Post by Rabbi Neil on Sept 14, 2021 22:39:35 GMT
Talmud teaches us that during a time of plague, the Angel of Death does not need his weapons because he was already given permission to destroy. That’s an extraordinary idea that during plague in particular - not during famine or drought, but only during plague - the Angel of Death is already armed by the occasion and doesn’t need precise instruments of death because it may kill at will. This text reveals a profound acknowledgement of how arbitrary plague actually is, how it isn’t a directed weapon like the plagues in Egypt which were a single supernatural way of humiliating the Egyptians and their gods. Rather, as we touched on last night, plague can strike anyone and everyone indiscriminately. That’s astute for an ancient text, but the latter part of the quotation – that the Angel of Death was already given permission to destroy – is rather challenging. Who gave the Angel of Death permission to destroy? Was it God? It seems that Jewish texts think not, and that plagues are a part of nature that fall outside of traditional understandings of covenantal reward and punishment. It seems that Judaism understands that plagues are just a terrible part of life on earth. Nonetheless, we learn in the same page of Talmud that when there is a plague, everyone should “gather up their feet,” meaning, go home and stay at home. That text is around 1500 years old, and yet has more common sense than a vast swathe of people living in this country today. In the 1400s, Rabbi Yitzchak Arama wrote that “when there is a plague in the city, … flee quickly to a quiet and safe place. If the plague finds a person even in that place, they should take any and all medications that can prolong their life.” So even six hundred years ago, with medicine nowhere near as advanced as today, Jews knew what to do in a time of plague – gather up your feet and take the appropriate medicine, or to use today’s terminology, socially distance and get vaccinated. Back then, duty to community meant that this behavior was assumed. People acted for the common good. The Angel of Death was armed by the natural world, but his attacks could be blunted by safe behavior.
In today’s pandemic, though, it is not just the natural world that arms the Angel of Death but the people who have not undertaken these simple steps of social distancing and vaccination. Their actions have allowed a new variant to form and spread, and they have therefore threatened the lives of our loved ones, and ultimately resulted in limiting what we can do. We lost the battle against COVID and that loss has led many people to another stage in the Kübler-Ross Cycle that I mentioned last night – the stage of Anger. I regularly hear expressions of anger at the unvaccinated, especially every time we have to limit our activities in our community because of the spread of the delta variant. But who are these people? Are they anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and so-called healers who lie about the body’s ability to protect itself from a virus so that they might further their selfish anti-establishment message? Well, in affluent, predominantly white areas, including some parts of Santa Fe, many of them are. In their minds, they believe that their Google search is in some way comparable to years of actual scientific data collection, experimentation and research by countless professionals worldwide, a process that is far too complicated for them to understand. The response of the vaccinated to such people is often anger. Anger at their apparent selfishness, at their thoughtlessness, at their delusion. And it is delusion – there are even people in hospital in Santa Fe with COVID who deny that COVID exists, even though that is what put them in hospital. That goes back to the denial that I was talking about last night. And it’s very easy for us to get angry at such people – anyone who threatens our loved ones or who limits our freedom due to their apparent selfishness… it’s a natural response to be angry at that. An article in the New York Times at the beginning of August, though, focused on the angry response that is increasing around the country towards people who have not been vaccinated. Putting aside those wealthy, uninformed and dangerously arrogant individuals I’ve just mentioned, the author, Sarah Smarsh, looks at the larger trend and sees socio-economic status, particularly access to health insurance, as a significant determinant for vaccination. She shows that those who are not able to get health insurance tend to trust the medical establishment far less. Another article in the same paper relates that unvaccinated people aren’t all being difficult, they’re just from differing socio-economic backgrounds. In that article, the author, Bryce Covert, explains that “those who aren’t yet vaccinated are much more likely to be food insecure, have children at home and earn little.” She shows that “about three-quarters of unvaccinated adults live in a household that makes less than $75,000 a year [and] they are nearly three times as likely as the vaccinated to have had insufficient food recently.” In other words, it may not always be the people we should be angry at, but rather at the inequity of our society that threatens us all.
