Kol Nidre Sermon 5778
Mike Comins
This year I read Jonathan Haidt’s book, the Righteous Mind, Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, and it has inspired me to take on what I think is the major problem in this chapter in American history, namely the identity politics of our time, and the seemingly unbridgeable partisan divide, between the coasts and the middle America, between the cities and rural America, between evangelicals and secular people. Don’t worry, I will not mention the name Donald Trump.
Let me give you the conclusion. I will make the case tonight that the future of American democracy depends on liberal, religious communities like ours. I’m not talking about political liberals. There are many political conservatives in the room tonight. The fact that they are here and not at Chabad shows that they are liberal theologically, that they are not fundamentalists with regard to beliefs about God and Torah. We are theological liberals here, and I believe that the future depends on us.
And apropos Yom Kippur, I will start with a confession with apologies to all my fellow lefties in the room tonight who will now consider me a heretic. From the very first time I heard it, I hated John Lennon’s song imagine. You know, Imagine all the people…maybe I’m a dreamer… More that any other song, it has been the anthem for various peace movements and lefty causes.
I was sixteen when it came out in 1971. It’s a great melody as you know and the song starts,
Imagine there's no heaven No hell below us Imagine all the people living for today
That sounded pretty good. I was down with that. But then it continued,
Imagine there's no countries It isn't hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too Imagine all the people living life in peace, you
What could be better? But I hated it. Imagine there’s no countries? Easy for you to say, Mr. Lennon, but we Jews lost 6 million to Hitler, in large part, because we didn’t have a country.
And no religion too
Well the best, most exciting, most meaningful things in my 16 year old life came from my friendships and activities in my Jewish summer camp and my Temple youth group, in the excitement and pride as a Jew that Israel gave me, and my work in getting persecuted Jews out of the Soviet Union. I was part of a network that made weekly phone calls to Jewish dissidents, which in and of itself protected them but also allowed us to let reporters know what was happening.
I loved being Jewish, and I wasn’t interested in giving it up.
All of which takes me to the book by John Haidt. He is a pioneer in the field of moral psychology. Unlike a moral philosopher, he does not come up with arguments about why you should take this or that position on ethical issues. Rather, Haidt researches how ethics function. He researches why people act the way they do.
To explain why morality differs from culture to culture, while there is also a lot of commonality between cultures, Haidt proposes that we think of morality like ethnic food. Indian, Chinese, Cajun, MacDonalds, the variety of cuisines around the world seems infinite, but it is not unlimited. All human beings have the same taste receptors: sweet, bitter, savory: each cuisine must fit within parameters dictated by human anatomy, so unsurprisingly, there is a fair amount of conformity and a lot of overlap between cultures. But local conditions, hot or cold climate, what kinds of food are available, and just the internal development of different culinary traditions have lead to the great variety of cuisines that we know.
Haidt applies this model to morality. He identifies five different moral receptors, universal moral possibilities, that all cultures wrestle with and that people act upon but each culture, and each person within a cultures does so in their own way. Here are the five. Each is on a spectrum.
Care/harm that’s the compassion receptor
Fairness/cheating that’s the justice receptor
Loyalty/betrayal That’s the good tribal member receptor
Authority/subversion good soldier receptor
Sanctity/degradation the religious or spiritual receptor
Our culture, says Haidt, without embarrassment or irony, is weird. That’s what he calls us: Weird. Western, Educated, Industrialized, rich and democratic. WEIRD societies are a very new phenomenon in the world. And what characterizes us is that we place a high value on individual fulfillment and individual choice. So we are big on the receptors that level the playing field and support freedom without imposing on others. We are big on Fairness vs Cheating, and we are big on Caring vs harm. If you are extremely weird, then most anything that other people do is OK with you, as long as it doesn’t violate the norm of: Do No Harm to others, that would be our libertarian friends, and another strain of the extremely weird are those who emphasize Care and Be Fair, that would be our Social Justice and human rights warriors.
Other societies, however, most societies, put more emphasis on the other three receptors, on loyalty, on authority and on sanctity. In these societies, the welfare of the group tends to be more important than the individual. Duty, for example, might be valued more than freedom. The family and the clan is usually more important than the state or the nation.
In American society, explains Haidt, secular liberals are usually committed to Do No Harm and Care and Be Fair, but not the other three. Conservatives, on the other hand, in addition to believing in Care and Be Fair and Do No Harm, conservatives are much more affirmative towards Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity, and when there are conflicts between these five loci of moral behavior, they are more likely to compromise on the first two that liberals hold dear, on justice and choice. I hope this brief summary makes sense.
On Haidt’s model, you can see why evangelicals vote conservative. Sanctity, loyalty and hierarchy count strongly in their communities. And you can see why minorities and those whose culture is more global and draws on numerous local cultures, tend to vote liberal. You can see why people who live in what the social scientists call thick communities, particular religious communities, communities tied to traditions where people have a history together, communities with inherited structures that are built on loyalty and hierarchy, such people tend to vote conservative.
