After Bondi - Leaders’ self-care and service

It is 5 am in New York, and I can’t sleep. I awoke feeling highly alert from a disturbing, relatively mundane but vivid dream about feeling frantic and let down. Wide awake, I take a moment to reflect on what is going on for me these days.

My initial response to the Bondi Beach Hanukkah massacre was a mixture of sadness and responsibility. I showed up for the bereaved and did what I could to address the challenge of Muslim-Jewish relations in Sydney and Australia. However, leaving Sydney and having a break from work with my family in New York has proved challenging some of the time. There is sometimes a sense of unreality about everything that is not the horror of what happened or the work that flows from it. At such moments, I feel alienated.

Creative Commons 4.0 image credit: 
https://www.mentalhappy.com/blog/holiday-priorities-dont-leave-self-care-off-your-list

On Friday night, my nephew, Chaim Kastel, a member of one of the bereaved families, talked at the Shabbat dinner table with my parents and other extended family, about the inspiring response of the Sydney Rabbis, about their service to the community, setting aside any differences or conflicts and rising to the challenge of caring for a community shattered by violence and tragedy. His words moved me to gratitude.

To all my rabbinical colleagues, I thank you and acknowledge your service. It is not easy or clear how to be there for others when you and your families are in pain. Thank you to my brother Mendel, working for the best outcomes for bereaved families and for culturally and religiously appropriate practices for the dead.  This is only a fraction of what you have done. I salute you, older brother, and I celebrate all the Rabbis for everything they have done and are doing.

For me, having (mostly and temporarily) stepped away from “the doing”, I feel a jumble of feelings that are hard to isolate. Anger, as well as sadness. I am not sure where my anger is directed. I have angry thoughts about God. It is ok to feel frustrated with God in the Jewish tradition, particularly in the Chabad school of thought. I will never forget the echoes of the Hebrew word for “Why?” (“Lamah?” “Lamah?”) echoing off the hills at the funeral of Mumbai couple Rabbi Gabi and Rivki Holzberg, murdered by terrorists. The question was posed by Rabbi Mordechai Shmuel Ashkenazi, (1943-2015, then Chief Rabbi of Kfar Chabad, Israel). We don’t accept the argument that human atrocities are just the choices of humans. Our theology teaches that God is present in human events, even if he “hides his face” (1).

I feel drawn to the complaint of Moses after he sent to Pharaoh to solve the problem of the suffering Hebrew slaves. At first, Pharaoh’s response to Moses’ efforts was to make life even harder for the slaves by removing their supply of straw that they needed for building but demanding that they still build as much as before, and when they failed to do the impossible, they were to be beaten (2). The Israelites expressed their annoyance to Moses who then turned to God with the complaint, “Why – (Lamah) have you done bad to this people? And why did you send me (3)”.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe wrote that regardless of God’s response to Moses – that things would improve – the fact that the Torah records Moses’ complaint reflects a degree of legitimacy of that complaint (4). As Jews we are required to believe that God is good and that everything is ultimately for the best, yet we are allowed to cry out in pain about human suffering.

Moses’ complaint seems to have two parts. One was about the people’s suffering, and the second part was about the impact on him as a leader having been sent on a failed mission. Leaders often show great care for others, but we are still human. The pain of failure or the absence of hoped-for achievements is not only an experience in sharing the community’s pain; it also carries a personal cost of frustration and distress.

For me, Bondi was a nightmare that I dreaded could happen and was hoping could be prevented. The failure to prevent it does not make me feel guilty, but it weighs heavily on me as a personal disappointment.

The personal disappointment is a little embarrassing. “It is not about you,” chastises my inner critic. I agree that the suffering of bereaved families is more important than my feelings, and so is the greater suffering of the Jewish community in Sydney and other impacted communities. Yet, I feel what I feel and I am as worthy of care as anyone else. In addition, if I am going to be useful to anyone, I need to acknowledge how I feel and process these feelings.