Why is this relevant on Rosh Hashanah? Rabbi Ilai says that through three ways is a person’s character ascertained – b’koso, u’v’kiso, u’v’kaso. It’s a very clever Hebrew word play. We can tell a person by their cup, by their wallet and by their anger, in other words – by who they are when they’re drunk, by how they spend their money and by how, when and why they express their anger. For those who experience anger, it usually comes very quickly, usually something that is hard to control. In Judaism, though, control of our anger is an essential part of being religious. That doesn’t mean that we should never be angry – definitely not – but we should be able to control our anger when it surfaces. Thus, for example, it is said that Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Lubavitch used to restrain an angry outburst until he had looked into the codes to learn whether anger was permissible in that particular instance! Similarly, Ben Zoma teaches, “Who is strong? The person who subdues their evil inclination, as it is stated, 'Whoever is slow to anger is better than a warrior, and whoever controls their passions is better than one who conquers a city' (Proverbs 16:32)." These teachings acknowledge anger but seek to control it and ensure that it is expressed in a healthy manner.
To be fair, there are some authors who express a more limited perspective on anger. For example, Rabbi Shlomo Ganzfried says that "anger is … a very evil trait and it should be avoided at all costs” and adds that “you should train yourself not to become angry even if you have a good reason to be angry." He acknowledges, at least, that there may be good reason to be angry. Maimonides goes even further, though, denying that a person can ever have good reason to be angry, and he compares one who becomes angry with an idol-worshiper, a viewpoint that is explained much later by Rabbi Shnuer Zalman of Liadi as being a refutation of Divine providence – a person could not get angry, in his opinion, if they knew that everything came from God, so anger suggests that they do not believe it is, which he and Maimonides see as idolatry. However, despite these outlying commentaries, the tendency in Judaism is not to see anger as problematic, but its inappropriate expression is. Moses, for example, had a right to be angry at the Israelites, but he did not have the right to strike the rock twice and curse the people in his anger.
Anger, as the Kübler-Ross Cycle of Grief shows, is a natural and likely even healthy response to loss. It’s a natural, human response in a pandemic when the behavior of others threatens the lives of our loved ones. But what do we do with our anger? We can’t just sit in it for the duration of this pandemic because if we did it would consume us all and poison our every interaction. The challenge for us all, and it is an extremely appropriate challenge for this season, is to use that anger to motivate us to change. We are good as a religious community at getting angry at injustice. Now it’s time to acknowledge our anger about this pandemic, and then use it to motivate us to bring about change. If someone is in hospital with a virus that they deny exists, can we really get angry with that person for their delusion, for not having learned what we have? If someone doesn’t get the vaccine because their community was unfairly targeted for medical experiments by the government decades ago, can we really get angry at them for their skepticism? If someone hears that taking the vaccine might put them in bed for a day or two which they know might result in significant loss of earnings or even their entire job, can we be angry at them for their risk assessment based on a life of socio-economic hardship that few of us ever know? And if someone is so lacking in critical faculties, if they are so gullible as to believe untrained charlatans and bogus websites instead of peer-reviewed science, can we really get angry at them for their intellectual failings and for not having been raised with the same critical skills that we were taught? Or should we get angry at the educational system which fails to raise critical thinkers, at the economic system which divides people socially and economically, at the information system which allows lies to be broadcast around the world, and at the political system which allow literal experimentation on specific communities and then rebukes them for their lack of involvement in civic society afterwards? So, who was it who actually armed the Angel of Death during this plague? Was it the anti-vaxxers, or was it a much deeper, more painful truth – that it was our inequitable society that created them, a society that we not only tolerated, but helped perpetuate and profited from?
This Rosh Hashanah, I know that some members of our community are feeling anger to some degree. They’re expressing it in differing ways, pointing fingers at others while justifying their own behavior. To return to last night’s sermon, that is, in fact, still denial. Anger comes to the surface much quicker when we deny the lived experience of the other, and when we assume that their thinking differently to us is a fault in them. Anger at people who are misinformed, economically fragile or who have good reason to trust the scientific community that has previously harmed them is not a religious response. Anger at others easily comes to the fore when we conveniently forget how little we did to change a society that was so inequitable that it ended up being the global and national poor who were so ravaged by the pandemic. Anger at others also becomes a convenient distraction from having to focus on how quickly we forgot about the sick in our community as we tried to rush back to life as normal.
