Post by Rabbi Neil on Aug 1, 2020 0:07:58 GMT
Va’etchanan Sermon 2020 – Must We Show Love Those who Prolong the Coronaverse?
I’m finding love very difficult right now. Not towards my family, of course, but towards the countless Americans whose acts of selfishness cause harm to countless other Americans. I read about individuals who didn’t wear masks in public who then became sick or died. I know that there are members of the community who read such news and who struggle with their response. They struggle with the fact that they take some sort of pleasure in these people becoming sick. I totally understand because I also went through those thoughts. They helped me recognize that I’m now angry with a vast swathe of the American population. The selfishness of the posts I regularly see online is truly shocking. These are the posts that say, “If you’re immuno-suppressed, stay at home – your ill health shouldn’t affect my freedom.” These individuals talk of acceptable risks of tens of thousands of deaths in order to allow business as usual to continue. They talk of reopening schools because the loss of life of members of school families is within the bounds of acceptability in order to return to business as usual. They are not just selfish, but callous and cruel.
Yesterday, one American died every minute from COVID-19. To date, 155,000 Americans have died from this virus, and the death rate continues to increase, not decrease. The death rate from the virus in this county is fifteen times that in Europe or even in neighboring Canada. As Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times this week, those who were seeking to return to business as usual should in fact have been the first to don masks and ensure social distancing so that this country could get the virus under control. Instead, the opposite happened and they were the last to do so for political reasons, or for spurious scientific reasons, or because they didn’t want their rights to be trampled. The rights of others – particularly the elderly or the medically vulnerable - to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is apparently irrelevant. In fact, their deaths are considered to be acceptable for the greater good, thereby turning American domestic policy and public discourse into a sick modern-day form of eugenics.
In mid-June, only 35% of Republicans said that they were wearing masks. Once Donald Trump wore one in public, that rose to 58%. It wasn’t the overwhelming scientific evidence that convinced them because it’s become very apparent that this is the first time contemporary Americans have had to wrestle with the developing process of science, and have preferred the absolute statements of online fraudsters to those of scientists who learn as they go - the anti-intellectual strain of American society is now in full murderous effect. No, it wasn’t the science, but the demonstration by the President that wearing a mask wasn’t an affront to their individual rights that made them change their minds. And that I believe is the key to why America is doing so badly in the fight against this virus – because of the disturbing insistence by so many Americans that we must put individual rights before the common good. The protests we saw weeks ago where people took to the streets so that they could have a haircut despite the obvious risk of death that that posed to others – protests that were stoked by the President who demanded that cities be freed or liberated because the political statement was apparently more important to him than American lives – showed the disturbing number of people in this country who don’t care about the health of others. As the death toll climbs – as everyone who took the appropriate precautions said it would – I totally understand being unspeakably angry at the selfishness of those who made this the worst country in the world for COVID-19. Of course, they don’t see it as selfish – they claim that they’re protecting freedom, especially the freedom to make choices for their own good and not have to consider the welfare of others. Apparently, that it was millions of Americans consider to be the definition of liberty.
So, knowing that that flawed definition of liberty is prevalent across this country, knowing that it is stoked from the very top, knowing that it is clearly an unavoidable part of American society, I really sympathize with those who struggle today in terms of whether or not one is obliged to show love to the person who expresses such opinions. That comes to mind because of this Shabbat’s Torah portion, Va’etchanan, which contains the first paragraph of Sh’ma. Sh’ma talks not of love of the other but love of God, but it is often said that we cannot show love to God if we do not show love to our neighbor. Many of us are honestly not feeling loving at all right now. Back in the book of Exodus, Torah tells us (Ex. 23:4-5) that if we see the ox or ass of our enemy wandering then we should take it back to that person. It says that if we see that animal lying under its burden, we should help raise it. It’s not the animal’s fault that its owner is our enemy. In Leviticus (19:18), we learn that we must not take revenge on others, which Talmud (Yoma 23a) explains as behaving in the same bad way to them as they behaved to us. In the same verse, Leviticus also tells us not to even bear a grudge. That’s really difficult right now. The reasoning given by Rabbis is usually that we should be concerned with matters not of earth but of heaven and that we should remember that everything that happens in this world happens for a reason. The thirteenth-century Talmudist Rabbi Aharon HaLevi of Barcelona even goes so far as to say (Sefer HaChinuch, 241) that we cannot blame others because “it was God who wished this to happen, so one should not consider taking revenge from the other person because the other person is not the reason for what happened.”
