A series of tweets collected by my colleague, Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber, will serve as a place to start. Over the summer, the Anne Frank Trust, an organisation working to empower young people to challenge prejudice, inspired by – you guessed it - Anne Frank, was rebuked for asking Michael Rosen to write a poem in support of their 75th Anniversary. The problem being that Rosen is no friend of Israel.
Then, in another tweet, they were rebuked for not mentioning that Frank
was a Jew, and was murdered for being a Jew. That’s despite the fact that they
do. Then they were rebuked for using an exclamation point when mentioning the
Holocaust. And then again for appointing a Quaker as its Chief Executive.
I’m interested, today, in the way language is used, especially in the
public realm and especially interested in how we demarcate between people we
speak to or speak about with compassion, and people we call out, or attack or …
in that most current of terminologies, cancel.
It's not
just that so much of what passes for debate in the public realm is nasty.
It’s not
just that, on all sides of political divides in this country, we are
simultaneously being told that there is a dangerous culture of cancelling being
practised by the other side, and at the very same time told that we shouldn’t
accept these dangerous other-siders as acceptable parties for reasoned debate.
It’s also that
the way this calling out of people is being cultivated as an acceptable way for
us to behave. Calling out others as beyond the pale of discourse is emerging as a
dominant form of public discourse.
I’m scared,
scared as a Jew - for this stuff will
always come back to bite us as Jews, and scared as a member of a society that
seems to be closing in on itself, rather than opening out.
Maybe these
aren’t modern challenges, here’s a very ancient version of a similar issue,
taken from the Talmud.[1]
It’s the
year 70 and the Romans are besieging Jerusalem. The Jewish political leadership
of the city – the Biryoni – are so sure the Romans represent the very worst
kind of foe that they’ve threatened anyone who wants to negotiate with the Romans
with death.
Rabbi Yochanan
Ben Zakkai realises the only way he saves something of Jewish life, is to
negotiate, so he arranges to be smuggled out of the city in a coffin. This is,
of course, before the days of Zoom. The Jewish Biryoni challenge the
pallbearers; they want to drive a spear through the coffin to ensure its occupant
is indeed dead. But they are warned away. So Rabbi Yochanan escapes the doomed
city and negotiates with the Romans for the survival of Judaism, even as
Jerusalem is destroyed.
One of the
most remarkable features of the Talmudic presentation of the story is its
ragged ending. Its protagonist, Rabbi Yochanan, doesn’t emerge as a hero. For
sure, he saves something of Rabbinic Judaism, but another Rabbi calls him out
for failing even to try and save Jerusalem.
‘[God] turns
wise men backwards and makes their knowledge foolish’ [Isa. 44:25]’ rebukes
Rabbi Yosef, or maybe it was Rabbi Akiva. “I did all I could,” protests Rabbi
Yochanan. He gets the last word, but there’s no valedictory conclusion, just an
unfinished argument about whether negotiating with an enemy can ever be the right
thing. The tale becomes a tale about the relationship between purity and
possibility.
There are
two sets of puritans in the story. The Biryoni – sure that no one should
negotiate with the enemy – and Rabbi
Yosef, or maybe it was Rabbi Akiva, who claim that if you are disturbed by a
threat to Jerusalem, you should fight to save Jerusalem, and anyone who accepts
anything less deserves approbation.
And on the
side of possibility is Rabbi Yochanan. Yochanan surrounds himself in deceit to
smuggle himself out of the city and gives up the possibility of saving Jerusalem to
achieve something. He is a practitioner of the art of the possible.
Whose side
are you on? Instinctively are you a puritan, in argument, in practice, in your relationships
or are you a wheeler-dealer, a merchant in the art of the possible.
Here are the
advantages of being a puritan. It’s clean. There’s a comfort in knowing that
you are right. For the Romans are clearly wrong, and Jerusalem is clearly right
and anyone who messes with the clear distinctions between my sense of wrong and
right has to be dangerous and should be avoided. Being a puritan is also, in a
strange way, the easier option. You nail your colours to a mast and you just
stay there.
And here are
the disadvantages of being a puritan, in argument. You end up in an ever-decreasing
circle of people with whom to stand. And, like the poor Biryoni, you can end up
without, not only the very thing you sought to protect but with nothing at
all.
I get that
it feels more comfortable confronting people with their faults than trying to
find a point of meeting with people who hurt us or discomfort us. And I get
that sometimes we are just too bruised to handle the challenge of seeking dialogue
when we are hurt. But it cannot be that we allow ourselves to descend into a
society that lobs verbal grenades rather than seeks to build bridges through
our willingness to engage with those who distress us.
