You
might have seen the TV show, The Good Place. It’s a sitcom set in the afterlife
– I recommend it.
The
premise of the show is that our heroes have died and, as good people in life,
they wake up, in death, in The Good Place -
a place where everything is really very, very good. Actually, that’s not
what the show is about at all, but the premise is good enough to get me
thinking. What would The Good Place really be like? What makes a society ‘good’?
What I want to do today is sketch out a rabbinic vision of a good place, I want
to ask some questions about how we get from here, to there. And I want to
suggest some answers.
Let’s
start at the top – who should be in charge? As Jews we’ve a bunch of models to
draw on. The Torah features God trying out a singular human – but neither Adam
or Noah cope. The model of a family too frequently descends into fraternal
bickering, if not fratricide. We have prophets, a hereditary priesthood and a
monarchy. But the prophets are too unpopular and priests and Kings become
corrupted. Eventually, Judaism settles on … rabbis. Now, don’t worry, I’m not
planning world-domination myself. The real clue is in the last letter of the
word – rabbis. All the greatest rabbinic leaders of the classical rabbinic
period come in pairs; you get Hillel and Shammai, Rav and Shmuel, Rabbi Akiva
and Rabbi Yishmael. And these pairs – or Zugim – argue. They argue about
everything from Kashrut to theology to what it means to be kind and
compassionate. Chavrtuta o Metuta the Rabbis teach – passionate argument or
death. In our Good Place there will be passionate argument.
Here’s
the other thing about Rabbis – their leadership isn’t purely dependent on what
they know, rather they – we – are expected to be decent, ethical and
compassionate. I mean, I know I mess up all over the place, but you can’t be a
good rabbi and a bad person.
There’s
a famous story about the renowned professor of ethics in some secular
university, who was an utterly appalling person. And one day a student finally
plucked up the courage to ask their teacher how it was possible for them to be
such an expert on ethics and such a vile human being. ‘What’ the professor
responds, ‘if I taught geometry, would you want me to be a triangle?’ It
doesn’t work for teachers of religion.
On
the other hand, here’s one of the greatest Rabbinic leaders, Maimonides;
Assur leadam lehiyot achzari - We are
forbidden to be cruel, forbidden to be slow to forgive. Rather we should be
gentle, willing and slow to anger. And when one who has sinned against us
requests our forgiveness, we should forgive with a levav shalem – a full
heart a willing spirit. And even if the person has distressed us greatly, or
many times, don’t be vengeful, don’t bear a grudge.
Rabbis are supposed to listen hard to even those
with whom they disagree and treat everyone with courtesy and dignity. In our
Good Place, leaders – and we would need a plurality of leaders – would be wise,
and decent and they would argue out the best way to run society.
It won’t just be the leaders arguing. My vision of
a Good Place rejects the seductive appeal of mono-culture at every level. Certainly,
a Jewish Good Place will have what the Bible calls gerim, outsiders, refugees, resident aliens – you can pick your contemporary
term for the people who are different; probably less privileged, possibly less
eloquent in our language, less sure of our customs. Loving the stranger is the
most frequently repeated idea in the Bible not, I think, just because it’s a
nice thing to do, but because Good Places value difference and diversity as a
source of creativity and productivity.
And what kind of society would emerge from all this
plurality and wisdom and decency?
Here are three laws which appear in a run of seven
verses in the three-thousand-year-old book of Deuteronomy.[1]
1.
If you loan
someone some money, and they pledge their millstone to secure the loan, and
they default, you can’t take the mill-stone away from them ki nefesh hu choveil – it’s their life-blood – you take the millstone, they won’t be able to
mill their flour and they will slide into destitution, and that can’t be good.
2.
If you loan
them some money with a pledge to repay and they default, you don’t go into
their house to take their pledge – you wait outside for them to bring it to you.
It’s better to be sensitive to their sense of security in their own home.
3.
And if they
pledged their coat – don’t take their coat overnight – they’ll need it to sleep
in. If a person pledges a coat, it’s the only thing they’ve got.
There’s a vision of a Good Place in these ancient verses.
I don’t suppose anyone here is reliant on a mill-stone today, and I know we’ve
learnt a whole lot about astral physics and evolution and the rest of it in the
last 3,000 years, but the values of our sacred texts, the checks and balances and
the approach to a good place are, surely, exactly what we need in contemporary
society. Is credit necessary for economic advancement? Of course it is. Do
lenders and their capital need to be protected by the rule of law? Of course
they do.
But not all the time, not to take all pledges from
all debtors and not in any way creditors might deem suitable.
