Here’s a cute thing little kids do. They’ll cover their eyes and assume that just because they can’t see you, you can’t see them. “Peekabo.” For a tiny child, the idea that anyone else sees the world differently from the way they see the world is so absurd you can get peals of laughter from playing along.
Adorable
isn’t it. From a small child.
My concern,
my fear and the driving force of my sermon, on this most holy of days, is that
not enough of us have grown far enough beyond this development stage. Not
enough of us care deeply enough about nurturing and loving and committing
ourselves to understand the different ways the not-me-s of the world see the
world. We are all so stressed and tired and so in fear of this divisive and
fractured society, that we think the only way forward is to muster every
resource we can to protect the way we see the world right now. And while we
think this helps - while at a certain level we think that if I can’t see you
then you can’t see me – we do know, don’t we, that peekaboo doesn’t really work.
But,
despite its obvious flaws, this pre-occupation with allowing into our awareness
only our own way of seeing the world, is compelling.
Lee Ross,
the recently deceased sociologist, studied and engaged in conflict negotiation
in, among other realms, Israel-Palestine. Not once, he wrote, in forty years’
experience, did anyone arrive at a conflict resolution seminar he was running eager
to learn how the other side saw the matter at hand. When we call for empathy or
gentleness in society, what we tend to mean is, “I deserve more empathy than
you – you better treat me gently,” and
we forget that thing Hillel once said, “That which is hateful for you, do not
do to others.”
When it
comes to the way we engage with the great political challenges of this day; in
this country, in Israel, in the States, we are quick to write off that vast
part of society that doesn’t hold the same views as me as either a bunch of out-of-touch
liberal elites or racist bullies. We consider our own position one of careful
nuance and compassion, and the positions of those with whom we disagree as
blunt and wilfully cruel. We’re all so busy being concerned about being
unfairly cancelled by those with whom we disagree, that we end up cancelling
them first. That helps, of course, at a certain basic level. If we get our cancelling
in first, then we really don’t need to pay any attention to the way they see
the world.
Somewhere between Kant telling us that the self is categorically
important, and the algorithms that sensationalise and fracture the information
we let into our brains, we’ve convinced ourselves that our version of truth is
the ultimate destination of all ethics, good behaviour and value. And, as an
approach, that will guide us towards an ever more divisive, angry and nasty society,
a society that, given a moment’s true and deeper consideration, none of us
would wish to inhabit.
We know it’s better to try a different way from our most
intimate social spaces, from our families. Just suppose that I vote Tory and my
brother votes Labour, or vice versa, it’s not the point. We’re going to hang on
in there, fighting not to demonise each other in our differences,
disagreeing, sure, but not barricading ourselves in and them out, because it’s
my brother.
This isn’t, for what it’s worth, a call to meekly accept
every position of every person who disagrees with me as equally acceptable. I’m
definitely in favour of some positions, and definitely opposed to others, and
I’m up for debate and up for changing minds. But the question is, how do we
engage with others when we want to make change and we don’t want to add to the
fractured, nasty culture of what sometimes passes for debate in this country?
How do I try and get my brother to change his opinion – and
full disclosure, I’m not sure I’ve ever successfully persuaded my brother of
anything – I take time, share love, listen hard, ask honest and open questions.
That’s the way to change the world, with love and humility, not with shouts and
barricades.
I like psychologist John Walen’s image, “You can’t move a
string by pushing it, you have to pull it.” When it comes to families, we know,
I think, most of us, of the need to pull together. We know, I think, most of us,
that pushing apart doesn’t get us to where we want to be. We just need to carry
that attitude with us when we encounter everyone else.
So, how do we pull strings in, how can we engage
compassionately and pro-actively with each other?
I’ve been hugely moved by the tale of Megan Phelps-Roper and
David Abitol, a Jew she met via Twitter. Phelps-Roper grew up in the Westboro
Baptist Church, you might have heard of them; a particularly nasty organisation
committed to demonising those who have different theological understandings – and
among the long list of people they demonise are Jews. In one of those 10-million-people-have-viewed-this-presentation
Ted Talks, Phelps-Roper explains why she left Westboro.[1]
She was on Twitter, busy demonising, when this Jew, David Abitol, the founder
of the blog Jewlicious, started to take her seriously and engaging with her
reasonably. He seems a remarkable person. And at one point, Abitol heads to
meet with Megan in New Orleans in person. As Phelps-Roper retells the story;
after several months of heated
but friendly arguments online, he came out to see me at a picket. He
brought me a Middle Eastern dessert from Jerusalem, and I brought him kosher
chocolate and held a "God hates Jews" sign. There was no
confusion about our positions, but the line between friend and foe was
becoming blurred. We'd started to see each other as human beings, and
it changed the way we spoke to one another.
