One of the leadership teacher Stephen Covey’s most famous observations is that “relationships operate at the speed of trust.” It’s a line that has resonated with me for a long time. To me, trust is everything–at work, at home, in life. When I keep my promises, I feel like I’m upholding trust, depositing it in my account; when I fail to do so, I feel like I’m reducing the balance. When I have trust in the account, I can draw on it to ask other people to trust me as we head into uncertain situations; when my balance is low or overdrawn, that’s pretty hard to do.
That’s a rather transactional way of putting it, of course. Interpersonal trust isn’t just a mortgage application–it’s much more. Trust and trustworthiness are ultimately things most of us experience in much deeper registers. They touch chords within us that go back to our earliest moments of life: when we learned to trust that a cry would produce someone to hold and feed us, when a parent who left us in the care of someone else kept their promise that they would come back. Violations of trust are perhaps the deepest violations we can experience.
For me, as for many others, the past week was an especially hard one. On Monday morning, our synagogue held services at 7 am–unusually early for a national holiday–so that folks could gather to watch the funeral of Hersh Goldberg-Polin. While Hersh is of course just one of the thousands of precious souls violently snuffed out over the past eleven months, for many of us he had become one we felt especially close with. And in my community’s case, that was even truer: Hersh’s aunt, uncle, and grandmother are members of our shul.
Sitting and crying along with hundreds of others in the sanctuary, what became so palpable to me was this sense of the degradation of trust. During his remarks at the funeral, Israeli President Isaac Herzog repeatedly said, “Selicha,” we’re sorry, to Hersh–for failing to protect you, for allowing you to be kidnapped, for not bringing you home safely. That reflected what has been so devastating for so many Jewish Israelis and so many Jews the world over: the sense since October 7 that the State of Israel, the ultimate Jewish institution, the Jews’ safe haven, profoundly betrayed their trust, our trust. Other arguments about Israel–about its military tactics, about the occupation, about its politics–also test our trust in our conception of the exercise of Jewish power. But for me and many others, this most basic element–the implicit duty of a state to protect and rescue its people–strikes to the most elemental levels of our self-conception. That is one of the things that has made this week, and these last eleven months, so especially hard.
Parashat Shoftim (Deut. 16:18-21:9) is all about law, authority, and power. In many ways it is a reflection on the social contract between judges and officials and the people who appoint them, and on the implicit trust upon which that social compact sits. In a midrash on the Torah portion (Devarim Rabbah 5:1), Rabban Shimon ben Gamaliel warns that, since the Sages teach that the world stands on judgment, truth, and peace, then “if you distort judgment you destabilize the world, as it is one of its legs.” I believe he is not only speaking in formal terms about corruption or the perversion of justice, but is pointing to something even deeper: the need for officials to maintain the trust of those who authorize them to begin with. When the people sense they can’t trust the judgment of the authorities they have empowered, then the world becomes destabilized. (An issue as true in America or any other country as it is in Israel.)
This, it would seem, is part of the motivation behind the ritual described in the closing section of the Torah portion, when a dead body is found on the outskirts of a city and the perpetrator cannot be found. “The elders of the town nearest to the corpse shall wash their hands… and they shall make this declaration: ‘Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it done.'” Why do the authorities need to seek absolution for something that presumably wasn’t their fault? Perhaps because the trust placed in these authorities is so fragile and so sacred–the public needs to know, and the authorities need to reaffirm, that they take seriously their obligations to safety, protection, wellbeing, and peace.
None of this is new, of course. The Pew Research Center keeps regular tabs on public trust in government here in the U.S., and the results for most of the last 50 years have been pretty steadily declining. We are divided along political and cultural lines, and we have a hard time believing that those in another camp are operating in good faith (or even agreeing on what constitutes operating in bad faith). All of this is both symptomatic of and contributes to the erosion of trust.
As we’ve been exploring on my Soulful Jewish Living podcast in recent weeks, the habits of the heart for living in a democracy are fundamentally spiritual in nature. That heartwork informs both the trust we, the people, invest in our authorities–and the sense of “sacred honor” that must inform those who hold authority as they draw on the people’s trust. There is spiritual work, heart work, to be done by both citizens and officials. All of us, together, are the custodians of that trust, and all of us, together, need to strengthen those spiritual muscles of the heart.
So, as we conclude this awful week and begin the month of Elul, a prayer: May the life and death of Hersh, of the other hostages, of the far too many soldiers and civilians who have died and been injured and orphaned and displaced–may all this suffering serve as a shofar blast to rouse us to awakened hearts, and to a path of healing and renewed trust in one another.
