We read this Shabbat about the 10 commandments. We tend to think these are ingrained in the fabric of our society—just look at people trying to plaster them on the sides of courthouses—we think they are the basis for Western morality. But the fact is, many of them are flouted.
The first commandment, which Rambam says is to know there is a God: many people nowadays say they are atheists. The truth is, the God they don’t believe in, is a God I don’t believe in and in fact the overwhelming history of Jewish thought rejects. There is no invisible guy way up high in an invisible castle. Believing in God means believing in goodness, in right, that there is something toward which I personally strive that is greater than myself, and toward which we try to move the world.
Sadly, murder seems to be becoming more common—most recently, the bank shooting up the road in Sebring, where a gunman pointlessly murdered 5 victims on cold blood. I do not believe our society is adequately teaching the sanctity of life.
The Talmud says that there is more than one way to murder somebody. According to the Talmud, public shaming—halbanat panim—is a form of murder. Why is shaming a type of murder? On a literal level, halbanat panim means to make one’s face white—if I shame you and make your face pale, I have shed the blood from your face.
On a more figurative level, we are social animals. My livelihood, my experience in society, depends on what others think of me. Destroying someone’s reputation is destroying the life they built
I have been thinking this week about the video of the student from Covington, who smirked at older native American drumming. A picture of this was put on twitter with a very judgmental caption claiming the student was harassing the native American. The tweet went viral, was even re-tweeted by the congresswoman from Minnesota. This led to threats of expulsion from the school, and even a death threat against student.
It turns out the student was not harassing anybody. The elderly Native American had approached their protest, and was drumming in their faces. They just stood their ground. Should they have smirked and been silly? No, they were disrespectful, but they did not deserve to be dragged over the coals in front of millions of people.
We cannot let ourselves be recruited by the forces of judgment, into believing shameful things about others. The Jewish tradition teaches us to give the benefit of the doubt, and this will take the ammunition away from the forces of judging and embarrassing. Pictures can always be interpreted multiple ways. Giving the benefit of the doubt means to question the caption, and assume the best—they were kids, thought it was funny, and were singing along. Nothing about the video suggested anything more.
We live in a society where people are judged & shamed, and lives & livelihoods are ruined. To not kill, is to not participate in killing, in ruining another’s life, by believing in the positive, giving the benefit of the doubt, and helping build, create life rather than destroy
Tuesday, January 29, 2019
Sunday, January 6, 2019
Vaera 5779: Hardening our Hearts and Gun Violence
Vaera 5779
In our parsha, we read about the first seven of the ten plagues, and Pharoah's famous reaction, his heart hardening over and over.
What does it mean to have a hard heart? To say “I don't care.” Balls of fire & ice destroying the trees? I don't care. Cattle dying? I don't care. Nobody has anything to drink, to eat? I don't care. I don't care what happens to other people—it doesn't affect me. Pharoah only cares at the tenth plague, when his own firstborn son dies.
All of us have the experience of our hearts hardening, of becoming desensitized to suffering. Shootings are not news, they need to be mass shootings. There are so many shocking things going on in the world—starvation in Yemen, oppression in Saudi Arabia, you name it-that we are just used to it.
When we no longer cry, really we are like Pharoah, our hearts have turned to stone. It happens to all of us, myself included. My chaplaincy supervisor, Joe Leggieri, once said that when you no longer cry, you're not fit to be a chaplain anymore. But the truth is, it's the only way we survive. I had a friend worked in hospice chaplaincy, and who used to joke he was friends with the angel of death; when he had terminal cancer, he made the same comment. When we see suffering on such a regular way, we get used to it, even befriend it.
I have to wonder whether we have become desensitized to gun violence. When shootings fade into the background, and we just shake our heads and accept them as a fact of life, our hearts have become hardened. There was a shooting in the Wellington Mall Christmas eve—how crazy is that? Today, the final draft of the Stoneman Douglas report was released. On the one hand, it is a great sign that people are not letting this issue die, fade into memory like Columbine and Sandy Hook. I am so impressed by the students of MSDHS, who took it to the streets of Tallahassee, Orlando (Disney's Main Street), DC, and even ran for office to keep this issue alive. They refused to let it become a memory, to fade into the history books.
