prefer to think of it as an intervention, large or small. There ought to be no self-righteous posturing in saying to someone you love that you are concerned about their habits or behavior. Indeed, it is far more loving to offer concern than to ignore or enable conduct that endangers the well-being of a friend or family member. Maybe all of this resonates with you and maybe it doesn’t, but the point of these four words of wisdom is not to endorse or critique the Bible or a thousand-year-old application of it. Instead, it is a remarkable insight about the importance of being in community. The notion that introspection is exclusively a solitary act is as frightening as it is inaccurate. Who wants to be left alone with their conscience? Who wants to wonder if anybody actually cares about what kind of person they are? Who wants to serve as an unforgiving judge of their own soul, likely more harsh than necessary, just to feel goodness again? The voice of criticism is the voice of love. No, of course not gratuitous or angry criticism which serves no purpose but to compound feelings of smallness. Rather, the voice of someone who cares enough to travel the path of repentance with you, ready to toss a lifeline before you drown in self-pity and remorse. In the public realm, criticism has become cruel and usual. Umbrage, rather than compassion and sadness, has accompanied reproof. It has made people fearful for all the wrong reasons, worried about being marginalized or excluded without hope of redemption. The same might be said about entertainment, where bickering and verbal combat have always been the source of comedy and drama alike. Eyes and ears on more screens for more time reinforce the conflict over the embrace. An instruction like Benjy Forester’s, channeling Maimonides’ teaching, is a reminder of why loving admonition is the source of rescue from the despair of self-isolation. Criticism alone serves only to further isolate. But when someone cares enough to accompany you to the place of personal growth and improvement, you are halfway to forgiveness. You know what you did, so say you are sorry. I’ll be right here with you.
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![]() Wisdom Wherever You Find It I can’t know your pain, but you have a God who knows what it is like to lose a child. Sen. Tim Kaine I first met Tim Kaine when he was the mayor of Richmond, Virginia. He showed up at the City of Alexandria’s annual observance of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. He was standing alone, eating a cookie, so I introduced myself, and he told me who he was. “What are you doing here in Alexandria?” I asked. He replied, “I hope to be Lieutenant Governor, so I am getting out to meet folks all over the Commonwealth.” Kaine has lost only one election in his life (it was a big one), and he has done an admirable job in every office he has held. Here is something he told me: It was when he was mayor that he faced what he thinks is one of the biggest challenges of his life in public service. Gun violence was claiming lots of lives in the city. Trying to address the mechanics of gun ownership and use was frustrating, but it hard as it was, it was a far second to what he described as the thing he was least prepared for. He visited the families of the victims. In Jewish tradition, we would colloquially describe that as a “shivah call.” During the seven (shivah) days following the funeral, community members, whether friends or not, go to the home of the bereaved family and offer comfort by their presence. The guidelines for conduct include not speaking until the mourner greets you – one should not presume that a grieving loved one wants to chat. The first words after that should be those of comfort. There is a sort of mantra of solace, but sometimes just, “I am so sorry” suffices. After that, the tension is broken, and respectful conversation is the norm. Tim Kaine is not Jewish, and he did not walk into homes where the conventions of mourning were at play. Though personally religious – he was raised a Christian and became a Roman Catholic – his job before elected office was as a civil rights attorney. The victims of gunplay were mostly Black, mostly men, mostly young. What could he possibly say to a mother who had lost the son that was the repository of her future? If you gave me a million years, I could not imagine something as appropriate as he intuited. “I can’t know your pain,” he said once (and then too many more times), “but you have a God who knows what it is like to lose a child.” From within the ethos of Christianity, there may be no better way to open the possibility of God’s comfort than those words. I remain a rabbi, a faithful Jew and a deliberate non-believer in Jesus. But when Sen. Kaine told me that story, I began to cry. I knew in the moment that such was the God I would want in my time of loss, of pain, of grief. I would want a God who understood what I was going through. The Scriptures of most of the theist religions contain narratives of a deity who stands with the believers in an hour of need, arguing their case, enacting their judgments, avenging their grievances. When the believers feel small, their deity nonetheless delivers the mighty to the weak, the many to the few, the scoffers to the loyalists. When critiques are leveled at religions, they are often based on these promises, doubters snarling “Where’s your God now?” when the righteous are unredeemed. I can’t argue with those people who find their path to faith blocked by evidence to the contrary, nor with those who point out that conflicts between adherents of different religions are to blame for so much that seems the antithesis of the religious vision. But just as they refuse to consider belief, I refuse to consider disbelief. And the deep sensitivity of Tim Kaine is part of the reason. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel identified the notion of an empathic God. He read the mission of the prophets to act as spokespeople for the divine pathos – God’s intimate concerns for humanity, part angry frustration at the one who shoots the gun, part broken heart for the mother who weeps. ![]() A GAME OF CHICKEN Wisdom Wherever You Find It It’s like trying to make a chicken by grabbing feathers from here and there. Cynthia Hudson Any number of TV game shows had a feature called various versions of the money booth. Some lucky contestant had the chance to be closed into a tall glass tube with a fan under the floor, into which was dumped a bucket of dollar bills. The greenbacks flew around the hapless schmo for sixty seconds (on the clock!) who got to keep anything he or she could hang onto. For all the excitement, rarely did anyone come away with enough to justify making a fool of yourself on national television. Many years later, I was co-chair of a commission for the Commonwealth of Virginia to promote diversity, equity and inclusiveness after the horrific events in Charlottesville in August of 2017. I had the great good fortune to serve with Cynthia Hudson, Deputy Attorney General. She is smart, organized and principled, and she made me feel a lot better about being confounded by the problems by sharing my sense of inadequacy about where even to begin. The members of the commission were a cross-section of Virginia, though even the unwieldy number who were selected could not be comprehensive representatives of faith, geography, ethnicity, race, gender