Netzavim: "Say You're Sorry!"

Parashat Netzavim 5768 - September 27, 2008

“Say you’re sorry!”

A real apology doesn’t simply restore the status quo, it re-established relationships

This time of year, as we approach RH and YK, many of us are doing an inventory of the past year and we’re thinking about making apologies to those we’ve hurt. But our popular culture provides us with few examples of how to make a proper apology. This is especially true among politicians and other public figures. Richard Nixon was famous for repeatedly using the phrase, “mistakes were made.” Since then, the phrase has been used by politicians of every stripe. One political commentator suggested that politicians have created their own grammar, which he called, the “past exonerative" tense. William Safire has defined the phrase as "[a] passive-evasive way of acknowledging error while distancing the speaker from responsibility for it." In other words, it is a way of expressing regret without accepting any blame. The other common form of non-apology apology is some variant on “I’m sorry you were offended.” This one is often used by celebrities who behave badly. Probably the most memorable example in recent history was when Justine Timberlake issued a press release that said, “I am sorry if anyone was offended by the wardrobe malfunction during the halftime performance.” It’s a way of saying, “look, I’m sorry you’re so overly sensitive that you were offended by something that any other rational normal person would have been ok with.”

In the final hours before the High Holidays, I suspect we have all used another common variant on the theme: “If there’s anything I have done to hurt your feelings, please forgive me.” This is approaching a little closer to an apology. But, this blanket statement is more of lawyerly disclaimer seeking to displace our guilt by putting it upon someone else’s feelings.

Those of us who have children know how hard it is to teach our kids to say “I’m sorry.” More often than not, the words come out through coercion. And it becomes a little ritual that we parents all know about. Your kid is playing with another child… your kid hits the other kid or grabs a toy away… the other kid cries… you’re embarrassed, and angry at your own child… so you shout, “say you’re sorry!”

“But, Abba, he started it.”

“It doesn’t matter… say your sorry… come on, say it!”

“I’m sorry”

“No, say it like you mean it.”

“I’m sorry, ok, I mean it, I’m sorry, there”

Any of you who are parents or work with kids knows that sometimes you just have to be satisfied with a pro-forma “I’m sorry.” And, something interesting happens in those encounters between kids. Once the “I’m sorry” has been made, the game can go on. The truth of the matter is that sometimes the formulaic “I’m sorry” is enough. Sometimes, when someone has wronged us, all we want is for that person to publicly acknowledge it, even if the acknowledgement is given grudgingly. The status qou has been restored and we can move on.

In contrast to playground misbehavior, real sins require real apologies. A real apology doesn’t simply restore the status quo, it re-established relationships. This week’s Torah portion provides us with a paradigm for understanding sin and repentance. The parsha starts, “Atem nitzavim hayom, kulchem, lifnei Hashem Elokeichem…” “You stand today, all of you, before the Lord your God…” The starting point… the intended order of things is for us to stand in relationship with God. Following in God’s ways, keeping God’s commandments, draw us into a relationship. We call this relationship, Brit, covenant. The ceremony being carried out in Parashat Nitzavim is a ritual of rededication.

The parsha then goes on to describe what will happen to us if we stray, if we start worshiping foreign gods and idols. The Torah describes God’s wrath and anger, but the real punishment is exile. The ultimate punishment, according to the Torah, is to be distant from God. This, of course, is not a physical distance. The spiritual exile of sin is that sin distances us from that within ourselves that is holy. Sin distances us from that which is Divine in the human soul.

The term for repentance in Hebrew is Teshuvah. Teshuvah is from the root, “la’shuv” - to return. The Jewish paradigm for apology and repentance is the metaphor of returning. Dt. 30 describes how God will banish us for our sins and how we can restore our relationship with God. “When all these things befall you – the blessing and the curse – then you will return…” “v’hashevota el le’vavecha…” the Hebrew is ambiguous here, but it literally means, “you shall return to your heart” or “you shall return them [God’s words] to your hearts.” “You shall return to your heart from amidst the nations to which the Lord your God has banished you.” In other words, the return to God is a return to our essential selves – a return to our hearts. But, that’s not all… The Torah says that when we move toward God, God returns to us. Verse 3 reads, “Then the Lord your God will restore you from captivity, and have compassion on you; he will return to collect you from among all the peoples where God scattered you. Even if your outcasts are at the ends of the world, from there the Lord your god will gather you, from their He will fetch you.”

