Friday, 18 June 2021

Chukat and Ruyard Kipling

 


 

At the heart of this week’s reading, Moses beats a rock – a rock God instructed him to speak to. For this action, Moses doesn’t make it into the Promised Land. Moses, of course, has a temper. As a child, he beat an Egyptian, burying him before fleeing into the desert. He has called out his followers as failures and, this week labels them ‘Morim’ – rebels. It’s not that he is wrong – the Children of Israel are graceless, rebellious and revolting. But Moses feels under-appreciated and put-upon. In a Midrash (BMidbar Rabba 19:9) the Rabbis imagine that, at first, only drips of water emerge from the rock – miraculous certainly, but prompting from the masses the sneering allegation, “what are we, sucklings or babes just weaned from milk?” And that sneering response is the thing that ignites in Moses his second striking of the rock, the one that brings upon him Divine sentence.

 

These recent Parshiot paint the most remarkable portrait of a leader unravelling under pressure. Every year I’m struck with enormous empathy as Moses receives the sentence for losing his temper. It’s so easy to understand how a person would come to strike out – after doing so much. But it’s not just leaders who face these pressures, and it’s not just leaders who are called upon to resist anger in thought, word and deed despite the provocation. It’s all of us.

 

We are in a wonderful run of BM celebrations – six in two months! – and my mind flits back to a gift my father gave me as a child; a framed print of Ruyard Kipling’s poem, If.

 

If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;

Then yours is the world and everything in it. And what is more, you’ll be a man my son.

 

We are called upon to find ways to respond to threat, challenge and the disregard of others with patience. We are called upon to demonstrate equanimity, especially when treating our fellows. Rambam called this the golden path – the Shvil HaZahav. It leads from childhood to adulthood and eventually to the Promised Land. Above all, be kind.

 

Shabbat Shalom

 

 

Monday, 14 June 2021

Korach and Cancel Culture

 


There’s a good word for what happens to Korach, in the portion that Harry read so well earlier.

He gets cancelled.

He says something, and so out-of-order, so unacceptable, that he pays with being removed, never again to intrude.

Except, and this is the so often the thing about the cancel-culture debate – it just feels more complex than that. I mean, what is the thing Korach said? “Rav Lachem - You have taken too much on yourself.” It’s an arguable position, no? Rashi suggests Korach says – “If you were going to appoint your brother as High Priest, you shouldn’t have also appointed yourself as King. You two aren’t the only people who heard God on Sinai?” Well, that’s at least an arguable position.

And yet Moses is so angered that he insists that God creates a new form of cancellation – a means of death by which no human has ever before died.

It all feels very contemporary. There are debates about, oh I don’t know, race or gender or Israel or even whether it’s time to turn the screens off and go to bed and there are arguments to be had and points to be made, and then there comes the moment in the the argument when one party calls on the earth open up to devour one’s opponents. OK, not literally swallowed up by the earth, at least not often.

But arguments tilt in the direction of aggression more often, perhaps than the times in which arguments tilt in the direction of having disputing parties genuinely seek points of agreement and meeting and growth and transformation and all the good stuff.

Sometimes people who raise arguments are genuinely enquiring, and the fact that they disturb our view of what is right is a sign that our securities and assumptions need to be re-evaluated. And sometimes people who raise arguments are a bit prickly and over-step the mark of decency in terms of how they make their points. Sometimes they seem motivated by wishing us ill. But it’s hard to pick one’s way through that distinction, especially when our securities and assumptions are being threatened.  And I’m distrustful of our ability to be fair witnesses on the question of whether those who disagree with us should be treated as genuine debate partners or disingenuous trouble makers.

There’s a strange tale in Midrash Bereishit Rabba about Yaacov from Kefar Neburaya[1]. He seems to be a Rabbi who thinks you need to do Shechitah to eat fish – that fish need to be slaughtered in the same way as animals are slaughtered, with a blessing and a special incision made at the neck. Well, we don’t – as Kosher keeping Rabbinic Jews do Shechitah on fish. But it’s not entirely obvious as to why not. I mean, fish are alive in the same way as chicken are alive. It’s not as if he’s entirely without logic in threatening to tear down the entire apparatus of Kashrut.