identity, economic strata, etc. As she and I struggled just to put together an agenda, she suddenly exclaimed in exasperation, “It’s like trying to make a chicken by grabbing feathers from here and there.” I won’t pretend that we made a chicken. But her lament helped me understand (not in the moment – I was laughing too hard) that if we came in with the result in our heads instead of establshing the process, we could work as frantically as humanly possible and still be unable to grab enough feathers. I should have learned it from the money booth. Our commissioners had remarkable insights into the mandate of the group. No one imagined they had the singular solution to the challenges of diversity, equity or inclusion, but they each had an idea about how to take a run at one or another of them. We were funded for a year and told by two governors that we could measure success by action, not merely words. When the term of the commission was about to end, we talked with the staff and came to the realization that there were still feathers all over the place and no clucking. But it does not mean that we failed. In looking at the initiatives – legislative and otherwise – that emerged as recommendations and encouragements from religious and tribal leaders, social activists, legislators, businesspeople, non-profit professionals, educators, government officials, and a remarkable Deputy Attorney General, we were able to reassure our crew that we had made an honest start. And I have watched, in the intervening years, as initiatives in the public and private sectors have made progress toward the goal of a Virginia better able to provide opportunities for everyone from the children of natives and “first families” to those who arrived here voluntarily and not. There is still plenty to do – more than plenty. But it will not be accomplished by frenetic activity that imagines the destination without considering the sometimes long and winding road to get there. You can’t make a fortune by snatching at the wind. You can’t make a chicken by grabbing feathers from here and there. At the same time, the difficulty of the task ahead cannot be the excuse for inaction. Communities awaiting justice, and the individuals within those communities, rightly expect that the call for “patience” is not a euphemism for “no.” If there is any lesson of the events that provoked Gov. Terry McAuliffe to establish the commission, it is the danger of delay in addressing society’s most difficult dilemmas. When the absence of diversity, equity and inclusion is presumed to be the norm, the people privileged by that presumption will resist change mightily. And sometimes violently. The winds of change power the flurry of feathers. Thanks to Cynthia, I have an answer to an age-old question. It’s the nurture of the egg that comes first. ![]() Wisdom Wherever You Find It American history is a series of provisional victories. Jon Meacham The horrifying specter of a twelve-story building collapsing in the middle of the night on the Florida shoreline feels too much like a metaphor. Let’s always keep in mind the lives lost when we think of that tragedy, first and foremost. But let’s not be paralyzed by our grief to the point that we can’t appreciate why the catastrophe resonates so comprehensively. An inspection of the infrastructure of our country, underway for many years, but lately with intensity, has revealed the cracks and spalling. I am not talking about bridges and interstate highways. I am talking about this less-than-perfect nation that has been in state of greater and greater flux since the waning days of the last century. That is when a small group of legislators, one of them named for a lizard, changed the functioning of Congress from charting the course of the country to a zero-sum game of achieving and retaining power. Accidentally, they were helped by a terrorist attack in September 2001, and then, in the following twenty years (has it been that long?), by the politics of fear of each other. It does not matter if the ground has become soft underneath us, or if a heavy object has struck us from above, to those of us used to a reliable structure we call home, it is frightening to think that parts of that structure in which we live have been shaken and fallen away. It is helpful to remember the wisdom of Jon Meacham, one of the great contemporary champions of the American experiment. There was always a time when America was great, but never a time it couldn’t be greater. Every step forward was, as he put it, a provisional victory. At any moment, the grand gesture could be undone by the small aggressions by citizens unhappy with the change in the status quo they had come to rely upon. The elimination of systemic enslavement did not eliminate the mentality that there was yet some hierarchy of skin color to preserve. The removal of barriers to women voting did not open the ballots along with the ballot boxes. The requirement to make buildings accessible to people of all abilities did not take away the barriers to the jobs within. And so with sexual assault, and harassment, and gun violence, and hateful speech, and crimes both physical and philosophical against people of differing identities. Even our first freedom – to believe and practice as our hearts inspire – seems to have been weaponized as people in the presumed majority misunderstand the truth that rights are universal protections rather than beneficent tolerations. When I teach about Judaism, I always start with a conversation about the role of myth – that is, organizing world view – in any society. I begin with the Declaration of Independence, asking my students to identify the first statement of myth in it. Some talk about the self-evident truths, some suggest political bonds, some identify the term “it becomes necessary.” However, I insist that the first statement of myth is “the course of human events.” The notion that there is even such a thing as history is a human construct designed to make sense of what are mostly random events. By establishing causal relationships, we build a structure that is ever more complex and comprehensive. Our founders looked back in time and geography to Europe, and they imagined a better version transplanted to someone else’s continent. In the process, they imagined something grander than they imagined – a place in which the notion that all were created equal could take root and flourish. Even as they said it, as they committed it to parchment, as they declared a country to rest on it, they violated it. Since then, the people who have felt excluded from that self-evident truth have insisted on victories in a continuing campaign to create a course of human events that make this place better than it ever was. By creating these provisional victories, we quite literally make history, while realizing the vision of our founders that exceeded their original imaginations. Meacham managed to sum all of that up in eight words that need a little unpacking. But it is an important piece of wisdom to remember. We live in complicated times, dealing with legal and cultural skirmishes that shake our infrastructure, all the more needed in these times of enforced isolation that are coming to an end. But as long as we are willing to engage in the cause of genuine equality, provisional victories will lead to longer-term successes. |
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