Psychologically speaking, I can understand why someone would want to think this way because then they are immune to all the harm the rest of the world brings to them. Nothing can get them down, nothing can get them upset, because it was all God’s will, and the only way we can authentically respond is by assessing our ways and considering why we might have deserved it. And if we find that we did not deserve it, then the only thing to do is to consider the mystery of God’s great plan. My problem with this is theological. Either we have free will or we don’t. If we don’t have free will then I totally understand that perspective but at the same time I cannot choose my response to others because I don’t have the free will to do so! However, if both I and the other person have free will, not only can I choose my response but they were in control of their actions, and could have chosen their actions better, which means I’m entitled to abhor what they do. This perspective that others aren’t in control of their behavior is, then, a theological cop-out. They are, and some people…. apparently, actually, an enormous number of people… make bad, selfish choices that negatively affect countless other people, even to the point of death. They are liable and we are entitled to respond. How can we not hold a grudge against those who so callously ignore the needs of others? One way is by praying that their ignorance and selfishness only affect them and not others. That acknowledges what they’ve done and doesn’t wish harm to them, but at least hopes that they don’t harm others.
When Torah says that we should love God with all our heart, soul and strength, and when people often say that that must include love of all other fellow human beings, maybe one way to respond to that is by lamenting whatever it was that led those people to lives of ignorance and particularly selfishness. That means not hating them but hating the circumstances that led to them behaving the way they do… hating not them but their ignorance and selfishness. This perspective considers the Jewish concept of tinok shenishpa, the idea that everyone is born into a particular culture which forms the way they think. That doesn’t mean that they’re not liable for their actions, but it does mean that their actions would have been better had the circumstances of their lives until now had been different. Knowing this helps me feel not anger but pity. To love God means to love other people but that does not heave to mean to love the negative things that other people do. Just as we love ourselves despite our faults, maybe we can love others with their faults.
But perhaps that’s too easy. After all, these aren’t just faults, this is deadly selfishness. This literally takes the lives of other people. Talmudic Tractate Bava Kamma discusses four differing kinds of damage for which people might be liable, from deliberate to negligent to accidental. At no point does it say regarding negligence that the circumstances of their birth and their general ignorance meant that they were not liable for their actions. We are held liable to a common standard of morality and need to be held liable for our actions. Perhaps love of God is not so much about loving other people as it is about loving justice, including person-to-person justice. After all, Torah clearly says (Deut. 16:20) “Tzedek, tzedek tirdof – justice, justice you shall pursue.” The prophets constantly rebuke the people for injustice while describing God’s disappointment based on God’s love for the people. Maybe sadness at people’s ignorance isn’t enough. Maybe we show love of God by being proactive in the search for justice, in protecting the vulnerable in society. That’s certainly what the Biblical prophets would consider to be a valid expression of love of God. So, instead of love of God making us sad at the ignorance of others, maybe it should empower us to stand up against ignorance and selfishness. That doesn’t mean necessarily to hate the other or wish them harm, but it can mean to oppose them and everything they stand for.
The schadenfreude – the celebration of those who helped prolong COVID-19 and then who became sick from it – that I know a number of members of our community are feeling is very real, and I believe that schadenfreude, though ugly, is a genuine expression of pain. It reveals how hurt we have been by the other person. We have individually and nationally been terribly hurt by the actions of those who have prolonged this virus, and we continue to be hurt by their actions. When those who cause pain to others finally themselves experience the same pain, it is understandable that we might feel that there is some karmic balance or poetic justice happening. We must remember, though, that our pain should never be turned into cruelty. Two wrongs don’t make a right. A haunting series of images from Facebook that have been shared around the world starts with a young man sharing how he won’t wear a mask and how the virus has been blown all out of proportion, then his next post is that he has a cough, the next one is that he’s really sick and quarantining and the final post is by a loved one informing his friends that he had died. In an interview, one of his attending nurses said that on his deathbed, he realized that he had made a terrible mistake but that it was too late to do anything about it. To celebrate a death like that would require the same callousness regarding other people’s suffering that they had themselves expressed in life. It would make us literally no better than them.
