Stoicism vs. Judaism, Apathy vs. Hope
The year was 1985, and I was a second year rabbinic student at the Los Angeles campus of the Hebrew Union College, just back from my first year of studies in Jerusalem, and eager to jump enthusiastically into my classes at the new campus, as well as my first practical experience as a rabbi in a student congregation. The congregation I was assigned to was in a very small town in the hills east of San Diego called Ramona. This was going to be my first experience leading a congregation, and of course the High Holy Days come up as the first big thing. Needless to say, I was rather nervous about my new role, and very anxious to please. Of course, there were myriad practical details to be attended to. When a discussion arose among the planning committee about how to get a couple of round kosher hallahs to make motzi over at the end of services, I figured that since I was driving down from LA anyway, and I happened to live in Fairfax, which is a Jewish neighbourhood of LA with a lot of kosher stores, I could pick up the hallahs for them. My new congregants readily accepted my offer.
The morning of Erev Rosh Hashanah arrived. I got up, packed the car with everything I would need for the trip, and then ventured out onto Fairfax Ave. to the kosher bakery to get my fresh hallot so that I could be on my way. Well, you can only imagine how crowded it was on that day, but the commotion I observed upon entering the bakery seemed out of the ordinary, even for Erev Rosh Hashanah. What was it? Turns out the little machine that gives you your number in the bakery so that everybody knows what order people should be attended to - that machine had run out of numbers. As a result, you can imagine, we had on our hands what one might call A Situation. What could be done? A full, crowded bakery, erev yontif, and no little numbers to hand out, so no obvious way to keep order. Now I suppose the people assembled in that bakery -- owners, workers, customers -- we all could have come together and said to each other, "look, the usual system for organizing things fairly isn't working, for reasons beyond our control. It's crowded. Let's form a queue, or find some other way to ensure a fair and orderly system of service." I suppose we could have said that. Well, what actually happened? You guessed it -- utter pandemonium. There was pushing. There was shoving. There was yelling. Old ladies were elbowed out of the way. Chaos reigned. And all this, on Erev Rosh Hashanah, just hours before the commencement of Hayamim Hanoraim, the most important religious days of the year, when we would be committing ourselves to a process of teshuvah, of repentance for sins against God and against our fellow human beings, promising to be the best people we can possibly be. And davka then, human nature at its worst.
Reflecting on this incident later, I remember thinking about the Yom Kippur haftorah from Isaiah, when God asks the people Hakhazeh yihye tzom evharehu? Can this be the fast that I desire? One which you are undertaking while oppressing the most vulnerable members of society? I could almost hear Isaiah shreying, "Is this behaviour in the bakery the kind of behaviour that God wants from us in celebration of the new year? Is making sure you get you get your rugelach order in before they run out, at all costs to your own dignity and the wellbeing of your fellow Jews, is that really what God wants from you on Rosh Hashanah?"
That was a later reflection. But what, you may wonder, was I doing during this descent into anarchy? I wanted to just walk out. And yet, by golly, I had committed to bringing two round yontif hallot to Ramona, California, for my very first High Holidays in the rabbinic role, and this was already taking longer than I had anticipated, and I was starting to worry about being late, and if I stood back and waited for someone to say, "Oh sir, you were next, what would you like?" I knew it would never happen. So while I don't think that I shoved any old ladies out of the way on my way to the counter, I decided I had to be a bit assertive myself and eventually elbowed my way to the front, got the attention of someone, probably in not the gentlest softest inside voice that I possess, and got my hallot. On one level, that was success. I kept my commitment to my new congregants. I delivered on my promise to bring hallahs. But in retrospect, on another level, a deeper, Rosh Hashanah, level, my procurement of those hallot was perhaps not such a success after all.
Twenty three High Holidays later, as I think back on that first year in Ramona, it's funny that I don't remember much else specifically about the experience. I certainly have no memory of what I talked about in my sermons. The people who were involved are very fuzzy in my mind; I don't think I would know any of them now. How was the music? Was the davening meaningful? What did I learn from the experience of leading a community in prayer for the first time? Was the rabbinate feeling like a good fit for me, or was I ruing the day that I had the crazy notion to go into this business? From out of the fog of memory, none of that emerges. But I do remember that bakery scene very vividly, and what it seemed to say about human nature. And I remember feeling pretty discouraged about the conspicuous disconnect between what we say and what we do.