I draw comfort from commentaries about Moses’ frustration at his involvement (5) in an apparently futile attempt to alleviate the suffering of the slaves. “If they were not going to be saved why involve me in this?” Alternatively, he complained about the timing of his mission when he said, “Why send me now if God is not ready to free the people at this time?” (6)

There are other commentaries that explain Moses’ complaint as being focused on the suffering of the people rather than on himself (7), such as his question, “If sending me was not going to help the people anyway, what was the point?” In other words, Moses had hoped that his mission would reduce the suffering of his people a little, right away. When this failed to eventuate, Moses asked why he was sent if there was no immediate relief. (8)

For leaders, it needs to be about both the people we serve and our own self-care and management. I hope that my colleagues and I do what we need to do to look after ourselves and our emotions. At the same time, along with my inspiring colleagues, I will be there for others and do what I can for a better future. Moses eventually saw the exodus come to fruition and also worked through his personal challenges.

 

1)    Deuteronomy 18:31

2)    Exodus, 5:6- 5:21

3)    Exodus 55:11

4)    Schnneerson, Rabbi MM, Likutei Sichos Vol 1, Shemos.

5)    Seforno, Bechor Shor,

6)    Ohr Hachayim, one explanation, the Netziv in Haamek Davar

7)    Ohr Hachayim alternative explanation

8)    Ralbag, Ibn Ezra, Chizkuni

 

 

 

   

Responsible and Caring Enough? Noah

When preparing to teach the teachers of tomorrow at Sydney University about global citizenship, I reflected on the question of responsibility. Many people, including me, and even children, are burdened with feeling responsible for problems that we cannot fix. These feelings are emotionally draining and perhaps destructive because they distract us from doing what we can for people we love or live near us in our communities and suburbs. On the other hand, there are times when I or others fail to embrace our responsibilities as individuals, members of families, communities and humanity as a whole.

Margaret Meade famously said we should “… never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.” Good point.

I love the idea of changing the world. I have committed my life to it. Then I got tired, very tired.

On the one hand, I am deeply grateful to the small group of thoughtful committed people who work alongside me and guide me as I have tried to change the world and then to support children and teachers. Thank you to all of you in the Together for Humanity team, board members, the volunteers, the casual educators, the donors, Christians, Muslims, Jews and others. We did amazing things together and we will continue to do great things.

On the other hand, despite all the children and adults we educated to reject prejudice and hate and to find common ground, there were other committed, but less thoughtful people who contributed to injustice, hatred, generalisations, prejudice and dehumanisation.

I learned, slowly and over many years to feel a little less responsible. It is not my task to complete the work, but neither am I free to desist from it (1).

I think of change-work as being a crew member of a sailing ship. We are not the captains of the ship ̶ that is God (or whatever forces atheists see playing God – multinationals, or whoever).  We are not responsible for the winds ̶ that again is God. Our task is to be part of the team that turns the sails to catch the winds already blowing. We do this with great humility – as small players in God’s vast world but paradoxically with a touch of magic as God’s partners in creation (2).  

Reading the Torah with this mindset, I am challenged when I read the story of Noah, especially as interpreted by some Jewish scholars.

Noah was burdened by his parents’ expectations that he would change the world, comfort humanity and repair the earth that had been cursed (3). He was favoured by God and declared to be a saint (4).

The world had become evil and full of crime and cruelty. The powerful– the sons of the gods ̶  took any woman they wanted, regardless of her consent or marital status (5). They farmed animals and people to be sold as sex slaves, with ownership certificates (6).  

When God told Noah, the golden boy, that the inhabitants of the earth would be wiped out in a flood, he said absolutely nothing, not one word of prayer to save his generation (7). Reactively, perhaps feebly, Noah talked to people who approached him while he was building his ark about the coming flood and suggested that they change their ways (8).  However, he failed to change his society. Instead, the people ridiculed and cursed him (9). For this he is deemed to have failed to be collectively responsible for humanity (10).  

Noah’s final humiliating episode had him rolling naked and drunk in front of his children, when he finally found his voice to respond to his humiliation with curses for his grandson (11).