What Rosh Hashanah during a pandemic shows us is that the journey to t’shuvah, to repentance, necessarily involves experiencing anger, controlling it, questioning its origins and its targets, and then using that experience of anger to motivate us to change the world around us. That last change necessarily involves changing ourselves, which is the essence of t’shuvah. In essence, an appropriate Jewish response to anger right now might best be described as “I’m so angry I could change myself,” or “I’m so angry I could go out and change the world,” or even “I’m so angry at that person or group of people that I will do everything possible to understand why they’re behaving in that way in order to help them change their behavior.” To be clear, sometimes rebuke can be a loving response – indeed, Torah specifically says that you should “rebuke your neighbor that you not incur sin because of them” – but we have to be honest with ourselves as to why we’re getting angry, or else we may rebuke others not in order to change them but merely to help us feel better about ourselves.
So, yes, it would be nice if everyone would just gather their feet and take their medicine to keep the plague at bay. If they’re not, and we know that many are not, we need to ask ourselves why, and help those who are not. We need to meet them on a human level. Bombarding someone with facts when they deny those facts only makes us feel better but is very unlikely to change them. And that applies not just regarding this pandemic, but in every area of our lives. This Rosh Hashanah, then, we are confronted with the uncomfortable reality that we often deny the humanity of others who disagree with us in order to justify our anger against them. With that in mind, this Rosh Hashanah, we are challenged by the realization that t’shuvah is only possible if we stop living in anger, and instead use it as a tool to make the world a better place. This Rosh Hashanah, we are forced to recognize that we cannot be angry that others are not like us, but should be angry that they have not had the same opportunities as us. This pandemic Rosh Hashanah gives us a unique chance to transform how we view others, and gives us a chance to let go of the anger that has been simmering in our society and in our souls for way too long. More than that, it does not just give us a chance to let go of that anger, it shows that in order for us to fully atone, we have to acknowledge it and redirect it. And if we are not yet ready to let go of that anger right now, at least this Rosh Hashanah gives us a chance to acknowledge it, to wrestle with it and not let it consume us.
The Angel of Death walks among us, armed by our unequal society, by ignorance and inequity that we have allowed to continue. In so doing, it has exposed the faults in our society, which should make us justifiably angry. It has shown us how much work there is still to do in perfecting the world around us and how we need to use our anger constructively and appropriately. It has revealed to us the anger that has been slowly consuming us and yet in so doing it has revealed how we might atone by redirecting that anger for the common good. So, may God be with us as we lead ourselves away from being consumed by anger, and instead use that anger to transform ourselves, our community and the world around us in true expressions of t’shuvah, and let us say, amen.
In today’s pandemic, though, it is not just the natural world that arms the Angel of Death but the people who have not undertaken these simple steps of social distancing and vaccination. Their actions have allowed a new variant to form and spread, and they have therefore threatened the lives of our loved ones, and ultimately resulted in limiting what we can do. We lost the battle against COVID and that loss has led many people to another stage in the Kübler-Ross Cycle that I mentioned last night – the stage of Anger. I regularly hear expressions of anger at the unvaccinated, especially every time we have to limit our activities in our community because of the spread of the delta variant. But who are these people? Are they anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and so-called healers who lie about the body’s ability to protect itself from a virus so that they might further their selfish anti-establishment message? Well, in affluent, predominantly white areas, including some parts of Santa Fe, many of them are. In their minds, they believe that their Google search is in some way comparable to years of actual scientific data collection, experimentation and research by countless professionals worldwide, a process that is far too complicated for them to understand. The response of the vaccinated to such people is often anger. Anger at their apparent selfishness, at their thoughtlessness, at their delusion. And it is delusion – there are even people in hospital in Santa Fe with COVID who deny that COVID exists, even though that is what put them in hospital. That goes back to the denial that I was talking about last night. And it’s very easy for us to get angry at such people – anyone who threatens our loved ones or who limits our freedom due to their apparent selfishness… it’s a natural response to be angry at that. An article in the New York Times at the beginning of August, though, focused on the angry response that is increasing around the country towards people who have not been vaccinated. Putting aside those wealthy, uninformed and dangerously arrogant individuals I’ve just mentioned, the author, Sarah Smarsh, looks at the larger trend and sees socio-economic status, particularly access to health insurance, as a significant determinant for vaccination. She shows that those who are not able to get health insurance tend to trust the medical establishment far less. Another article in the same paper relates that unvaccinated people aren’t all being difficult, they’re just from differing socio-economic backgrounds. In that article, the author, Bryce Covert, explains that “those who aren’t yet vaccinated are much more likely to be food insecure, have children at home and earn little.” She shows that “about three-quarters of unvaccinated adults live in a household that makes less than $75,000 a year [and] they are nearly three times as likely as the vaccinated to have had insufficient food recently.” In other words, it may not always be the people we should be angry at, but rather at the inequity of our society that threatens us all.