And eventually Phelps-Roper left Westboro, and the most
important thing that shifted her was the humanity she found in David. She
shares later in her Ted Talk
David, my
"Jewlicious" friend from Twitter, invited me to spend time among
a Jewish community in Los Angeles. We slept on couches in the home of a
Hasidic rabbi and his wife and their four kids -- the same rabbi that
I'd protested three years earlier with a sign that said, "Your rabbi
is a whore." We spent long hours talking about theology and Judaism
and life while we washed dishes in their kosher kitchen and chopped
vegetables for dinner. I was astonished.
The thing that changed Phelps-Roper wasn’t the intellectual
arguments, or the abuse directed at her, but the humanity of the human prepared
to stand vulnerable before her.
It turns out the thing that changes other people is, to a
great extent, the same thing as holds us together when we disagree with one
another. If we treat other people, even people with whom we disagree as real
human beings, not caricatures, if we hang on in there, even when conversations
get difficult, if we pull in on the strings that bind us, rather than push
away, we can achieve both. We can be part of a less divisive world and fight
for the change we want to see in the world.
That’s a tall order, I know. I struggle with it too. But let
me try and offer two gentle steps, as we set out in this new year to better
ourselves and the society in which we find ourselves. Two steps that are, and
forgive me, I’m a rabbi and it’s Rosh Hashanah, very Jewish.
The first is – stop digging; as in, if you are in a pit,
stop digging. It’s monetised, you know, all those media groups who draw us in
to watch one human being fighting another human being in a digital pit. They
are making money, you know, off our inability to just say no. The real question
is how do we allow ourselves to be shaped by our encounters with others? I send
out a feedback form every year after Yom Kippur and every year I say something
about God in my sermons and every year someone complains that they didn’t come
to Shul on Rosh Hashanah to hear the Rabbi bang on about God. Sorry. But God is
at the heart of this. Not the vindictive, bogus theology taught in places like
the Westboro Church, but the kind of God we believe in here.
The kind of God we’ve spent this morning praying to; a God
who is powerful at a level beyond human power, mysterious and unknowable beyond
human knowledge, certainly, but, we believe merciful, slow to anger and willing
to bear the weight of our transgressions if we can only find it in our hearts
to change our ways. I’ll take that God above any of the social media
influencers out there. It’s worth turning off the phones and re-centring our
sense of what is important away from the bear pits that pass for debate, and
towards El Rahum v’Hanun, a God of mercy and grace. It’s worth our prayers.
And the second is this - for a human being to change, we
need to encounter other human beings. We need to be vulnerable human beings
encountering other humans to change them, and ourselves. I think that’s part of
why it’s worth being here, in a Synagogue, a Bet Kenesset – literally, a place for
people to come together. There are different human beings here. Some older,
some younger, some distracting because they pray too loudly, or chat too
loudly, or snore too loudly.
But we need to be jostled up against different people with
different levels of … well everything to grow and learn and heal. We’re a
better community and a stronger community by being egalitarian, by having more
members of colour, or of different sexualities or who are well … everything.
By the time we are done with the service today, I suspect we
are all going to be too interested in lunch to want to have particularly deep
conversations about the great matters of our time with our fellow
Synagogue-attendees. We’re not even offering a proper Kiddush.
But we could take a moment now to look around this
incredible room of incredible human beings, all of whom are created in the
image of God, none of whom, despite the ways in which they might disagree with
me, are worthy of being demonised or stereotyped or abnegated, all of whom, if
I can just connect with them, human-to-human could teach me so much I could
never understand just by myself.
We could take a second moment to embed that attitude into our
heart, fixing this sense of the vital important of treating other people as
valuable fellow wanderers, even if we disagree – perhaps most especially if we
disagree.
And dare I request a third moment; to appreciate what it is
to be part of a community, this special community, where there are so many
different people to learn from?
With our prayers and with this remarkable assembly of human
beings there might be everything we need to heal this world here, in this
special space, on this special day. As Hillel said, that’s the very essence of
the Torah, the rest is commentary, now go complete it.
May we go on to do just that, tomorrow, and beyond, and
onwards into the year of sweetness, health and peace we wish for ourselves,
Shannah Tovah
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/megan_phelps_roper_i_grew_up_in_the_westboro_baptist_church_here_s_why_i_left/transcript?language=en
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