Yet, the Torah is clear that Noah was a virtuous man who did what he could in a terribly difficult time (12). His very name, Noah, means respite. He was not an assertive man. Maybe his getting drunk was a response to his feeling of loneliness when everyone – outside his own family – was dead, and even when they were alive, he could not relate to them (13). Or it might have been a reaction to his own sense of failure to live up to his father’s dreams and his sense of responsibility for the catastrophe of humanity.

As I sit with the two ways of reading the story, I choose to embrace both. Perhaps what I can learn from Noah is not to go passive or silent, to continue to care deeply but to care enough. Not to the extent of delusional saviour complexes. Regardless of others’ estimations of our gifts, we can discern which challenges to take responsibility for and which to step back from. We are not responsible for other people’s choices, nor are we responsible for saving the world. Yet, we should care about all human suffering, everywhere, even as we recognise our limited ability to alleviate it.  Then we should go about soberly doing our bit. This is what we should also tell our children.  

 

 Edited by Hazel Baker. Thank you!

1)    Pirkey Avot 2:16

2)    Talmud, Midrash Rabba

3)    Genesis 5:29

4)    Genesis 6:8, 6:9

5)    Genesis 6:2

6)    Midrash Rabba and Eshed Hanechalim commentary

7)    Genesis 6:13- 7:5, Sacks, J. (2009), Covenant and Conversation, Genesis, p.45

8)    Midrash Rabba

9)    Midrash

10) Sacks, p. 63, others

11) Genesis 9:20-27

12) Genesis 7:1

13) Adin Steinsaltz, https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/4942416/jewish/What-Was-Wrong-With-Noah.htm

Insecurity, Scapegoating and Re-assigning Shared Responsibility - Acharei Mot

I, like many people, crave the feeling that comes from thinking of myself as being good. This need can be difficult for me to satisfy because I am both flawed as well as virtuous and my habitual self-criticism and insecurities tend to focus more on the former than the latter. Some people, including bigots[i], in their efforts to think of themselves as good, designate someone else as a scapegoat to take the blame for the existence of their shortcomings.  Scape-goating is part of both Donald Trump’s and Bernie Sander’s appeal to at least some Americans.  Either foreigners or bankers are blamed for America's problems.  This tactic is far from new and in fact when we re-examine the origins of this concept, there are dramatically different approaches to the topic of “scapegoating”.

We first read about the scapegoat in Leviticus: “Aaron shall lean both of his hands upon the live male goat's head and confess upon it all the wilful sins of the Israelites, all their rebellions, and all their unintentional sins and he shall place them on the he goat's head, and send it off to the desert...[ii]”

The concept of transferring blame implicit in scapegoating is strongly rejected by one of the greatest Jewish authorities of all time, Maimonides. He wrote that ‘sins are not burdens that one can transfer from the back of one person to that of another, but (rather) all these actions are all meant as lessons to bring about fear in one’s soul, until one repents[iii]’. In this approach, the destroyed goat is an illustration of the evil within each individual themselves, that can only be removed by personal change and improvement. The goat is at least in part an aid to the imagination just as the ceremonial “tossing our sins” into the sea by emptying our pockets at the edge of a body of water does not substitute for the hard work of changing habits and repairing our relationships with our fellow humans or God.   

In contrast to the view of Maimonides, the symbolism found in at least one commentary of this ritual appears to reflect the modern concept of a ‘scapegoat’. This interpretation implies that sins can indeed be transferred from one person to another. It symbolically links the two goats and the twins Jacob and Esau[iv] who are seen as ancestors and therefore symbolic of the Jewish and Roman nations respectively.  Despite the similarity of two ordinary goats as well as the twins Jacobs and Esau Jews, Jacob is seen to be held close to God, while Esau is distanced from God. This choice is articulated by God through one of the prophets in the statement: “Is it not (true) that Esau is a brother to Jacob said God, yet I loved Jacob and I hated Esau[v]”. Mirroring this apparently arbitrary selection of Jacob by God, one goat is selected to be offered in the holy temple. The other goat, is sent to a forsaken area in the desert which mirrors the fact that Esau, the archetypal Roman, himself was a man of the field, distanced from God, “bitter, brazen (עז) in strength and wickedness”.  