I think about human nature a lot this time of year, because while the premise of that term is that there are certain things about us that are inherent and don't change, the whole premise of these High Holy Days is that we can change. We can be different, we can be better. Change is of course a political slogan, we know that all too well this election year. And change is also a technological fact of life we all live with. But according to the rabbis, change is much more than a political slogan or a new gadget. At the core of the Yamim Noraim is the fundamental principle that teshuvah is possible, real change is possible, our nature isn't set, we don't always have to do what we've done before, we can with God's help climb out of the ruts we've dug ourselves into, we can in the deepest ways that matter be different, be better than we were this last year.
My question is, do we really believe that's true, or is it just a nice idea that we proclaim in shul before going home to our ill-gotten hallot? When it comes to fundamental human nature, is the promise of change real, or ultimately futile? Is inevitability the true marker of the human condition? If so, what are we doing here in shul on these yamim noraim? Is it all just a show?
Looking out at the world, it's certainly easy to give in to despair and a sense of futility concerning human nature. A few weeks ago, we witnessed the spectacle of the Olympics in Beijing. The promise had been that the Olympics would bring more openness and democratization and respect for human rights in a rising China. We all know what really happened. The exact opposite. The Olympics were a great show, for sure -- but not only did China continue to repress the Tibetans, and continue to support the Sudanese government in its genocidal campaign against the black Muslims of Darfur, but the government actually increased oppression at home in myriad ways in order to ensure a "successful" and "flawless" Olympics, buying the silence of grieving earthquake parents and apparently suppressing knowledge of the tainted milk crisis so as not to spoil the show. Despite the promises and despite the spectacle, nothing really changed.
Or the economic crisis currently underway south of the border. Talk about déjà vu. Corporate greed. Lax oversight. Obvious warning signs ignored. Reasonable levels of prudence by both big businessmen and little guys deemed unnecessary. People thrown out of work, and out of their homes. We've seen it all before, and here we go again - we hope not so bad as some predict, and we hope not on our side of the border, but where and how it will end we just don't know. Do we ever learn?
And of course there's the Middle East, which unfortunately can always be counted on to provide reasons to feel pessimism, despair and futility. This summer, I was in Israel during the lead-up to the prisoner deal with Hezbollah, and on the day before we left the country the exchange of imprisoned child murderer Samir Kuntar for the bodies of Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser took place. So much commentary has been written about the merits and drawbacks of what Israel agreed to in that exchange; that's not my subject for today. But the cruel and manipulative way in which our enemies withheld information about the soldiers' fate until the last possible minute chips away at any glimmers of hope that we might have in a possible reconciliation between us and them. It was so horrifying. The Hezbollah spokesman stood there at the border in front of a black SUV and said, "and now we're going to reveal the fate of Regev and Goldwasser" as if it was some kind of game show. And he opened the door, and while we had been told by the government that they were dead, we held out faint hope that maybe maybe the intelligence was wrong and they would jump out of the car smiling. But of course it was just coffins, and while the crowds celebrated in Beirut, Israel buried its dead. The deal that was struck, whatever you think of it, did provide some closure for the families, but in the larger picture of our conflict with our neighbours of course, nothing really changed, and the inevitability of conflict seems more entrenched than ever.
Not that Israel itself is exempt from the failings of human nature by any means. Many examples can be cited, but one that particularly stands out for me is the shameful harassment of Palestinian villagers and farmers on the West Bank by some of their settler neighbours, harassment which continued unabated this year - and far too often the Israeli security forces just stood by and allowed it to happen, not affording the Palestinians the protection they need and deserve as they go out to their fields, that they own, to harvest their crops. Like other ethnic groups involved in life and death struggles with their neighbours, our people too has those in our midst who demonize the other, and fail to recognize or honour the ethical claim even our enemy has on us, especially according to our own Torah. Jewish settlers throwing stones at Palestinian villagers or burning their fields or olive groves - this is not the Israel most of us aspire to. Last week's pipe bomb attack against a Peace Now activist who also happens to be a Holocaust survivor, Israel Prize laureate, and prominent academic - this is not the Israel most of us aspire to. Israeli reluctance to take on the extremists within its own society has been a feature of this conflict for decades -- it's not only wrong, it also doesn't help our cause…and it hasn't changed.