Why is this relevant on Rosh Hashanah? Rabbi Ilai says that through three ways is a person’s character ascertained – b’koso, u’v’kiso, u’v’kaso. It’s a very clever Hebrew word play. We can tell a person by their cup, by their wallet and by their anger, in other words – by who they are when they’re drunk, by how they spend their money and by how, when and why they express their anger. For those who experience anger, it usually comes very quickly, usually something that is hard to control. In Judaism, though, control of our anger is an essential part of being religious. That doesn’t mean that we should never be angry – definitely not – but we should be able to control our anger when it surfaces. Thus, for example, it is said that Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Lubavitch used to restrain an angry outburst until he had looked into the codes to learn whether anger was permissible in that particular instance! Similarly, Ben Zoma teaches, “Who is strong? The person who subdues their evil inclination, as it is stated, 'Whoever is slow to anger is better than a warrior, and whoever controls their passions is better than one who conquers a city' (Proverbs 16:32)." These teachings acknowledge anger but seek to control it and ensure that it is expressed in a healthy manner.
To be fair, there are some authors who express a more limited perspective on anger. For example, Rabbi Shlomo Ganzfried says that "anger is … a very evil trait and it should be avoided at all costs” and adds that “you should train yourself not to become angry even if you have a good reason to be angry." He acknowledges, at least, that there may be good reason to be angry. Maimonides goes even further, though, denying that a person can ever have good reason to be angry, and he compares one who becomes angry with an idol-worshiper, a viewpoint that is explained much later by Rabbi Shnuer Zalman of Liadi as being a refutation of Divine providence – a person could not get angry, in his opinion, if they knew that everything came from God, so anger suggests that they do not believe it is, which he and Maimonides see as idolatry. However, despite these outlying commentaries, the tendency in Judaism is not to see anger as problematic, but its inappropriate expression is. Moses, for example, had a right to be angry at the Israelites, but he did not have the right to strike the rock twice and curse the people in his anger.
Anger, as the Kübler-Ross Cycle of Grief shows, is a natural and likely even healthy response to loss. It’s a natural, human response in a pandemic when the behavior of others threatens the lives of our loved ones. But what do we do with our anger? We can’t just sit in it for the duration of this pandemic because if we did it would consume us all and poison our every interaction. The challenge for us all, and it is an extremely appropriate challenge for this season, is to use that anger to motivate us to change. We are good as a religious community at getting angry at injustice. Now it’s time to acknowledge our anger about this pandemic, and then use it to motivate us to bring about change. If someone is in hospital with a virus that they deny exists, can we really get angry with that person for their delusion, for not having learned what we have? If someone doesn’t get the vaccine because their community was unfairly targeted for medical experiments by the government decades ago, can we really get angry at them for their skepticism? If someone hears that taking the vaccine might put them in bed for a day or two which they know might result in significant loss of earnings or even their entire job, can we be angry at them for their risk assessment based on a life of socio-economic hardship that few of us ever know? And if someone is so lacking in critical faculties, if they are so gullible as to believe untrained charlatans and bogus websites instead of peer-reviewed science, can we really get angry at them for their intellectual failings and for not having been raised with the same critical skills that we were taught? Or should we get angry at the educational system which fails to raise critical thinkers, at the economic system which divides people socially and economically, at the information system which allows lies to be broadcast around the world, and at the political system which allow literal experimentation on specific communities and then rebukes them for their lack of involvement in civic society afterwards? So, who was it who actually armed the Angel of Death during this plague? Was it the anti-vaxxers, or was it a much deeper, more painful truth – that it was our inequitable society that created them, a society that we not only tolerated, but helped perpetuate and profited from?