Now these are very broad generalizations, I’m not trying to argue that every individual fits neatly into these broad tendencies. They don’t. It may not even be a majority of people. But I do think Haidt is on to something. He explains identity politics in a deep way. He really explains why I, a left leaning Reform rabbi, could hate the song, imagine. He explains why some privileged people identify more with oppressed people than with their peers, and why some religious people are willing to give up on justice issues in order to preserve their community and their way of life.
So, what do we do with that? How can a people so deeply divided as we are in America today, bridge the gap and find common ground.
I’d like to take these questions, and see what Jewish sources say about how to live with disagreement in the commons, how to disagree in public places and civil society, with an emphasis on civil.
First, I’d just like to imagine a page of Talmud.
Describe.
This is pluralism in action. Everyone here thinks they are the correct interpreters of God’s will in the world, and they disagree with each other. By our standards, they were really rude. Nachmonides would often quote verbatim the pre-eminent commentator Rashi, and then say, Rashi is completely wrong, and then give his opinion.
To understand how we got there, we need to go back to the very beginnings of the rabbinic tradition, to the sages Hillel and Shammai, and their disciples, Bet Shamai and Bet Hillel, the houses or the schools of Hillel or Shamai. Our first major disagreements in Jewish law take place between them in the first century.
I wrote a seminar paper at Hebrew University in which I analyzed all 300 of their disagreements and I tried to see the patterns and tendencies of each school. Some of their arguments are classic, like when they debated about whether one should praise every bride as beautiful on her wedding day. What if she is blind or lame, said Bet Shammai? The Torah says, don’t lie. Find something besides beauty to praise her for. Bet Hillel said, every bride is graceful and beautiful.
I often thought that Bet Hillel was right. Another example. Bet Hillel say you can get married with a wedding ring that’s worth a pruta, a ring worth a few dollars, so that no one would be prevented from marrying for financial reasons, but I also liked Bet Shammai for saying a man had to present good reasons for divorcing his wife, whereas Bet Hillel said a man could divorce his wife if he didn’t like the way she makes him soup. Believe me, I couldn’t make that up.
But the general rule, later sages wrote, is the Halacha, Jewish law, follows bet Hillel. Here’s the Mishna that explains it:
Bet Shammai and bet Hillel argued for three years. One side said: the halackha is in accordance with us. And the other side said, “The halakha is in accordance with us.” Finally there was a divine pronouncement, a bat kol, saying, eilu veilu, these and these are the words of the living God, but the halakha is in accordance with Beit Hillel.
God talks in this rabbinic story, so it’s clearly a mythical story that was written after the fact, to explain why Bet Hillel was usually accepted over Bet Shammai, and it is very revealing. Notice that God never said that Bet Hillel was right and Bet Shammai was wrong.
This really troubled later rabbis, who discuss it in the Talmud. The point of rabbinic debates is to resolve how to do God’s will in the world. Now, how could opposing opinions both be the will of God? Doesn’t truth count.
The Talmud offers a solution. The minority view might be correct for a different time, or a different set of circumstances. So if, say in America society today, where it is generally agreed that your spouse’s soup recipe is not a grounds for divorce, we can now go with Bet Shammai’s opinion. Makes sense. But there is something deeper going on here that contemporary Rabbi scholar Rueven Kimmelman describes well. Both Bet Shammai and bet Hillel are equally intent on carrying out the divine will, both sides are committed to finding the truth. But human beings are not God. Ultimately we can’t know truth with a capital T. What we CAN recognize is that others with whom we disagree are equally committed to the quest for truth, and to the values that empower the discussion. Both Bet Shammai and Bet Hillel are loyal to Torah and to the rabbinic method of argument and debate. Both had what I’ll call theological humility. And God God’s self validates this by saying, both opinions are the words of the living God.
This attitude allowed each to follow the majority in making decisions for the sake of the unity of the Jewish people. And that was no small matter. For instance, the two houses disagreed on the leverite marriage laws, which affected who could marry who. And yet the Mishna records,
“Notwithstanding that the one school prohibits what the other allows, the disciples of the two schools have never refrained from intermarriage with one another.” According to this tradition, on even the most difficult issues, they were humble and practiced pluralism.
Later rabbis also asked another question. If both Bet Shammai and Bet Hillel speak truth, why does Halacha, why does Jewish law follow Bet Hillel?
Another quote from the Mishna. “Bet Hillel said, pursue peace, love all of God’s creatures, and bring them to Torah.” This source reflects one of the early stories where a gentile who wants to mock Judaism goes to Shammai and says, teach me the Torah while I stand one foot. Shammai rightly shows him the door. When the gentile goes to Hillel, Hillel answers him. Love your neighbor as yourself, the rest is commentary, if you really care, go study. And the gentile does and becomes a Jew.