Perhaps the most poignant example for me of changelessness this year has been the situation of Darfur. Here, after all our protestations of Never Again, it is happening again, before our very eyes. There is more information about what is going on in Darfur than about any previous ongoing mass atrocity in the world. This is not Rwanda, where the genocide took place over a few weeks and then was over. This is not the Holocaust, where the full extent of what was going on in the death camps wasn't widely known until the liberation. There have been dozens and dozens of eyewitness accounts of the genocide in Darfur, which have received considerable publicity in the West, and yet nothing there has changed. The brutal rapes, the savage killings, the expulsion of people from their villages - it all goes on, and we know it's going on, and there will be no intervention. It will just play out as it plays out, and we'll all turn the page, not because we don't care, but because we have no idea what we can do to help, given the limitations on what we're prepared to do to help.
The arena of international affairs provides many such discouraging examples. But it's not only in the international realm and in world affairs that a sense of futility and changelessness often prevails. I know about some of the disappointments people experience in their personal lives, patterns of relationships in which our hopes for change are continually dashed. Here are some you've told me about over the years: distant or critical fathers; demanding or intrusive or guilt-giving mothers; workaholic or self-absorbed spouses; passionless marriages; secretive, surly teens; adult children who are too busy to visit, or can't seem to get established in a career, or have married the wrong person; unappreciative bosses; insensitive friends who let you down when you need them most; fellow members of a group or community who just don't pull their weight. Any of these ring a bell?
Many of us have encountered these types in our lives, and their stubborn resistance to change can cause us tremendous anguish and grief. But what's most discouraging is that all these people who make our lives so miserable - guess who they are? They're also us, in other people's eyes. If we're honest with ourselves, and if these yamim noraim are about anything they're about honesty, we'll admit that's true. We have been many of these wretched things to other people in our lives; we've been the overbearing mother and the critical father and the inattentive spouse and the child who's too busy to visit. We've been the friend who just didn't step up to the plate when we were needed. We've been the inflexible boss, the lazy student or employee, the unforgiving or unbending partner, the indifferent neighbour, the non-contributing member of the community or congregation. We've been judgmental of others, but have resented it when others have judged us. Now of course we haven't all done all these things. But most of us have done lots of them, or have our own list. That's largely why we're here, in fact, on these days, to own up to the fact that we've done lots of them, and to seek forgiveness for that. And to remember the fact that we've experienced lots of them too, and we're here to offer forgiveness for that. As wounded as we've been, generally to that degree have we wounded others. It seems to be part of our nature. This is our Ashamnu, our Al Het, our Vidui. And while these days proclaim the possibility for change, that faith is perhaps belied by the 2009 calendar - guess what's on it? Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur again. We'll be back.
So whether it's in the international arena or in our personal lives, it is easy to succumb to a sense that while some external conditions might change, what is most fundamental to us as human beings, our nature, is unchanging and inevitable. That is certainly discouraging, and supremely undermining of the message of the High Holy Days. The hope filled message of change in the High Holy Day liturgy collides with the sense of futility many of us feel about the changeless patterns of relationship in our lives like the two particle beams at the new Super-Collider near Geneva will soon collide with each other, and what will come out of the collision on these holy days nobody knows, but we hope it's not a black hole that will swallow us up.
How do we, heirs to a tradition that maintains hope, and faith in a better future as cardinal principles, respond to the sense of inevitability and futility that can so easily lead to depression and despair? I see two major types of responses before us.
One response I'll call the stoic response. In common parlance, a stoic is someone who is unflinching in the face of suffering. The original Stoics were part of a school of Greek philosophy founded by Zeno in the 4th c. BCE. The Stoics taught that no event or person makes us miserable - we make ourselves miserable by the way we react to these events or people. The universe is governed by absolute laws of nature that are beyond our control. The only thing we can control is our own response. Happiness comes from accommodating ourselves to nature and to the inevitable; unhappiness comes from refusing to see that the universe is not set up for our comfort and convenience. As an early Stoic Epictetus put it, starkly, "If anyone is unhappy, remember that his unhappiness is his own fault. God has made all men to be happy, and to be free from worries" (III.24.2). And elsewhere… "Nothing else is the cause of anxiety or loss of tranquility than our own opinion" (III.19.3).