So, back to Sh’ma. To love God is to love human beings, and therefore to try to help as many people live as well as possible. That means not just lamenting those who limit the lives of others, but actively opposing them. Leviticus (19:16) says hocheach tochiach et amitecha – you shall surely rebuke your neighbor. Showing love to others is done not by focusing on heaven or not holding them liable for their actions, it’s the opposite – we show love to them by trying to show them how to be a better person. And if ignorant, selfish people suffer, loving God means showing them the compassion that they did not or could not themselves show others. Pursuing justice is not the same as harboring a grudge or seeking revenge. We can show love of God both by opposing those who cause harm and also by mourning their deaths from their own ignorance. For how tragic is it that a person is so blinded by their own selfish and narrow-minded understanding of liberty that they ignore the very things that will keep them alive to enjoy that liberty? Those deaths are not cosmic justice - they are tragedies, tragedies of ignorance. Loving God, then, means working to help avoid such tragedies, trying to rid the world of ignorance and prejudice. Not everyone is ignorant, of course – some are deliberately manipulative of the ignorance of others for their own gain, as we have clearly seen throughout this crisis. Such people should be opposed with every fiber of our being not out of vengeance, but out of love for everyone else they negatively affect.
When we say the words of Sh’ma, when we talk of love of God, we must include love of others. That means actively helping others move from a place of ignorance and praying that their ignorance does not affect other people. It means that when their ignorance causes harm, to themselves or to others, we do not sink to their level of callousness, but instead show love and pity for those who are suffering. In that way, let us love God with all our heart, all our soul and all our strength, and let us say, Amen.
I’m finding love very difficult right now. Not towards my family, of course, but towards the countless Americans whose acts of selfishness cause harm to countless other Americans. I read about individuals who didn’t wear masks in public who then became sick or died. I know that there are members of the community who read such news and who struggle with their response. They struggle with the fact that they take some sort of pleasure in these people becoming sick. I totally understand because I also went through those thoughts. They helped me recognize that I’m now angry with a vast swathe of the American population. The selfishness of the posts I regularly see online is truly shocking. These are the posts that say, “If you’re immuno-suppressed, stay at home – your ill health shouldn’t affect my freedom.” These individuals talk of acceptable risks of tens of thousands of deaths in order to allow business as usual to continue. They talk of reopening schools because the loss of life of members of school families is within the bounds of acceptability in order to return to business as usual. They are not just selfish, but callous and cruel.
Yesterday, one American died every minute from COVID-19. To date, 155,000 Americans have died from this virus, and the death rate continues to increase, not decrease. The death rate from the virus in this county is fifteen times that in Europe or even in neighboring Canada. As Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times this week, those who were seeking to return to business as usual should in fact have been the first to don masks and ensure social distancing so that this country could get the virus under control. Instead, the opposite happened and they were the last to do so for political reasons, or for spurious scientific reasons, or because they didn’t want their rights to be trampled. The rights of others – particularly the elderly or the medically vulnerable - to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is apparently irrelevant. In fact, their deaths are considered to be acceptable for the greater good, thereby turning American domestic policy and public discourse into a sick modern-day form of eugenics.