One of the primary recommendations of the report was that teachers should be allowed to carry guns. I am not going to weigh in on the merits of whether teachers should pack; we have an armed security guard here, and thank God for that. The problem is, if a shooter comes around, they will go somewhere else instead. We have not solved the underlying issue, we have come to accept it
We cannot afford to accept as a society the idea that deranged individuals, students who torture animals and classmates, should have access to weapons. We cannot simply accept that deranged individuals will act in hostile ways and not be held accountable. If we do, if we simply accept that the bad guys will have guns, then our hearts have become hardened. Yes, we do need to protect ourselves, to have an armed guard, but we also need to keep questioning how we have become such a violent country.
This week's parsha challenges all of us to maintain a heart of flesh, a heart which feels the pain of others, not to become complacent. Rebbe Nahman says that if we find our heart becoming desensitized, we should bang our head against the wall of our heart, we should tell ourselves to wake up, to remember this is painful, this is not right.
Torah challenges all of us to keep our hearts sensitive to everyone around us, to feel even minor sufferings of the individuals around us, and through this to create a humane society & world.
Shabbat Shalom.
In our parsha, we read about the first seven of the ten plagues, and Pharoah's famous reaction, his heart hardening over and over.
What does it mean to have a hard heart? To say “I don't care.” Balls of fire & ice destroying the trees? I don't care. Cattle dying? I don't care. Nobody has anything to drink, to eat? I don't care. I don't care what happens to other people—it doesn't affect me. Pharoah only cares at the tenth plague, when his own firstborn son dies.
All of us have the experience of our hearts hardening, of becoming desensitized to suffering. Shootings are not news, they need to be mass shootings. There are so many shocking things going on in the world—starvation in Yemen, oppression in Saudi Arabia, you name it-that we are just used to it.
When we no longer cry, really we are like Pharoah, our hearts have turned to stone. It happens to all of us, myself included. My chaplaincy supervisor, Joe Leggieri, once said that when you no longer cry, you're not fit to be a chaplain anymore. But the truth is, it's the only way we survive. I had a friend worked in hospice chaplaincy, and who used to joke he was friends with the angel of death; when he had terminal cancer, he made the same comment. When we see suffering on such a regular way, we get used to it, even befriend it.
I have to wonder whether we have become desensitized to gun violence. When shootings fade into the background, and we just shake our heads and accept them as a fact of life, our hearts have become hardened. There was a shooting in the Wellington Mall Christmas eve—how crazy is that? Today, the final draft of the Stoneman Douglas report was released. On the one hand, it is a great sign that people are not letting this issue die, fade into memory like Columbine and Sandy Hook. I am so impressed by the students of MSDHS, who took it to the streets of Tallahassee, Orlando (Disney's Main Street), DC, and even ran for office to keep this issue alive. They refused to let it become a memory, to fade into the history books.
One of the primary recommendations of the report was that teachers should be allowed to carry guns. I am not going to weigh in on the merits of whether teachers should pack; we have an armed security guard here, and thank God for that. The problem is, if a shooter comes around, they will go somewhere else instead. We have not solved the underlying issue, we have come to accept it
We cannot afford to accept as a society the idea that deranged individuals, students who torture animals and classmates, should have access to weapons. We cannot simply accept that deranged individuals will act in hostile ways and not be held accountable. If we do, if we simply accept that the bad guys will have guns, then our hearts have become hardened. Yes, we do need to protect ourselves, to have an armed guard, but we also need to keep questioning how we have become such a violent country.
This week's parsha challenges all of us to maintain a heart of flesh, a heart which feels the pain of others, not to become complacent. Rebbe Nahman says that if we find our heart becoming desensitized, we should bang our head against the wall of our heart, we should tell ourselves to wake up, to remember this is painful, this is not right.
Torah challenges all of us to keep our hearts sensitive to everyone around us, to feel even minor sufferings of the individuals around us, and through this to create a humane society & world.
Shabbat Shalom.
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