A Time to Act (Yitro 5786)
It has always been easy for me to know how old the United States is. I was a “Bicentennial Baby,” born in 1976. Add 200 to my age, and you get the age of the country. With God’s help, I’ll turn 50 in May, and my country, in turn, will be 250 in July.
I don’t know about you, but to me it doesn’t feel like a very happy birthday year for the nation.
Two and a half centuries ago, Thomas Jefferson and his comrades, however imperfectly, planted into the Western world’s collective political consciousness the ideas of human equality and government by the consent of the governed. (As David Graeber and David Wengrow demonstrate in their wonderful The Dawn of Everything, Jefferson and his European antecedents very likely learned some of these ideas from Native Americans. Add it to the many things on the list of what the rest of us owe the original inhabitants of this land.)
They grounded that claim in a conception of the Divine that we recognize from our own Torah: that human beings are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Or, as my mentor, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, so persuasively taught generations of Jews, human beings are created b’tzelem Elohim, in the Divine image. This, according to Ben Azzai, is klal gadol batorah, the Torah’s foundational principle.
That basic idea was and remains revolutionary. From the very founding of the republic, it challenged the practice of slavery—eventually leading to the country’s most catastrophic moment of rupture and, in the same breath, bringing about a profound moment of its redemption. Planted there in the Declaration of Independence, the idea of equality continued to challenge those with and without authority, leading eventually to women’s suffrage, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, and legal equality for LGBTQ folks. And it undergirded the value that all human beings, regardless of their national origin or legal status, are entitled to equal protection under the law. Despite moments—sometimes long moments—of backsliding and repeated failures, increasingly large majorities of people came to trust that the United States and its institutions generally strived to live out the true meaning of its creed.
Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, one of the great poskim (halakhic authorities) of the twentieth century in America, identified the United States as a malchut shel hesed, a government that—unusually, and happily—was imbued with kindness. Rabbi Chaim Strauchler summarizes Rav Moshe’s view: “America, uniquely in Jewish history, embedded kindness into its legal and civic structures. Hesed was not dependent on the goodwill of a ruler or the mood of a mob. It was routinized, bureaucratized, and protected by law. For Jews, this was unprecedented: not perfection, but reliability.” Which is to say, the bank of trust that authorizes the government—the consent of the governed—rests on a foundation of Hesed. There have always been groups for whom this description wasn’t true, of course. But the seed of equality, planted at the root of the American project, summoned the country to rise to its challenge.
Thus one of the things that makes this such an unhappy birthday year for me, and perhaps for you, is that this description increasingly seems not to fit reality overall. Arms of the Federal government are flagrantly, even gleefully, violating these values and squandering this trust: ripping people from their homes in the dead of winter, imprisoning children, housing human beings in inhumane conditions, and even destroying images of the Holy One—i.e., killing people (who also happen to be citizens, but I’m not sure that should matter)—who get in their way. They are supported and justified by Administration officials who seem to delight in spreading hate and falsehoods, and have claimed absolute immunity for their actions. And all of them are ultimately authorized by a President who, at the most charitable, I might describe as suffering from incontinence in his speech. “What is worse than doing harm?” the Buddha taught. “To prompt others to do harm.” Or, in our own tradition: “Whoever causes the multitudes to be righteous, sin will not occur on this person’s account; And whoever causes the multitudes to sin, such a person is not afforded the ability to repent” (Pirkei Avot 5:18).
All of that causes me, and perhaps you, a lot of pain. It can lead to fear, to a sense of constriction, to moments of paralysis interwoven with moments of reactivity. And, perhaps most significantly for we who practice Judaism as a mindfulness practice, it can lead to “spiritual bypass,” when we use the tools of mindfulness to acknowledge our fears, but not to take responsibility for doing anything about the state of the world.
To me, this is one of the hardest parts of our practice—and, even more so, of leading a Jewish organization devoted to this approach to Torah in this moment. At IJS, we begin all of our retreats and courses by creating a trust bank, a container in which participants feel safe enough to be vulnerable. We gather deposits into that bank by reading a set of shared norms that we call Making Safer Spaces. The third item in this document reads, “Know that there is genuine freedom in this program. Every invitation to speak and participate is just that: an invitation. Passing or staying quiet is perfectly acceptable. You know best what you need.”
Which is to say, at IJS we mostly avoid using the word “should.” We don’t tell you what to do. We invite you to determine what is right and good for you right now.