In mid-June, only 35% of Republicans said that they were wearing masks. Once Donald Trump wore one in public, that rose to 58%. It wasn’t the overwhelming scientific evidence that convinced them because it’s become very apparent that this is the first time contemporary Americans have had to wrestle with the developing process of science, and have preferred the absolute statements of online fraudsters to those of scientists who learn as they go - the anti-intellectual strain of American society is now in full murderous effect. No, it wasn’t the science, but the demonstration by the President that wearing a mask wasn’t an affront to their individual rights that made them change their minds. And that I believe is the key to why America is doing so badly in the fight against this virus – because of the disturbing insistence by so many Americans that we must put individual rights before the common good. The protests we saw weeks ago where people took to the streets so that they could have a haircut despite the obvious risk of death that that posed to others – protests that were stoked by the President who demanded that cities be freed or liberated because the political statement was apparently more important to him than American lives – showed the disturbing number of people in this country who don’t care about the health of others. As the death toll climbs – as everyone who took the appropriate precautions said it would – I totally understand being unspeakably angry at the selfishness of those who made this the worst country in the world for COVID-19. Of course, they don’t see it as selfish – they claim that they’re protecting freedom, especially the freedom to make choices for their own good and not have to consider the welfare of others. Apparently, that it was millions of Americans consider to be the definition of liberty.
So, knowing that that flawed definition of liberty is prevalent across this country, knowing that it is stoked from the very top, knowing that it is clearly an unavoidable part of American society, I really sympathize with those who struggle today in terms of whether or not one is obliged to show love to the person who expresses such opinions. That comes to mind because of this Shabbat’s Torah portion, Va’etchanan, which contains the first paragraph of Sh’ma. Sh’ma talks not of love of the other but love of God, but it is often said that we cannot show love to God if we do not show love to our neighbor. Many of us are honestly not feeling loving at all right now. Back in the book of Exodus, Torah tells us (Ex. 23:4-5) that if we see the ox or ass of our enemy wandering then we should take it back to that person. It says that if we see that animal lying under its burden, we should help raise it. It’s not the animal’s fault that its owner is our enemy. In Leviticus (19:18), we learn that we must not take revenge on others, which Talmud (Yoma 23a) explains as behaving in the same bad way to them as they behaved to us. In the same verse, Leviticus also tells us not to even bear a grudge. That’s really difficult right now. The reasoning given by Rabbis is usually that we should be concerned with matters not of earth but of heaven and that we should remember that everything that happens in this world happens for a reason. The thirteenth-century Talmudist Rabbi Aharon HaLevi of Barcelona even goes so far as to say (Sefer HaChinuch, 241) that we cannot blame others because “it was God who wished this to happen, so one should not consider taking revenge from the other person because the other person is not the reason for what happened.”
Psychologically speaking, I can understand why someone would want to think this way because then they are immune to all the harm the rest of the world brings to them. Nothing can get them down, nothing can get them upset, because it was all God’s will, and the only way we can authentically respond is by assessing our ways and considering why we might have deserved it. And if we find that we did not deserve it, then the only thing to do is to consider the mystery of God’s great plan. My problem with this is theological. Either we have free will or we don’t. If we don’t have free will then I totally understand that perspective but at the same time I cannot choose my response to others because I don’t have the free will to do so! However, if both I and the other person have free will, not only can I choose my response but they were in control of their actions, and could have chosen their actions better, which means I’m entitled to abhor what they do. This perspective that others aren’t in control of their behavior is, then, a theological cop-out. They are, and some people…. apparently, actually, an enormous number of people… make bad, selfish choices that negatively affect countless other people, even to the point of death. They are liable and we are entitled to respond. How can we not hold a grudge against those who so callously ignore the needs of others? One way is by praying that their ignorance and selfishness only affect them and not others. That acknowledges what they’ve done and doesn’t wish harm to them, but at least hopes that they don’t harm others.
When Torah says that we should love God with all our heart, soul and strength, and when people often say that that must include love of all other fellow human beings, maybe one way to respond to that is by lamenting whatever it was that led those people to lives of ignorance and particularly selfishness. That means not hating them but hating the circumstances that led to them behaving the way they do… hating not them but their ignorance and selfishness. This perspective considers the Jewish concept of tinok shenishpa, the idea that everyone is born into a particular culture which forms the way they think. That doesn’t mean that they’re not liable for their actions, but it does mean that their actions would have been better had the circumstances of their lives until now had been different. Knowing this helps me feel not anger but pity. To love God means to love other people but that does not heave to mean to love the negative things that other people do. Just as we love ourselves despite our faults, maybe we can love others with their faults.
