[ Website Home | List of Articles ]
Category: Justice Content: The Long Shorter Way Yom Kippur 5765—September 24/25, 2004 Rabbi Ronne Friedman Temple Israel, Boston We are taught two simple things: first that we may come before God on this day and seek forgiveness; second that God cannot exonerate us for sins that we have committed against another human being unless we have first sought and secured forgiveness from whomever we have wronged. At the outset of Yom Kippur, the rabbi prays before the open Ark: “Racheim alai v’al sholchai, al yikalmu vi, v’al ekaleim bahem, have compassion on me and on those that I lead, let them not falter because of me, nor I because of them…” It is impossible for me to speak to you this Yom Kippur without first asking your forgiveness. I do not reference those wrongs that I’ve committed which are general, frivolous or inadvertent, although I am sure there are many. No, this apology is very specific and heartfelt. I believe that I have misled you and for this I am grievously sorry. Before I ask you to forgive me, let me explain. On November 15, 2002, I preached, what was for me, the most difficult sermon that I had ever preached in my life. In anticipation of the possibility of war with Iraq, I engaged in extensive soul-searching, immersed myself in traditional and modern Jewish texts on the possible moral justification for war, spent scores of hours reading, listening to and consulting with contemporary moralists and political scientists. I studied not only the available unclassified U.S. reports on the Weapons of Mass Destruction, but also the lengthy Assessment of the British Government on “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction.” I then wrote the best-crafted, most extensively researched sermon that I’ve ever written in which I offered a qualified moral defense for war against Iraq. I’ll spare you the caveats included in the sermon and the rationalizations after the fact. I was wrong. I compounded my own error by sharing it with you from this pulpit and in print. I failed to factor that the reports of our intelligence agencies (and those of Great Britain) might be false, whether by virtue of deliberate lies or by reason of ineptitude. I permitted an exaggerated fear of imminent danger to cloud my better moral reasoning. Chatati, I missed the mark. I ask your understanding and forgiveness. I hope this evening/morning to offer t’shuvah. Permit me to continue with the Talmudic story of a 1st century rabbi, one Joshua ben Hananiah, who recalled that he had once learned a valuable lesson from a young child. “He remarked: I was once on a journey when I noticed a little boy sitting at a cross-road. ‘By what road’, I asked him, ‘do we go to the town?’ — ‘This one’, he replied: ‘is short but longer and that one is long but shorter’. I proceeded along the ‘short but longer’ road. When I approached the town I discovered that it was hedged in by gardens and orchards. Turning back I said to him, ‘My son, did you not tell me that this road was short?’ — ‘And’, he replied: ‘did I not also tell you: But longer?’ I kissed him upon his head and said to him, ‘Happy are you, O Israel, all of you are wise, both young and old’. (Talmud Bavli, Eiruvin 53b) What is the moral meaning of the riddle posed by the child? To answer this we must venture into the dangerous territory where religion and politics converge. One of the greatest Jewish scholars of the last century, Professor Gershom Scholem, the interpreter of Jewish mysticism, once adduced two opposing tendencies in Jewish messianism, he called them the apocalyptic and the restorative. Simply stated, the apocalyptic view is embodied in the idea that history will end with a bang, that redemption will come only when the world is so thoroughly corrupt that it must be destroyed, that evil will be eradicated in a cataclysmic upheaval and only then will God establish a new reign of righteousness. The restorative view is more difficult, but more humanistic and gentle. According to this view, the Messiah or the Messianic age will arrive only when we human beings commit ourselves to repair the broken world in which we live. I would like to suggest three corollaries: first, that the apocalyptic idea is the short longer way, that is, the means that seem deceptively easy, but in fact, are a trap; second that the restorative concept is the long shorter way, that is the difficult route that leads to a more hopeful ending; and third that these same apocalyptic and restorative trends are evident in American politics; examination of them offers insight into our current situation. Listen to this analysis: "Throughout our history two strands (of U.S. foreign policy) have coexisted uneasily - a dominant strand of democratic humanism and a lesser but durable strand of intolerant Puritanism. There has been a tendency through the years for reason and moderation to prevail as long as things are going tolerably well or as long as our problems seem clear and finite and manageable. But ...when some event or leader of opinion has aroused the people to a state of high emotion, our puritan spirit has tended to break through, leading us to look at the world through the distorting prism of a harsh and angry moralism…. The inconstancy of American foreign policy is not an accident but an