That ethic has largely guided how we respond to public events. In 2022 I told our Board of Directors that I was worried about something big happening in the world and us feeling a lot of pressure to sign on to or make a political statement. We hadn’t really prepared for that, and I was concerned we could suffer as a result. So we spent the next year working together as a Board and staff, the result of which was our policy on making and signing statements. Consistent with our approach to “shoulds,” the upshot of our policy is that we generally don’t make or sign onto such statements. Rather, we see our role as holding the container within which all of us can “strengthen our innate sacred capacity to work towards a more just, equitable, and inclusive society and world, and to fulfill our sacred role as stewards of Creation.”
The Board adopted that policy in September 2023, less than a month before October 7. Generally speaking, it has served us well in the years since.
Yet the question of spiritual bypass is always lurking, and as the leader of this organization, I find myself thinking about it frequently every week. It is so important that we help folks to manage their stress and anxiety and to do so through the language and practices of Torah. And it’s so important that we help folks connect with their deep sense of purpose, experience a rich sense of community, and recognize the presence of the Holy One in their lives. I am incredibly proud of us for that. But are we also helping people (me, you) to get off the cushion and act?
One of the ways spiritual bypass can show up is when we tell ourselves, “There’s nothing I can do. Someone else will have to solve this problem.” Part of the clear perception that is a goal of our practice is to discern what the problem is and whether it is ours to solve. Some Jews, it seems, have adopted the position that, in a world where trusted institutions are breaking down, the first and overwhelming priority needs to be Jewish survival: “Let others worry about America, we need to focus on our own protection.” And honestly, I am sympathetic to this argument. As a student of Jewish history, I think that’s a completely reasonable position. Indeed, in many ways it informs the dedication of my life to Torah and the Jewish People. There is no one else to keep the Jewish people alive—it’s up to us.
And yet I cannot give up on America. I can’t seem to shake the belief that there is something profoundly special and important about this experiment that is two centuries older than me. In a remarkable series of essays, my colleague Rabbi Zachary Truboff suggests that it’s the radical notion that, in America, just as in the Torah, we have been born into a covenantal relationship with one another:
We must not forget what America offered Jews. For the first time in their history, Jews could live covenantally within a non-Jewish political community, not as tolerated guests, but as participants in sustaining a shared political world. America’s Constitution, like the Torah, rested on the fundamental principle that power must be restrained by law, for without this, those in charge soon act as if they were gods. But there is a second dimension to covenantal politics that is just as essential: responsibility. A covenant does not perpetuate itself automatically but only endures if those bound by it take responsibility for it again and again. At Sinai, all Jews were made responsible for the covenant with God, and in America, all citizens are responsible for the republic. Neither system functions if its members treat it as someone else’s problem.
Parashat Yitro tells us two stories. There is the story of the Revelation at Sinai, and, before that, the story of Jethro, Moses’s non-Jewish father-in-law, who helps him establish a system of law, judging, and governance. The very juxtaposition of these two stories teaches us about what it takes for a society of humans to live together: a sense of shared experience and purpose, institutions that can maintain the trust of the people, and wise and compassionate leadership, among others.
Jethro tells Moses that the leaders he appoints “will judge the people at all times,” in all moments, as it were. Commenting on this verse, the Seer of Lublin suggests a slightly different reading: “According to the time and the moment will they make judgments and decide the halakha,” the righteous path to take.
In a democracy, every one of us shares an equal piece of the sovereign. That is what makes the Declaration such a radical document, even 250 years later. Power does not reside in a king or an emperor far away, but rather within each and all of us together. And not only political power, but spiritual power: God is not off in some far away place, but within, between, and amidst us.
If we take the Seer of Lublin’s teaching seriously, then the responsibility devolves on each and all of us, individually and collectively: to know what the time and the moment are, to judge, and to act.
We practice so that we can perceive clearly, so that we can know what the time and the moment are. We practice so that we can acknowledge our fears and mindfully, courageously act in spite of them. We practice so that we can live a life of loving and compassionate purpose and devotion, and bring about a world in which every image of God can be safe, free, loved and loving in the deepest sense.
So when I say that IJS is here for you right now, that’s what I mean. If you need comfort, calm, and clarity we are here for you. If you need community, we’re here for you. If you or those you know and care about are afraid for your safety, we are here for you. And, if you’re ready to act, we’re here for you—and I’m glad you’re here for all of us.
For Reflection & Conversation
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What do you notice arising in you as you take in this reflection? If you sit with it, does anything become clearer for you? If so, what and why? If not, why not?
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What supports or inhibits you from engaging in civic life in this moment? How, if at all, does your practice help? How do you try to manage the dangers of spiritual bypass?