The Torah provides us with a paradigm for forgiveness that is about restoring relationships. And the Torah teaches us that returning – Teshuvah - requires the cooperation of both parties in the broken relationship. That’s why real apologies are sometimes so difficult – because we aren’t yet ready to return to the relationship. A real apology requires the sinner to turn back from his or her bad behavior. It requires acknowledgement and taking responsibility. It requires us to return to our own hearts – to holiness and Godliness. But, the Jewish paradigm of Teshuvah also recognizes that the one who has been wronged has an obligation. It is the obligation to recognize sincere regret, and the desire to restore the relationship.

May this be a year of teshuvah for all of us – a year of returning to our better selves – a year of restored relationships. Shabbat Shalom and Shanah Tovah.

Ki Tetze - You Must Not Be Indifferent

Parashat Ki Tetze 5768 - September 13, 2008

You Must Not Be Indifferent

Evil goes unchecked when we become callous to suffering, when we fail to live up to our potential as images of the Divine

Many of you know Mr. Karsh because he hands out the programs in the lobby on Saturday morning. Many of you also know that Mr. Karsh is a Holocaust survivor. That’s about as much as I knew about him until yesterday morning. Like every day after minyan, the regulars sat down for cake and coffee, but yesterday, Mr. Karsh – who is usually very quiet – decided to tell us his story of survival in Nazi occupied Poland. With great courage and emotion, Mr. Karsh told us about how he and his family were forced into a ghetto; he told us about how the German soldiers and Ukranian police would torture and kill the Jews. And he told us about the ultimate liquidation of the ghetto in which his mother and sister were brutally murdered. He told us about how he was able to hide from the Nazis and briefly reunite with his father – only to witness his father’s murder at the hands of Ukranian thugs. He told us about his long trek through the small villages and forests of Poland as he searched for safety, and the individuals who either tried to harm him or tried to help him along the way. And he told us how he joined the Jewish underground – the partisans – who hid in the forest. It is a remarkable and terrifying story that testifies to the strength of Mr. Karsh’s spirit. At the end of the story, Arlene Stein, turned to me and asked with despair and bewilderment: “how is it possible for human beings to do such awful things to other people?”

That is probably one of the most important questions that can come out of the Holocaust and many sociological and historical studies have been done aiming at answering that question. In Hitlers’ Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Political Scientist Daniel Goldhagen argued that centuries of anti-Semitism had become so engrained and normalized in German culture, that even quite ordinary people had no problem carrying out Hitler’s orders. In another well-known book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, social theorist Hannah Arendt observed in Adolf Eichmann what she called, “the banality of evil.” Eichmann, she observed, was no more anti-semitic than any other German, nor was he a socio-path, but rather he had willingly accepted the orders of his superiors because they had “normalized the unthinkable” – that is to say, that when people are surrounded by evil, when cruelty and inhumanity have been made normal by a larger group – like the state – ordinary people will follow along. This was proven in a number of sociological experiments in the 1960s and 1970s in which researchers like Philip Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram demonstrated that ordinary people will, given certain conditions, follow orders given to them by authority figures and that when put in a situation in which they see others doing the same, they are more likely to comply.

Still, what is it that happens in a person that prevents them from resisting, from saying no to evil? How do we become desensitized to cruelty? And, if cruel behavior is indeed quite common, how do we condition our minds to protect us from becoming susceptible to group-think and the lure of blind obedience? Let us consider the lessons from this week’s Torah Portion, Ki Tetze.

Parashat Ki Tetze is comprised of a collection of laws. In fact, this Torah portion has more mitzvoth in it than any other parsha in the Chumash – more than 10% of all the 613 mitzvot are found in parashat Ki Tetze. They deal with the rules of war, public safety, property rights and lost objects, forbidden relations, worker’s rights, labor law, fairness in business, and a host of other very important statements of social policy. And right in the middle of all these laws is a rather mundane little rule:

Chapter 22, verse 6 states: “If, along the road, you chance upon a bird’s nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs and the mother sitting over the fledglings or on the eggs, do not take the mother together with her young, in order that you may fare well and have a long life.”

According to the Talmud, shooing away the mother bird is the easiest mitzvah to observe. Indeed, if you tried to take the chicks or the eggs, you would probably scare off the mother bird anyway. But why should we do this? What is the moral underpinning of this law? Elsewhere in the Talmud, the sages use this rule as the basis for prohibiting unnecessary pain to animals (tza’ar ba’alei hayyim). In other words, the mother bird is chased away to spare her the pain and suffering of seeing her offspring taken away. This is the conventional understanding of the text. But the Medieval sage, Moshe Maimonides, observed that this explanation is not likely. Even if we believe that birds are capable of such emotional attachment to their young, how is shooing the mother bird away going to spare her the trauma she will feel when she returns to the nest only to find her young gone? Rambam also observes that this law is related to the prohibition of cooking a kid in its mother’s milk because symbolically, killing a mother and her young at the same time are akin to exterminating the entire species.