expression of two distinct sides of the American character. Both are characterized by a kind of moralism, but one is the morality of decent instincts tempered by the knowledge of human imperfection and the other is the morality of absolute self-assurance fired by the crusading spirit….” If I asked you to guess the source of those words, would you succeed? They were written almost forty years ago by Senator William Fullbright in The Arrogance of Power. As Yogi Berra would say, “this is déjà vu all over again.” In a world that often appears chaotic and threatening, how do we determine the right course of action, how are we to restore our moral compass? The Torah reading for the morning of Yom Kippur is prescriptive: HaChayim v’hamavet natati l’faneicha, hab’racha v’hak’lala, u’va’charta bachayim, I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse, choose life… (Deut. 30:19) A first century rabbinic commentary on this verse goes on to explain: “Because Scripture says, I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse (30:19), Israel might say, “Since God has placed before us two paths, the path of life and the path of death, we will follow whichever one we want;” therefore the verse says, choose life (30:19). A parable: A person was sitting at a crossroads with two paths before him, one which started out smoothly, but ended amidst thorns and one which started out amidst thorns, but ended smoothly. He therefore informed passers-by, saying to them, “Do you see this path which starts out smoothly? For two or three steps you will walk easily, but it ends up with thorns. And do you see that other path that is full of thorns at the beginning? For two or three steps you will walk through thorns, but it ends smoothly.” ( Sifre on Deuteronomy, Piska 53, trans., Hammer, pp. 110-111, n.b., this commentary appears to begin with Deut. 11:26, but it’s true purpose is to comment on 30:19) What is the evidence that we have taken the apocalyptic way, the path that seems deceptively smooth, but ends in thorns? I am concerned and you should be too, regardless of your political predilections, about the degree to which the American public is being manipulated by constant and excessive reference to images of fear as a justification for our current foreign policy. Psychiatrist and author Robert J. Lifton writes of what he calls the “superpower syndrome”: “…at the core of superpower syndrome lies a powerful fear of vulnerability. A superpower's victimization brings on both a sense of humiliation and an angry determination to restore, or even extend, the boundaries of a superpower-dominated world. Integral to superpower syndrome are its menacing nuclear stockpiles and their world-destroying capacity. The war on terrorism is apocalyptic, then, exactly because it is militarized and yet amorphous, without limits of time or place, and has no clear end…. Implied in its approach is that every last terrorist everywhere on the earth is to be hunted down until there are no more terrorists anywhere to threaten us, and in that way the world will be rid of evil…. Despite the constant invocation … of the theme of "security," the war on terrorism has created the very opposite--a sense of fear and insecurity among Americans, which is then mobilized in support of further aggressive plans in the extension of the larger "war." What results is a vicious circle that engenders what we seek to destroy: Our excessive response to Islamist attacks creates more terrorists and more terrorist attacks, which in turn leads to an escalation of the war on terrorism, and so on. The projected "victory" becomes a form of aggressive longing, of sustained illusion, of an unending "Fourth World War" and a mythic cleansing--of terrorists, of evil, of our own fear.” (“Against Apocalypse”, Robert J. Lifton in The Nation, Dec. 22, 2003,) This is the short longer way, it begins in the open but is quickly enmeshed in thorns, for it takes us down cul-de-sacs and into blind alleys, it detours past the prison of Abu Ghraib and tries to hide war crimes in a dark corner, leaves us vulnerable to ambush and inures us to the deaths of innocent children and civilians, human beings whom we begin to dehumanize and dismiss as “collateral damage.” As we pursue the short longer way, we become increasingly enmeshed in a quagmire; our government tries to persuade us that we can eliminate the threat of a widely dispersed swarming, pesky foe with relentless pursuit and unlimited force. In a metaphorical sense, we are seeking to eradicate the West Nile mosquito threat by devising to blast the dangerous insects with rocket grenade launchers. The xenophobic rhetoric that has intensified during the current presidential campaign creates a moral myopia that threatens our society more from within than from without. It encourages black/white, we/they thinking that isolates us from the rest of the world, divides us against ourselves and puts at risk both our right to dissent and the civil liberties that have made us a distinctive and unique country. Let me hasten to add two caveats: first, I am not dismissive of the threat of international terrorism, nor do I mourn for a moment the removal of Saddam Hussein from the world stage; and second, we must never repeat the grievous error that we made during the Viet Nam War era—those who