Decency is Bravery
“See, this day I set before you blessing and curse:
blessing, if you obey the commandments of your God יהוה that I enjoin upon you this day;
and curse, if you do not obey the commandments of your God יהוה, but turn away from the path that I enjoin upon you this day and follow other gods, whom you have not experienced.”
(Devarim 11:26-28)
When you are offered the choice between a blessing and a curse, you would think that it would be an easy choice to make, but in life the bottles don’t all come with labels.
As Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur approach, Teshuvah (return) is one of the main themes. If we return to God, or the good, or to good relations with those who we have wronged, we are returning to a place or a moment where we made a choice. Or it may have been many places along the path where we made choices. They may have been our choices alone or choices that we made together with others. If the bottles had labels, we may not have looked all that closely at them.
The American way of thinking is, at the root, libertarian. We believe that we have an innate right to “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” As Jews, there is another voice that is always in our ear. Yes, we have individual responsibilities, but we do not fulfill those responsibilities for ourselves alone. When we act in the ways that God asked of us we do so to benefit not only ourselves, but the ever-widening rings of community that surround us, outward from our family to our people and to all the peoples of the world. Torah could map the details of this in a more straight-forward way than it does, that is true sometimes.
In our Torah Portion this week, Nitzavim, we are reminded of the choice, blessing or curse. We are reminded and then we are taken through a prophecy of bad choices and the consequence of those choices. What is frightful and new in this prophecy is the inevitability of our failure to choose well, of our failure to understand the gravity of the choices, and of God’s love for us as a people that will save us as a people even though it will not save all of us as individuals.
When all these things befall you—the blessing and the curse that I have set before you—and you take them to heart amidst the various nations to which your God יהוה has banished you, and you return to your God יהוה, and you and your children heed God’s command with all your heart and soul, just as I enjoin upon you this day, then your God יהוה will restore your fortunes and take you back in love. [God] will bring you together again from all the peoples where your God יהוה has scattered you.
“Even if your outcasts are at the ends of the world, from there your God יהוה will gather you, from there [God] will fetch you.”
(Devarim 30:1-4)
There is something fatalistic in this redemptive vision. We can’t save ourselves alone. And yet, we needn’t carry all of the responsibility on our shoulders as individuals. Our choices have high stakes, even though the reality of our free will seems tenuous. As infants we begin without a clear idea of where we end and the rest of the universe begins. There is something inevitable about that. We begin as something wholly contained within another. When we are born we experience a degree of separation, but we don’t entirely grasp the consequences of that moment. But that separation is contained within a larger other. We are never truly separate, never entirely sovereign selves.
We learn in Pirkei Avot, “Rabbi Tarfon used to say: It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.” What is the work? These teachings. And what does it mean to do the work in our world today? There is no point in politeness here. The state of things in the United States where we live, and in Israel where so many of our fellow Jews live, is dreadful. In both places we find societies that are on the precipice. I think that it is fair to say that all of us don’t see things in the same way. Those who are struggling to grasp at power for their own personal benefits seem ascendant over us in ways that are overwhelming. What do we do? We follow Rabbi Tarfon. We allow ourselves to be guided by Torah.
This may be too much God-talk and too great a challenge to your ingrained American-ness. I am not entirely unchallenged in this way at times. I can’t reduce my values to “Torah values” alone.
I can also recommend a few principles that, when put into practice, will make a difference. Some are easier and simpler than others. They make a good checklist to follow when you have a choice to make. They are: honesty, decency, and compassion. All of them can require a certain amount of bravery in the current climate that we find ourselves in. They have become forms of resistance. Honesty can be undermined by anger. Compassion can be offered in a careless way when honesty would provide true compassion. Even these are tools that we must handle carefully if they are to be effective. Don’t rush.
I sometimes feel, when I talk about Teshuvah, that I am not being clear about what the work of Teshuvah is. What I am talking about here is not Teshuvah. It is what we do on the way from point to point. It could be the road to Teshuvah or it could just be what we do while we struggle to stand still with the world swirling around us. Action is hope. Take it.