Therefore, the mitzvah is not really for the bird’s benefit at all. What the Torah means to teach us instead is that callous acts such as these degrade us. They coarsen us and make cruelty more normal. If we become accustomed to rather banal acts of cruelty, it may lead us to greater inhumanities. Witnessing violence all the time makes it normal and easier to stomach. Think about how easy it is – in a culture so accustomed to violence, both real and cinamagraphic – to read the horrors described in the newspaper or watch atrocities on the 11 o’clock news.

Over and over again in the laws of the Torah, we see a concern for our moral conditioning. Just a few verses earlier, with regard to the rules of returning lost property, the Torah admonishes “…lo tu’chal l’hit’alem” - “You cannot be indifferent” (literally, “you cannot hide”). If you find something, you have to do something about it – you have to think about what the person who lost it feels. If you see your fellow’s animal has fallen, you may not ignore it. When we see wrong, we must not hide. And later, in chapter 25, we see this even when the law demands corporal punishment. If a man is convicted of a crime and sentenced to lashes, the Torah warns (25:3): “He may be given up to forty lashes, but no more, lest being flogged further - to excess –causes your brother to be degraded in your eyes.” This rule not only shows a concern for excessive punishment and the cruelty of torture, but for our own moral fiber as citizens of the state that carries out the punishment in our name. It means to tell us that we as a society are debased and coarsened by the excesses of our government’s exercise of power. And, in the end, we must never forget, that even the criminal is our brother because we share the same inalienable dignity of having been created in the image of God. (How much more so, the innocent victim.)

In this season of reflection and repentance, when we take stock of our behavior in the year that has passed, it is important for us to remember that evil – even the most banal acts of cruelty – happen when we fail to cultivate our sensitivities through small acts of kindness. Evil goes unchecked when we become callous to suffering, when we fail to live up to our potential as images of the Divine. The common theme running through many of the laws of Ki Tetze is that they ask us to step out of ourselves and see the world through the eyes of others – through the eyes of the woman captured in war, through the eyes of the son of an unloved wife, through the eyes of a man looking for his lost property, through the eyes of a guest in our home, through the eyes of the day laborer who needs to be paid so his family can eat, through the eyes of a person gripped by debt, and even through the eyes of a rebellious son and a convicted criminal, and through the eyes of a simple little bird. In other words, the Torah beckons us to see the world through God’s eyes.

May the year to come be one in which we rededicate ourselves to the ideals of our tradition. May we each find the strength to do an honest inventory of our lives. May we move forward with greater sensitivity and kindness to others – able to see our fellow human being, and all the inhabitants of this earth, through the eyes of God. And may we see a day when cruelty and inhumanity are no more.

Shabbat Shalom

Shoftim - Country First?

Introduction to Parashat Shoftim 5768 – September 6, 2008

Country first?

Before all else, we must put our ideals first.

What is a country? Is a country a plot of land? Is a country a group of people who express their will in any fashion they choose?

Our Constitution opens:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defen[s]e, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

At the founding of our nation, the framers of our Constitution understood that a country is only as strong as the ideals toward which strives. And the very first of these ideals mentioned in the Preamble is Justice.

Similarly, this week’s Torah portion and much of the book of Deuteronomy are the Constitution upon which our ancestors established the ancient Land of Israel. Standing on the bank of the Jordan River, Moses declares God’s law and the conditions upon which the people may possess the land. And, like our Constitution, the Torah places great emphasis on Justice. In the opening verses of this week’s portion we read the famous words: “tzedek, tzedek tirdof…” Most translations understand the repetition of the word tzedek here as emphasis: “Justice, Justice shall you pursue.” A better translation would treat the second appearance of the word tzedek as a modifier to the first, as in the phrase just two verses before – “mishpat tzedek” (righteous judgment). Therefore, “Tzedek, tzedek…” means “just justice” or “righteous justice” – that is to say, justice that is attained through just means.

But we can’t stop there, the verse continues: “tzedek, tzedek tirdof l’ma’an tikhye vyarashta et ha-aretz asher HaShem Elokekha noten lach.” “Righteous justice shall you pursue in order that you may thrive and occupy the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” That is to say, that the ideal of justice precedes even the country itself. It means that our very claim to the land is predicated on establishing justice within our borders.

As we read together this morning, I urge you to follow along closely and notice all the various ways in which we are beckoned to pursue justice – justice both in outcome and in means. So important is this mandate for justice that even the king of Israel is commanded to review the law continuously. You’ll note that in 17:18, the King of Israel is required to keep a copy of the Torah next to his throne and read it throughout his life. This means to tell us that in a country established upon the principle of Justice, no person is above the law. It means to tell us that before all else, we must put our ideals first.