| Like me, one of my childhood rabbis, Rob Dobrusin, is a baseball fan. In addition to teaching me Torah as a young person, he also taught me to appreciate the writing of Bart Giamatti, the late Commissioner of the MLB. So the other day, when he posted this meme about the Pittsburgh Pirates on Facebook, I was, like him, rather amazed: |
| The Pirates are, as my kids might say, notoriously “mid” as a team. Despite the fact that they have boasted some exceptional talent over the years—pictured here is Paul Skenes, arguably the best pitcher in the National League for the last couple of seasons—they have made just seven World Series appearances since 1909, the last one coming nearly half a century ago in 1979. The stats here bear that out: a perfectly balanced, ho-hum record. But of course, this is the age of fake news. So at first I was like, “Come on, that has to be an AI-generated piece of spammy clickbait.” Which is to say, I distrusted the information. Which further implied that I subtly thought Rabbi Dobrusin had fallen for it. Which felt icky. Not until I checked with my oldest son (the one with encyclopedic baseball knowledge and the wariness of a kid growing up in the AI age) did I confirm that this was, in fact, real (“Yeah, WTF Stats is reliable.” Good to know.) and my faith in the sagacity of my childhood rabbi was restored. Hang out on social media, or really anywhere these days, and I feel like you’re likely to run into this experience of kneejerk distrust. This is the age of conspiracy theories about everything from the health of Senator Mitch McConnell to the death of Senator Lindsey Graham to the alleged rigging of the World Cup in favor of Argentina because Lionel Messi is allegedly Jewish and Jews, because we “run the world,” can of course rig the World Cup (yet somehow we can’t manage to create decent pizza cheese that bears a kosher certification—whatever). Distrust is rampant. According to the General Social Survey (if you believe those guys), the percentage of Americans who say that other people can generally be trusted has declined from 46 percent in 1972 to 32 percent in 2018. Trust in government has plunged even further, from 77 percent in 1964 to 20 percent in 2022. Likewise for journalism, health care, and educational institutions. All of that is toxic not only for the body politic, but for our own lives and experience. Like I said, to me it feels icky not to trust. As he does throughout Deuteronomy, Moses opens the book with some tough love for the Israelites. “May YHVH, the God of your ancestors, increase your numbers a thousandfold, and bless you as promised,” he says lovingly, and then immediately adds, “Eicha—How can I bear unaided the trouble of you, and the burden, and the bickering!” (Deut. 1:11-12) Rashi, quoting the Midrash Sifrei, comments on each of these descriptors. In particular, he notes that “the burden” here means, “they were Apikorsim [i.e. they were faithless doubters]: if Moses went forth early from his tent they said, ‘Why does the son of Amram leave so early? Perhaps he is not at ease at home?’ If he left late, they said, ‘What do you think? He is sitting and devising evil schemes against you and is plotting against you.’” In his Itturei Torah, Rabbi Yaakov Greenberg quotes Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav as developing this idea further: “Apikorsut—faithless doubt—is a heavy burden upon a person and a harsh form of suffering. Whereas a believer has a strong and solid support—making the burden of their life much lighter, because everything for them is anchored in a firm faith (emunat omen)—the doubter is weighed down by constant doubts and obsessive thoughts that plague and oppress them without end.” I’m particularly struck by the phrase emunat omen, rendered here as firm faith, but also gesturing at other images: an uman is a craftsperson or artist (one who practices omanut); a nursing mother or nursemaid is an omenet; and Moses himself at one point strikingly refers to himself as an omen, or male wetnurse, to the Israelites (Numbers 11:12). On this last passage, Avivah Zornberg suggests, “Motherhood is the human reality that offers a vision of recovery from skepticism’s annihilation of the world. Motherhood is an encounter with an other, who is both part of oneself and deeply unknown.” Moses can thus be understood as asking, “Could he be the constant, dependable source of trust for his people?” (Bewilderments, xxxii-xxxiv) Every year, we read Parashat Devarim immediately before the 9th of Av. Among the many things we commemorate and re-experience on this holiday is the complete breakdown of trust that lays the spiritual groundwork for the physical destruction of the Beit Hamikdash, the divine home on Earth, and the physical and spiritual homelessness that follows. These days, swimming in this sea of distrust, it sometimes feels like we are closer to that reality than to redemption. So perhaps over this Shabbat and the coming week, including the day of Tisha B’Av itself, we might engage in some of our own spiritual work to understand where doubt and distrust work in our own minds, hearts, and neshamot. In that reflection, we might scratch the surface of the wells of faith and trust that still live within us, cisterns of healing waters that our souls are desperate to drink from. For Reflection & Conversation
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