Yitro 5785: The Vanishing Line
The beginning of this month marked five years since I began working at IJS. Half a decade later, I am grateful that I continue to wake up every day and get to do this amazing work with these amazing colleagues—including our professionals, our volunteer leaders, and the thousands of people who participate in our community in one way or another. That includes you, as a reader of these reflections. So I begin with gratitude: Thank you for the opportunity to be part of your life, and to hopefully do some good.
While by this point I feel genuinely comfortable in my role, when I first started it wasn’t necessarily obvious that that would be the case. Among other things, I am the first man to lead IJS. And (not unrelated) I’m also the first of our leaders who doesn’t hail from the liberal Jewish community. My ordination is from YCT Rabbinical School, a modern orthodox institution—with a feminist and often liberal bent, no doubt, but still.
So I’ve observed moments over these five years when the part of the world I’m working in and the part of the world I come from operate with different sensibilities. For instance, most of the people I work with and serve don’t observe Shabbat or practice keeping kosher in the same way as I do. Our communities have different orientations around the liturgy of the prayer book. They have different cultures of text study and language. The encounter of these worlds inevitably produces tension for me—tension which Jewish mindfulness practice has helped me to manage. And most of the time, I find that tension is a productive one, like a passing storm that yields a gentle rain—for me, at any rate, and hopefully for others too.
Yet sometimes the storms can be, well, stormier. Such a case happened this past week, as I watched how these two worlds responded to the president’s announcement that he intends for the United States to redevelop the Gaza Strip and, in the process, aid in or force the relocation of the area’s millions of residents. Much of the liberal world responded immediately that this was wrong: It amounted to ethnic cleansing. Much of the orthodox world responded that not only was Trump’s idea not wrong, it was right: To oppose the opportunity for Gazans to relocate was immoral, as was the status quo, which would consign Israel to perpetual warfare with Hamas.
My own first instinct was closer to my liberal friends: Of course I’m against ethnic cleansing. I likewise believe the people of Gaza should have freedom to leave if they wish, and I also believe Israelis and Gazans alike should be able to live free of Hamas’s rule.
But my point here is not so much to espouse a political position (there are plenty of columns that do that) as to take note of this phenomenon I experienced in straddling the worlds that I do, and the way my own practice has aided as I’ve done so (there are far fewer columns that do so).
One of the benefits of my job is that I don’t have to make excuses to meditate—I, like, literally get paid to do that. So I found myself deepening my own practice this week, and really trying to stand on the balcony and observe this Bizarro phenomenon: Two views of right which appear to be diametrically opposed—and with enormous practical, political, historical, strategic, and moral stakes. I tried to resist the urge to react, and just sit with this profound, quite jarring phenomenon.
As I did so, what arose for me was a midrash about the miraculous nature of the revelation at Sinai, which we read in this week’s Torah portion: Each person heard according to their own voice—women heard the Divine voice in the voice of a woman, men in the voice of a man, etc. Or, as the Talmud puts it, “Moses would speak and God would answer in a voice”—in what voice? In Moses’s own voice (Brachot 45a). I understand this interpretive tradition as an attempt to answer a bedrock conundrum, or series of them: How is it that we each can relate to the Divine Presence uniquely, and yet we can agree that all of us encountered the Divine Presence? How is it that I can have my own experience of reality, which is inherently different from yours, and yet we can both acknowledge that we share a reality?
The philosophical, social, and legal questions proceed from there: How do we communicate, since my experience of language and your experience of it are always going to be different on the most intimate levels? (One is reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s quip: “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”) How do we agree on the meaning of a promise, or a law, and that we are each bound by it? How do we come to a shared understanding, and what happens when we don’t? How do we know that others are operating in good faith—or even that we are doing so ourselves?
As I observed these questions coming up for me, I found myself arriving at the other end of the Torah’s socio-political spectrum, which is summed up in the sentence: “Each person did what was right in their own eyes.” This is a catchphrase of the Book of Judges, repeated over and over again to illustrate what can happen when a society is not bound by a shared commitment to authority, and setting the stage for the establishment of centralized government in the Book of Samuel. Yet what I realized as this verse arose in my mind alongside the midrashim about revelation that I shared above is that the line between these two experiences is, perhaps, vanishingly thin: When Ploni (Hebrew for John Doe) was standing at the foot of Sinai and heard God speaking in the voice of Ploni, was he hearing God’s voice or his own? How did he know? How would he know? And how would others trust that judgment—or their own? It doesn’t take long before the philosophical knots proliferate.
Revelation, recognizing the Divine voice and discerning the truth of the moment, is not easy business. It can be messy and contradictory and really hard—not only to discern what is right and true, but to live in community with others with a shared language of what is right and true. We are living through a period when, in my lifetime at any rate, as both Jews and Americans, we are being challenged on these most fundamental levels in ways we’ve never been challenged before. As individuals and as a collective, now is a time to lean into our practices even more, to resist the impulse to react with words and, instead, take the time to be quiet, to listen, and only then to speak—with more compassion, with greater wisdom, with deeper trust.