These are extraordinary statements. What are the practical implications of such a philosophical approach? One contemporary writer's summary of the Stoic proposition is reflected in the title of one of his books: the psychologist Albert Ellis wrote How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything, Yes Anything. Sounds great, no? The idea behind it is that we can't control events "out there". Things happen all the time. Things like the difficult relationships I referred to earlier. Things like wars, and hurricanes, and tsunamis, and cancer, and appliances that break down the day after the warranty expires. All that happens, and we can't control any of it. What we can control is how we respond to these things. The state that we should aim to achieve, according to the Stoics, is one of utter acceptance - don't go around with crazily optimistic notions about the possibility for changes or improvements. Don't believe you have a right to kindness, peace, prosperity, health, and good fortune. Lower your expectations for change, and you won't be disappointed. Don't get all emotional when things happen; rather, respond rationally and calmly, with equanimity. Even death, or should I say - especially death, because it is so inevitable - should be greeted with acceptance. No point in getting all worked up about something that's going to happen anyway. The essential goal is apathy -- apathy will help us avoid making ourselves miserable.
This approach certainly has merits. There is something enviable about this kind of acceptance, and there are times when it is helpful and appropriate for us to adjust our expectations and our hopes to fit our circumstances. Even our own tradition asks aizehu ashir? Who is the rich one? Mishesameach b'helko - the one who is satisfied with his lot. That is certainly a stoic approach - to be satisfied, to be content, not to shoot for more, to accept the inevitable.
But, as Rabbi Janet Marder points out, this is not ultimately the Jewish approach. The Jewish way is the second major type of response to our perception of changelessness and inevitability. Here's a double negative for you: in contrast to psychologist Ellis, we Jews stubbornly refuse to stubbornly refuse to make ourselves miserable. Our tradition does not afford us the opportunity to avoid being unhappy. Does that mean we enjoy being miserable? No, but there are certain things which, when they occur, should make us miserable, at least for a while. Apathy is certainly not our goal as Jews. We sometimes succumb to it, but it is not an ideal of our tradition. There are things which go on in this world which should make us miserable, should break our heart, and if they don't, then we're missing out on something very important, and we're missing out on incentives to try, perhaps despite the odds, to try and take something which is bad, and make it just a bit better.
In the face of crushing disappointment in the seeming changelessness of human nature, how does our Jewish tradition want us to respond? Not with apathy, not with feeling less, or aspiring to less, not with cynicism, or the acquisition of a tougher skin -- but davka with more feeling, more emotion, more hope - irrational perhaps - that change for the better is possible. Judaism is not a recipe for achieving serenity or equanimity. In fact, in case you haven't noticed, we don't do serenity and equanimity real well in the Jewish world. It sounds nice, and I have a lot of sincere respect for people who are developing and promoting Jewish meditation techniques designed to achieve physical and mental wellbeing. It's great, and it's important, but it is bumping up against what I perceive as a national tendency to rage, and protest, and kvetch, and criticize, and generally feel. It's hard to stoically accept, when you feel so deeply and so passionately about something. As Rabbi Ed Feinstein teaches, the opposite of Judaism isn't Christianity, or Islam, or even atheism - the opposite of Judaism is surrender, or despair.
We've all been hurt enough to know the downside of feeling. But the upside of feeling is that we continually grow in our emotional capacity, in our compassion, and in the energy that we have to devote to making things better. Judaism, as opposed to stoicism, has opted to pay that price.
However, the key to the Jewish view that change for the better is possible, as I see it, is the idea that our goal and our hope as human beings is to make things better - but not perfect. Perfect is out of our reach, and is often the enemy of the good. And here I have to spend just a minute with the phrase Tikkun Olam. It's a phrase which has become very widely used in the contemporary Jewish world, and in fact its usage has spread beyond the Jewish world, influencing the discourse of the political campaign currently underway south of the border. It literally means "repairing the world". In its usage in contemporary discourse, the term encompasses everything from the reversal of global warming to universal health care to ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Sudan to eradicating poverty, AIDS, substance abuse, corruption and every other evil under the sun. This understanding of the term is utopian, messianic, and would involve some extraordinary transformations in human behaviour and human nature. And indeed the messianic usage of the term is present in our tradition, reflected most conspicuously in the Alenu prayer, recited three times daily but emanating originally from the musaf liturgy of the High Holy Days, in which we ask God l'taken olam b'malkhut shadai - to perfect the world under divine sovereignty. That's something God can do, and traditionally we pray that God will do so bimheira b'yameinu speedily in our day.