Rebuking people
is, in fact, a Mitzvah – straight out of the Torah. הוֹכֵ֤חַ תּוֹכִ֙יחַ֙ -
you shall surely rebuke your fellow - אֶת־עֲמִיתֶ֔ךָ, but it’s a dangerous charge
because it’s so easily done wrong. It’s so easy, in rebuking others, to create
division, defensiveness and to close down relationships. And that’s even when we,
as rebuking people, are trying to rebuke genuinely. It’s worse when rebuke
becomes a way to say, I don’t want to have to deal with you, so I’m just going
to rebuke you and then I won’t have to deal either with you or the ideas you
represent.
The context
of the Biblical mandate to rebuke is revealing – the verse opens with the
insistence
לֹֽא־תִשְׂנָ֥א
אֶת־אָחִ֖יךָ בִּלְבָבֶ֑ךָ –
don’t hate your fellow in your heart
You shall surely rebuke your
fellow
But then the verse ends
וְלֹא־תִשָּׂ֥א
עָלָ֖יו חֵֽטְא –
but don’t incur your own sin on their behalf.
What’s the sin a rebuker can
commit? Surely the failure to live up to the command of the very next verse –
perhaps the most famous in all the Torah –
וְאָֽהַבְתָּ֥
לְרֵעֲךָ֖ כָּמ֑וֹךָ –
you shall love your fellow as yourself.
A person who finds rebuking
comes too easily is probably a person who doesn’t love as much as they should.
The rabbinic teachings around
rebuke are full of the dangers of the kind of rebuke that causes pain – The
Talmud in Baba Metzia warns, “One who humiliates their fellow in public, it is
as if they were spilling blood,”[2] Rav
Nahman Bar Yitzhak suggests the teaching is particularly apposite – after all,
when a person is humiliated in public, ‘the red leaves their face and white
come in its place.’ It’s better to say nothing than to say something you know
isn’t going help, warns Rabbi Abba.[3]
Only rebuke a person in
private, teaches Rambam.[4] The
Mesilat Yesharim[5]
warns that, often, the attempt to rebuke a person ‘will not be heeded and only
causes a person in their further wickedness. In such cases, [he continues] the
only pious action is to keep silent." Indeed that’s the conclusion of a different
Talmudic passage in Yevamot.
כשם
שמצוה לומר דבר הנשמע, כך מצוה שלא לומר את שאינו נשמע[6]
Just as it is a Mitzvah to say something when a person can
hear it, so too it is a Mitzvah not to say something that a person isn’t going
to hear.
The great founder of modern
Chasidism, the Baal Shem Tov, taught - “First rebuke yourself, and only after
your neighbour.”[7]
That’s a particularly sensitive read of a Biblical phrase that contains a
doubled verb
הוֹכֵ֤חַ
תּוֹכִ֙יחַ֙ –
first critique yourself, then your fellow.
I was deeply
moved, researching this sermon, by a Ted Talk by the African-American
academic and civil rights activist, Loretta Ross.[8]
She was tasked with changing the minds of Klu Klux Klan members,
and she began thinking, in her words – what the hell! – she just wanted to call
these racist wicked people out, and I can’t say I blame her.
But she’s
emerged in the decades since believing in the possibility of changing minds by
NOT calling people OUT, but instead calling people IN. Calling people in, she
says, is pretty similar to calling people out. It’s just done with love. It
prioritises finding points of meeting and opening conversation up above point
scoring and bravado.
When we are
disturbed by another person, we have the decision of whether we speak out, but
also, how we speak out. We need to decide if we are going to speak out to
strengthen our own sense of how right we are or whether we want to engage and
change the realities in which we live.
When Loretta
Ross teaches this practice of calling other people in, she talks about the
importance of empathy and self-assessment as we prepare to deal with people who
have done things to frustrate or hurt us. She talks about how calling people in
re-affirms our sense of optimism, that change is possible, and broken relationships
can be healed. But none of that can happen when we are more excited about how well
we can put other people down, than the possibility of finding a point of
meeting, even with those with whom we disagree.
Language is,
we believe as Jews, the way of the creation of the world, it’s the tool for the
revelation of God’s will to humanity. It’s the greatest and most powerful tool
we have to do good in the world.
In this year
to come, I want to urge us all to turn towards a language of love, compassion and bridge-building, even in our disagreement and even in our
discomfort with some of those with whom we are called to debate.
If we see
that which is wrong, we can, indeed we are called to rebuke, but only in love –
and if we can’t rebuke with the love we have for our fellow being so clear to
them, then we should learn, instead, the importance of knowing when not to
speak.
Shannah
Tovah
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