If we take this commentary at face value, it implies that the Jews can pass on their sins to Rome! Despite my preference for Maimonides’ approach that affirms personal responsibility, I think that sometimes there is in fact merit in assigning shared responsibility to parties other than the direct perpetrator. For example, if members of oppressed minorities commit crimes like burglary, it makes sense to combine the principle of personal responsibility that holds the robber accountable with assigning some responsibility to those who created the unjust circumstances in which those crimes are committed, such as colonialism or institutional racism. This theme is alluded to (in the commentary about the scapegoat) when Esau/Rome, cries out in protest as the crimes are loaded onto him: “how can I bear all these sins?” The complaint is explained as an argument against shifting blame for sins that are not attributable to oppression such as sins of lust[vi].  The implication is that culpability for some sins can be justly attributed to the oppressive, “brazen” state and only some “responsibility re-assignment” is unjustified.  

For me, I believe the most useful thing to do in relation to my self-concept is firstly to combine acknowledgement of my shortcomings with appreciation for my positive aspects. There is no need, benefit or justification to blame others for one’s own faults. There are times when I can use my imagination in a process of moving on, just like the goat ceremony might help someone work on their self-improvement. For example, I can externalise my habitual self-criticism and imagine it coming from a harsh unreasonable judge or a personalised “inner critic” who needs to be told to back off. Religious Jews often talk about the “evil inclination” as if it was another person. This is ok as long as we don’t forget we are just pretending and that in reality the “inner critic” and evil inclination is part of us. In the broader context of inter-group relations, I think the concept of the scapegoat can be, at times ridiculous bigotry and at other times, a rightful redistribution of a fair share of responsibility between those who take harmful actions and those who, through greed, arrogance, stupidity and injustice contributed to the circumstances that made that harm likely.

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[i] See the work of Stuart Hall on representation

[ii] Leviticus 16:21

[iii] Guide for the Perplexed 3:46 cited in Nachshoni, Vayikra, p. 768

[iv] Abarbanel Acharei Mot, p. 179

[v]  Malachai, 1:2-3

[vi] Chasam Sofer in Toras Moshe, based on Midrash, cited in Nachshoni, Vayikra, p. 767

An Understanding Heart; Choice or gift?

Muslim and Jewish students form relationships at a
Together For Humanity run interschool program,
in Sydney Australia. Some prefer to sit with their
peers as can be seen by  the clusters of green and blue
school uniforms. They are gently coaxed to develop greater
comfort with each other, during an interschool cooking
activity at Our Big Kitchen this week. 

Yesterday I observed Jewish and Muslim children and young adults responding to each other with varying degrees of love.  There were young girls from two schools one Muslim the other Jewish, hugging each other good bye and boys engaged in cool and comfortable friendly chatting.  One boy seemed less sure about it all, saying he would miss the others, then adding; “or maybe not”. 

The young adults also ranged from open hearted sharing, moving reflection and good will to two much more guarded young men, who seemed to me (perhaps wrongly) to approach the whole thing with suspicion.  It set me thinking about the process of acquiring understanding.

A gift?

It seems to me that understanding is at least to some extent a gift from our parents, our experiences or even from God either in our essential nature, or some other act of grace.  This seems to be confirmed by this phrase from our reading this week about Moses’ speech to his people at the end of a 40 year trek through the desert and on the last day of his life. “Moses called all of Israel and said to them, "You have seen all that the Lord did before your very eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh, to all his servants, and to all his land; …the great signs and wonders (Miracles). Yet until this day, the Lord has not given you a heart to know, eyes to see and ears to hear[i]”.

In ten years of bridge building work, I have learned that understanding cannot be created on demand, nor can it be rushed.  It needs to be given the chance to develop.  In the case of the Jews in the desert it is only after 40 years they can understand what happened with the gift of hindsight[ii].  Perhaps what is needed is a change of circumstances, such as the death of the charismatic Moses (on “this day”) for people to understand the full picture, in this case the more important factor which is the hand of God[iii].