serve in uniform deserve our unqualified admiration and support. They also deserve a mission that is worthy of their sacrifice. Their families deserve to know that they will be placed in harm’s way only when the necessity is absolute and the risk justified. Yom Kippur comes to remind us that the world is an insecure place, that we and those we love are fragile, that history is replete with righteous human beings who died likiddush hashem, as martyrs for the sanctification of God’s name, but Yom Kippur does not leave us there. The message of this day is that mid-course correction is possible, both for individuals and for nations, that choosing life does not imply a disingenuous denial of the dangers that abound. Rather Yom Kippur teaches us to acknowledge the existence of evil in ourselves and chaos in the world, but challenges us to confront them through the rule of law and to transcend them with a hope that is, despite our anxiety, predicated upon faith, faith not only in God’s beneficence, but also faith in the human capacity to choose the blessing over the curse. I fear the isolationism that the current course of action in Iraq has imposed upon us; we are suffering a decline of respect throughout the world and are increasingly viewed as an imperial bully on the world stage. One has only to travel abroad or read the international press to recognize that this is so. We have permitted our government to express a naked disdain for the United Nations and for world opinion. This, too, is the short longer way, the route that begins in the open and ends in a thicket of thorns. Listen to William Fullbright, a prophet of the past, once again: “…the United States has a vital interest in upholding and expanding the reign of law in international relations….it provides us with stability and order and with a means of predicting the behavior of those with whom we have reciprocal legal obligations. When we violate the law ourselves, whatever short-term advantage may be gained, we are obviously encouraging others to violate the law; we thus encourage disorder and instability and thereby do incalculable damage to our own long-term interests." (This and the other source above excerpted from William Fullbright, The Arrogance of Power, 1966) Two hundred years ago, Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, great grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, taught his disciples this mantra: “Kol haolam kulo gesher tza’ar meod, v’haikar lo l’phacheid k’lal, the entire world, is a very narrow bridge, but the most important principle is not to fear.” He later emended this pithy maxim in an ingenious play on words that offers us even greater insight into what ranks as the most significant threat to our security: “kol haolam kulo gesher tza’ar meod, v’haikar lo l’hitphacheid, k’lal, The entire world is a very narrow bridge, but the most important principle is not to frighten yourself.” (Nachman’s first iteration is now a well-known Hassidic folk tune. I received the emendation via an oral transmission from my colleague, Rabbi Elaine Zecher, but she no longer remembers the source for it.) The greatest danger posed by apocalyptic thinking, whether as an expression of religious messianism or of realpolitik, is that it invariably leads to individual despair and collective pessimism. It is a strategy that must resolve itself in fight or flight responses, it ensures a constant and persistent level of stress that must inevitably result in a dead end. Although it may stoop to conquer, it cannot in the final analysis succeed. And what is the alternative, the long shorter way, the difficult thorny moral path that ultimately will lead us to a clearing, a route that points in the direction of stability and moral resolution? It is a philosophy, religious or political, which is more nuanced and reflective. The restorative impulse begins with an understanding that evil is part of the human condition, that it can be subdued, but never eradicated, that it must be managed from moment to moment, first in ourselves and then, with wisdom and humility, in the world. This is the true meaning and demand of the kabbalistic doctrine of tikkun haolam, the repair of the world. It is the ultimate meaning of God’s most urgent command to us, “Choose life!” Sixty-five years ago, the Nazis invaded Poland. W.H. Auden penned these words which memorialize that catastrophic event in a poem entitled September 1, 1939: I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night…. I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return…. Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism's face And the international wrong…. The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout… Defenceless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame. (I found Auden’s poem, which I studied in college, via an online source. I’ve excerpted it above. The full text is easily accessed online.) Those who choose the long shorter way, the thorny path that emerges to a clear and open road are those who overcome negation and despair in order to show an affirming flame. May we, you and I, from this Yom Kippur to the next, pledge ourselves to kindle this sacred fire and carry it from this place out into a world that is desperate for its light. Kein y’hi ratzon, May this be God’s Will.