This Rosh Hashanah, I know that some members of our community are feeling anger to some degree. They’re expressing it in differing ways, pointing fingers at others while justifying their own behavior. To return to last night’s sermon, that is, in fact, still denial. Anger comes to the surface much quicker when we deny the lived experience of the other, and when we assume that their thinking differently to us is a fault in them. Anger at people who are misinformed, economically fragile or who have good reason to trust the scientific community that has previously harmed them is not a religious response. Anger at others easily comes to the fore when we conveniently forget how little we did to change a society that was so inequitable that it ended up being the global and national poor who were so ravaged by the pandemic. Anger at others also becomes a convenient distraction from having to focus on how quickly we forgot about the sick in our community as we tried to rush back to life as normal.
What Rosh Hashanah during a pandemic shows us is that the journey to t’shuvah, to repentance, necessarily involves experiencing anger, controlling it, questioning its origins and its targets, and then using that experience of anger to motivate us to change the world around us. That last change necessarily involves changing ourselves, which is the essence of t’shuvah. In essence, an appropriate Jewish response to anger right now might best be described as “I’m so angry I could change myself,” or “I’m so angry I could go out and change the world,” or even “I’m so angry at that person or group of people that I will do everything possible to understand why they’re behaving in that way in order to help them change their behavior.” To be clear, sometimes rebuke can be a loving response – indeed, Torah specifically says that you should “rebuke your neighbor that you not incur sin because of them” – but we have to be honest with ourselves as to why we’re getting angry, or else we may rebuke others not in order to change them but merely to help us feel better about ourselves.
So, yes, it would be nice if everyone would just gather their feet and take their medicine to keep the plague at bay. If they’re not, and we know that many are not, we need to ask ourselves why, and help those who are not. We need to meet them on a human level. Bombarding someone with facts when they deny those facts only makes us feel better but is very unlikely to change them. And that applies not just regarding this pandemic, but in every area of our lives. This Rosh Hashanah, then, we are confronted with the uncomfortable reality that we often deny the humanity of others who disagree with us in order to justify our anger against them. With that in mind, this Rosh Hashanah, we are challenged by the realization that t’shuvah is only possible if we stop living in anger, and instead use it as a tool to make the world a better place. This Rosh Hashanah, we are forced to recognize that we cannot be angry that others are not like us, but should be angry that they have not had the same opportunities as us. This pandemic Rosh Hashanah gives us a unique chance to transform how we view others, and gives us a chance to let go of the anger that has been simmering in our society and in our souls for way too long. More than that, it does not just give us a chance to let go of that anger, it shows that in order for us to fully atone, we have to acknowledge it and redirect it. And if we are not yet ready to let go of that anger right now, at least this Rosh Hashanah gives us a chance to acknowledge it, to wrestle with it and not let it consume us.
The Angel of Death walks among us, armed by our unequal society, by ignorance and inequity that we have allowed to continue. In so doing, it has exposed the faults in our society, which should make us justifiably angry. It has shown us how much work there is still to do in perfecting the world around us and how we need to use our anger constructively and appropriately. It has revealed to us the anger that has been slowly consuming us and yet in so doing it has revealed how we might atone by redirecting that anger for the common good. So, may God be with us as we lead ourselves away from being consumed by anger, and instead use that anger to transform ourselves, our community and the world around us in true expressions of t’shuvah, and let us say, amen.