The vision of society that emerges, time and time
again through the Bible and Talmud is a society that demonstrates compassion alongside
a commitment to justice. I’ll take that balance of compassion and justice as a
model for my Good Place
And then there will be Shabbat. We’ll
have the chance, in our Good Place, for six days of the week, to get on, to
make, to create, to seek for more and better. And then we’ll all pause, turn
off the phones and the emails and turn our attention towards celebrating what
we have. We’ll eat meals with friends and family. We’ll converse without the
distractions of screens or headphones. Shabbat, in The Good Place, will help us
realise that ‘better’ doesn’t always mean ‘more.’ That should help us find
better ways to protect the environment in our Good Place. In my little thought
experiment, basic rules of physics will still apply, as God said to first human
beings as they guided around the Garden of Eden, “Look at my works! See how beautiful
they are—how excellent! For your sake, I created them all. See to it that you do
not spoil and destroy My world; for if you do, there will be no one else to
repair it.”[2]
That one will still apply, but we’ll be ready for it and we’ll take due care.
Well, that’s the vision. Do you like it? It could do with a tweak,
here or there, I’m sure. But it would do, no? Creativity, decency, a space to
celebrate the gift of our humanity?
Here’s the question. How far away are we? How impossible, how
fairy-tale, how beyond the reach of possibility is this Good Place?
I mean, working out how we get the right kind of political
leadership is a tricky one, but the really radical thing about this vision of a
Good Place is how simple it is.
We could all get on with creating this Good Places even if without
the political leadership problem entirely sorted – in fact it’s probably much
better if don’t wait on the politicians – they seem to have their hands full
for the time being. Certainly, those of us who lend, could lend with the sort
of empathy and humanity that the Bible calls for. Many of you, I know, do
exactly that. The rest of us can get on with, I don’t know; making sure that
the blind aren’t confronted with stumbling blocks, or that if, even our enemy
is stumbling we don’t gloat. We could get on with not coveting things that
belong to others and we could all benefit from taking Shabbat more seriously
and we don’t really need anyone’s permission to do that.
Two other verses from Deuteronomy;
It’s not in heavens that have to ask,
who will go up to the heavens and bring it down for us. It’s not beyond the sea
that you have to ask, who will cross the sea to bring it back for us.
We all have the possibility of creating better places, for
ourselves, for our loved ones, for all of society. In fact, we had better get
on with it sooner rather than later.
It will some gumption and well, there’s really no other words I
can use, it will take religion and it will take faith.
Here’s the thing that puzzles me. If, I could get a bum-on-a-seat
for every time someone told me this past year that they weren’t really into
Judaism as a religion, this place would be rammed full. And I wold love to see
this place rammed-full on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, but that’s not
really the point. The point is, if you want to live in a Good Place, in a
better place – where do you find the pointers towards the way that society will
function? How do you puzzle your way towards making that vision a reality when
your desires come up against the desires of others? How do you protect yourself
and your society from the forces that will weaken us and strip our values from
us. I’ve an answer – be more Jewish. Do more Jewish stuff, read more about
Jewish stuff. Speak up and take more pride in the Jewish stuff. I’ve nothing
against other religions, I’m sure other religions can help, and if you’ve
another faith tradition that speaks more clearly to you – gei gezunte heit – go
for it. But if you are here today, do more of this. Be prouder of this. If you
find yourselves in environments where self-declared atheists or lapsed-Jews or
any of the like are taking opportunities to explain how much smarter they are
now they don’t do Judaism, raise the eyebrow. Ask how they intend to get to a
Good Place, suggest that they could do with paying more attention to some very
old, very holy and, frankly, very Good suggestions in the pages of the Good Book.
Creating the Good Place will take religion. Do more religion.
And it will take faith. Faith is the thing that allows a person to
do something they know is right even if the rest of the world thinks you are
crazy. Faith is the thing the justifies the sorts of actions that we know are
good, even if society doesn’t value their performance – things like being nice
or charitable or gentle. These tend to be things society doesn’t seem set up to
value, sometimes they are even things society seems ready to mock. But have
faith. They will make the world a better place. We know that; we have faith in
that. Faith is good. Faith doesn’t require us to use the ‘God word.’ It just
requires us to believe there is justification for goodness, even if it’s not
immediately apparent. We’ll need some faith to build this Good Place.
We are, quite remarkably blessed to have this heritage. It’s an astounding gift in a world that desperately needs our active, faithful and
religious engagement, if it is to become a better place, let alone a Good
Place.
Don’t
give up on this journey.
It’s
the best shot we have at turning this world into a Good Place
It could even come in this new year.
May it come to us all in health, peace and joy,
Shannah Tovah
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