But perhaps that’s too easy. After all, these aren’t just faults, this is deadly selfishness. This literally takes the lives of other people. Talmudic Tractate Bava Kamma discusses four differing kinds of damage for which people might be liable, from deliberate to negligent to accidental. At no point does it say regarding negligence that the circumstances of their birth and their general ignorance meant that they were not liable for their actions. We are held liable to a common standard of morality and need to be held liable for our actions. Perhaps love of God is not so much about loving other people as it is about loving justice, including person-to-person justice. After all, Torah clearly says (Deut. 16:20) “Tzedek, tzedek tirdof – justice, justice you shall pursue.” The prophets constantly rebuke the people for injustice while describing God’s disappointment based on God’s love for the people. Maybe sadness at people’s ignorance isn’t enough. Maybe we show love of God by being proactive in the search for justice, in protecting the vulnerable in society. That’s certainly what the Biblical prophets would consider to be a valid expression of love of God. So, instead of love of God making us sad at the ignorance of others, maybe it should empower us to stand up against ignorance and selfishness. That doesn’t mean necessarily to hate the other or wish them harm, but it can mean to oppose them and everything they stand for.
The schadenfreude – the celebration of those who helped prolong COVID-19 and then who became sick from it – that I know a number of members of our community are feeling is very real, and I believe that schadenfreude, though ugly, is a genuine expression of pain. It reveals how hurt we have been by the other person. We have individually and nationally been terribly hurt by the actions of those who have prolonged this virus, and we continue to be hurt by their actions. When those who cause pain to others finally themselves experience the same pain, it is understandable that we might feel that there is some karmic balance or poetic justice happening. We must remember, though, that our pain should never be turned into cruelty. Two wrongs don’t make a right. A haunting series of images from Facebook that have been shared around the world starts with a young man sharing how he won’t wear a mask and how the virus has been blown all out of proportion, then his next post is that he has a cough, the next one is that he’s really sick and quarantining and the final post is by a loved one informing his friends that he had died. In an interview, one of his attending nurses said that on his deathbed, he realized that he had made a terrible mistake but that it was too late to do anything about it. To celebrate a death like that would require the same callousness regarding other people’s suffering that they had themselves expressed in life. It would make us literally no better than them.
So, back to Sh’ma. To love God is to love human beings, and therefore to try to help as many people live as well as possible. That means not just lamenting those who limit the lives of others, but actively opposing them. Leviticus (19:16) says hocheach tochiach et amitecha – you shall surely rebuke your neighbor. Showing love to others is done not by focusing on heaven or not holding them liable for their actions, it’s the opposite – we show love to them by trying to show them how to be a better person. And if ignorant, selfish people suffer, loving God means showing them the compassion that they did not or could not themselves show others. Pursuing justice is not the same as harboring a grudge or seeking revenge. We can show love of God both by opposing those who cause harm and also by mourning their deaths from their own ignorance. For how tragic is it that a person is so blinded by their own selfish and narrow-minded understanding of liberty that they ignore the very things that will keep them alive to enjoy that liberty? Those deaths are not cosmic justice - they are tragedies, tragedies of ignorance. Loving God, then, means working to help avoid such tragedies, trying to rid the world of ignorance and prejudice. Not everyone is ignorant, of course – some are deliberately manipulative of the ignorance of others for their own gain, as we have clearly seen throughout this crisis. Such people should be opposed with every fiber of our being not out of vengeance, but out of love for everyone else they negatively affect.
When we say the words of Sh’ma, when we talk of love of God, we must include love of others. That means actively helping others move from a place of ignorance and praying that their ignorance does not affect other people. It means that when their ignorance causes harm, to themselves or to others, we do not sink to their level of callousness, but instead show love and pity for those who are suffering. In that way, let us love God with all our heart, all our soul and all our strength, and let us say, Amen.