But it is not something we human beings can achieve. As Hillel Halkin points out in a recent article in Commentary magazine , the term Tikkun Olam is often used differently in rabbinic literature. I recently taught a shiur on the mitzvah of pidyon shvuyim, redemption of the captive, in the context of a discussion of the deal Israel agreed to in order to secure the release of the bodies of Regev and Goldwasser zikhronam livrakha. One of the texts we looked at was Masekhet Gittin (45a), where the rabbis place a monetary limit on the amount one may pay to secure the release of a Jewish captive. On what basis? The mishnah says, Mipnei Tikkun Ha-Olam. Now what possible meaning of Tikkun Olam could be intended by its usage in this context? How does a limit on ransom further the goal of repairing the world? It appears that in this context, Tikkun Olam is not a utopian concept at all. Rather, it means something like "the common weal" or "the greater good". Don't pay exorbitant ransom - why not? Because doing so will only lead to the taking of more captives and the hiking of the price required to free them. That would be worse overall. So the goal of Tikkun Olam in this sense isn't perfection. In fact, for the person being held prisoner now, this ruling actually sets them back, because perhaps a high ransom would result in their freedom. But Tikkun ha-Olam, in this decidedly non-utopian sense, utterly tuned in to the messy reality of our world where everything is a tradeoff, only wants to make things, when all is said and done, a bit better. And this, says Judaism - as opposed to both the Stoics on one side and the messianists on the other - this incremental kind of change for the better is indeed possible.
At the turn of the year, as we celebrate Rosh Hashanah, we reaffirm our faith in the possibility of change -- in ourselves, in the people with whom we are in personal relationship, and in the wider world around us. Not necessarily dramatic or revolutionary change, but substantial change, that has real effects. Our faith in the possibility of change leaves us vulnerable to disappointment and anger again and again and again. From the distant arena of international affairs, to the much closer realm of our relationship with our community and our own loved ones, we see the unchanging patterns of human nature manifesting themselves. Jewish tradition doesn't want us to devote our energy to learning to accept these patterns; rather, we do our best to overcome them, however we can. It's not that there's no place for the acceptance model in Judaism; there surely is. Forgiveness, for example, represents a sort of letting go, accepting the reality of what happened and moving on. So acceptance has its place. But that acceptance should be true and deep, coming not from a place of apathy, or not wanting to "deal with it", but rather from a true transformation that has occurred in the heart and soul of the person doing the accepting.
This is my prayer for all of us as we usher in the year 5769. I pray that we battle against any tendency we may have to cynicism, futility, and inevitability. Human nature is powerful, but human nature is not inevitable, and sometimes, we can with God's help actually overcome it, we can achieve some measure of Tikkun. Not everybody who is our enemy today has to be our enemy tomorrow, and it is worth taking chances to test whether some of those difficult relationships can change for the better. Repressive regimes do from time to time give way to democratic, accountable systems of governance. Not every pattern of behaviour that we ourselves have practiced needs to continue, and it's worth taking chances to see whether we can perhaps do things differently the next time. As for all the discouraging news in the world around us, there are in the midst of all the bad news signs of hope - most conspicuous for me in the environmental movement, which has succeeded on a grass roots level in convincing millions of people to make choices in their daily lives which are better for the environment than the things they were doing before.
Do our efforts to change work every time? No. Mostly, to be frank, they don't. Mostly we keep elbowing ourselves to the front of the bakery line, year after year. But our faith says we have to keep feeling, keep hoping, keep examining ourselves, keep holding on to the possibility of change. The traditional recipe is teshuvah, tefila, and tzedakah, and that's as good a list as any I've ever heard of to avoid apathy. It may mean we're miserable from time to time, but it is the Jewish way to make this tradeoff. May 5769 be a year of hope and not cynicism for us and our whole community.