The Choice & responsibility argument

If people are to be held responsible for their actions, it would be because we assume them to have the ability to make choices.  Commentaries, therefore, reinterpret the idea of “God not giving people the heart to know” in ways that shift the responsibility back to the people. One simply adds a question mark, so it is a rhetorical question rather than a statement, “Did God not give you a heart..?![iv] One suggests that God did not give the people a heart for the purpose of forgetting him, as they did, but rather for the purpose of choosing to know…[v]. Another argues that the intent here is about God’s role being limited to being the ultimate first cause of everything[vi], so the argument is that it could be said that God did not, in the end, provide them with a heart to understand but this was because of their own rebelliousness[vii] and their choice to test (rather than trust) God and to forget the miracles they had seen[viii]. 

A combination

Understanding certainly involves some effort on our part, yet much of what we achieve in our understanding of our fellow man or of God is a gift. One commentator expressed it as follows, “God favours man with understanding. But God will only bestow this gift on one who makes a genuine effort…[ix]” In one mystical tradition, through our good deeds we become worthy of being gifted with additional and loftier layers of our souls[x]. 

This combination is seen in one text that combines advice to avoid judging and disparaging people by understanding their faults as being “caused” by their difficult circumstances, yet also asserting that regardless of what situations people find themselves in, they are still responsible for their choices and behaviour[xi].

The Very Ugly Man

Rabbi Eliezer was once riding on a donkey on the coast, he was feeling really happy because he had studied a lot of Torah[xii].  Then he chanced upon a very ugly man, (not just in the physical sense but it was clear to the Rabbi that the man had an ugly character[xiii]).

The man greeted him, "Shalom, Rabbi!" Rabbi Eliezer did not return the greeting. Instead, he stared at the man and said, "Empty (headed) one! Are all the inhabitants of your town as ugly as you?"

The man replied: " Why don't you tell the craftsman who made me, “how ugly is the vessel you made?"

Because he realised that he had done wrong, Rabbi Eliezer went down from his donkey, prostrated himself and begged the man for forgiveness. .. [xiv]

Judgemental and Smug

I remember some years ago feeling quite judgmental and hostile toward a man who I thought had a serious deficit of understanding and capacity for empathy.   I realised that like Rabbi Eliezer, I objected not to his actions but his nature.  I realised that I was giving myself credit for my nature, which I believe is essentially a gift and blaming him for defects in his nature which essentially was not his own doing.   I learned to appreciate him for his strengths, while still not liking some of his less endearing attitudes.   Remarkably, after I accepted him for who he was, I noticed a gradual shift in some of his thinking and behaviour.

Conclusion

Understanding is both a gift and a choice.  On Let us not feel superior to those who have not yet reached the degree of understanding that we enjoy, only partly due to our own efforts.  Still, those of us who “understand” have an obligation and opportunities to try to provide opportunities for those not yet blessed with understanding hearts.

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[i] Deuteronomy 29:1-3

[ii] Melechet Machshavet, cited in Leibovitz, N, Studies in Devarim, Elizer Library, Department For Torah education…the Joint Authority for Jewish, Zionist Education, Jerusalem, P.292

[iii] Meshech Chochma

[iv] Abarbanel

[v] Targum Yonatan Ben Uziel, in his translation he simply adds the words “for the purpose of forgetting him, as you did, but rather” , between “has not given you a heart”, and “to know”

[vi] Ibn Ezra

[vii] Seforno

[viii] Ibn Ezra

[ix] Malbin, cited and translated in Leibovitz

[x] This is my understanding of a central theme in the Ben Ish Chai’s writing

[xi] Tanya 30

[xii] There is an element of self-satisfaction here. See http://www.daat.ac.il/daat/sifrut/agadot/barkai-2.htm

[xiii] I was unable to find the source for this commentary at this time.

[xiv] Talmud, Taanit 20a &b