But when Rabbi Chagai hears about what Yaacov is up to, he orders him to lie down and beats him. I mean there is a bit of argument, but the argument doesn’t get settled. Poor old Yaacov just gets hit.

Rabbi Chagai’s response to Yaacov is so revealing of how we all feel when we meet someone who’s a bit difficult and awkward and doesn’t accept the same norms as I do. It’s so much easier to deal with difficult people by dealing with them, and not their arguments.

 

I’m deeply uneasy about these kinds of stories. I don’t like the idea that when we disagree the way out of the problem is beating someone, or calling on God to swallow them up, or cancellation.

I suppose the point of the Korach story is that Moses appeals to God to do something so dramatic that everyone will know that Moses is right and Korach is wrong. And indeed God does something utterly dramatic. But, in the world in which I live, I don’t get to see arguments settled by God’s direct intervention. Instead, I get to see plenty of arguments start, and plenty of arguments when people on one side accuse the people on the other side of being disingenuous or worse. And I see plenty of arguments where both sides seem more interested in trying to get the other person to lie down and get beaten rather than engage across the chasm that separates one side and the other. And God? Well God just doesn’t get directly involved in the sorts of arguments I see.

 

It’s something I experience it as a Rabbi all the time. Two people in the community are arguing and I get both sides of the argument. One person explains their position and listening to them, how could I possibly not see that the other person is deliberately seeking to attack them? And then I speak to the other person, and it turns out they just think they are making a perfectly reasonable point and it’s the other person who is the bully. And when God doesn’t get involved how do you escape an ever-more fractured and broken world where we are ever-more drawn into the things that divide us and. Ahhh.

 

So, here are my thoughts about how we can learn to argue better.

Let’s start with this one – every human being is created in the image of God. We are each of miraculous and extra-ordinary and so very, very beautiful – even if you disagree totally with me and my worldview. Can you argue with me as if you really believe I’m created in the image of God? Please.

And then there is a stunning verse in Proverbs - מָוֶת וְחַיִּים, בְּיַד-לָשׁוֹן - The tongue has the power of life and death.[2] Words are so important. Of course, in the Bible, the universe is created by speech. There’s a powerful Kabbalistic idea that every time we speak we create a world around us. Or, for the less mystically inclined, what about the idea from linguistic theory, the Sapir Worff hypothesis, that our language creates and shapes our worldview? When we use language in ways that denigrate those we disagree with we move into being people who … and it gets back to where we just were … fail to see that every human being is created in the image of God.

And one last idea – Shiviim Panim LeTorah[3] - there are 70 facets to the Torah. Or, as I like to think of it, the truth is too complex for my single mind, or anyone’s single mind. And the fact that someone I disagree with might, in my mind, be obviously wrong, or mendacious, or cruel or heartless, or any of that isn’t actually a sign that that is absolutely the case. As Jack Nicholson once told Tom Cruise, I can’t handle the truth. Truth is not something to be handled by any human, it’s something that should inspire in us a certain humility. We would do better reflecting on what we don’t know, than what we think we do. Gedalti Ben HaChakhamim V’Lo Matzati Tov MiShtikah – said the son of the great Rabban Gamiel – I grew up among the wisest, and I’ve found nothing better than silence. Or as a less Rabbinic sage, Bob Dylan, wrote in Back Pages

Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats too noble to neglect

Deceived me into thinking I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then I'm younger than that now

With a humility about our own hold on truth, curiosity is an easy next step, and curiosity draws us into valuing other opinions and views and through that other people. That’s good.

Without it, we are drawn into rejecting the worth of other views, and the people who espouse them. That’s not good.

·      Value people as created in the image of God.

·      Be careful of the power we exercise through speech

·      And be humble in our claims to know truth.

It’s possible to argue well, it’s possible to disagree and through disagreement come to know more and value more people and things. I really believe this; it’s possible to argue well and save the world.

What a prize is in store for us.

Certainly, it beats being swallowed by the earth.

Shabbat Shalom



[1] Bereishit Rabba 7:2

[2] Prov 18:21

[3] B’Midbar Rabba 13:16

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