The point is that truth is not the only criteria. One of the things I heard when I was studied in an orthodox yeshiva is that you never want the smartest guy in the room to be the head rabbi. Because it was recognized that in the Jewish legal system, if you’re smart enough, you could prove that pork is kosher. Rather, you want the person who is smart with a heart, who will use his intellect to serve the people well. Bet Hillel pursued peace, and so their understanding of the truth won out.
Another reason that Halacha follows Bet Hillel is found in the sources. Bet Hillel studied the opinions of Bet Shammai before studying the opinions of their own rabbis. 17 instances are recorded when Bet Hillel heard the arguments of Bet Shammai, and changed their minds to agree with them. There is only one instance of bet Shammai following Bet Hillel.
This is critical to the Jewish version of pluralism that informs our tradition. The sources say that Bet Hillel was open to hearing the other side for two reasons. One, the other side might be right. And two, you understand your own position better, you have a better chance of reaching the truth, when you join a conversation and your opinion is challenged. THAT’s why our holy books are collections of conflicting opinions.
To sum up, truth counts, but we must be theologically humble, and we must hear other opinions in order to reach the truth as best we can, and in general, our understanding of the truth should lead to peace.
Now I’d like to go back to Jonathan Haidt and hopefully bring this all together. Haidt mentions two things that I think are very important. First, he argues that the secular, liberal critique of religion, which bases itself on disproving religious dogmas, really misses the point. Sanctity plays an important role in human life for everybody whether you are religious or not. We’re not going to read it tomorrow, we do the alternative reading, but traditionally on Yom Kipppur afternoon, we read ch. 18 of Leviticus, which lists the various incestuous relations that are forbidden. Theoretically, in a WEIRD society, if a relationship is consensual and does not violate Do No Harm to others, incest shouldn’t bother a good libertarian or a good liberal. But of course it does. I’m sure we can bring some good rational reasons to oppose incest, to protect the children from genetic diseases for example, but for most people, we don’t engage in reasoning, we just feel disgust. Feelings of purity and pollution are important players in the moral life.
Often such feelings are not rational in that they aren’t true because they are universal, which makes fairness supporters uncomfortable. Rather, they are local. People raised in strict Jewish or Muslim cultures often have a visceral reaction of disgust towards pork, which doesn’t exist at all in other cultures. We can educate and change emotions like disgust, but the point is that emotions are central to our moral lives, and they are often culture-specific.
Second, long time members of the Haverim have heard me say before, how do you tell a Nazi that they’re wrong. You believe in some version of the Golden Rule, the Nazi believes in survival of the fittest, and logical arguments can be made on both sides. In the end it comes down one’s deepest intuition about the nature of the universe and the nature of human beings. And those intuitions are greatly affected by the culture you grow up in. As a religious Jew, I have received the wisdom of Jewish tradition, and I have been educated to feel it. Human beings are created in the image of God, every life has infinite value. Every person is sacred. In appealing to our sanctity receptor, religion anchors our moral lives in a way that secular culture cannot.
Finally, and this is more me than Haidt, the first two receptors that guide WEIRD societies, Fairness and Care/Do No Harm, are good at describing what we are against, we’re against injustice and oppression and we’re for free choice, but they don’t do enough to build the thick communities that we need to thrive as human beings. They help some but not enough when it’s time to figure out how to do a wedding or a funeral or how to eat right or what kind of music to create or how to love a spouse or raise a child or honor one’s parents. I recently heard about a study that shows that baby boomers are much lonelier, more isolated and less supported in their old age than previous generations. It makes sense. Many Americans are missing a thick community. As the saying goes, it takes a village to raise a family, but many people struggle to find that village in our society. There is a gap between the nuclear family and society at large; a gap that thick communities reliably fill.
So let me now return to the conclusion with which I began. I believe that how well we fare, whether or not liberal religious communities thrive, will have a big effect on the future of American democracy.
We theological liberals affirm both sides of the cultural divide that afflicts our society. We take seriously and we act seriously to fight oppression, to spread justice, and to ensure individual choice and opportunity. All the liberal Jewish movements, Jewish Renewal to Conservative, now accept our LGBTQ brothers and sisters in our congregations and into the rabbinate. This, of course, followed the full acceptance of women into every aspect of Jewish life. As a Reform Rabbi, I am particularly proud of my movement’s emphasis on Tikkun Olam, where in addition to the charitable works that characterize our synagogues, we sponsor the religious action centers in Washington and in Jerusalem, to fight the political fight for social and environmental justice.
AND, at the same time, we take seriously, and we act seriously, to honor the other moral receptors. Perhaps not so much authority, but sanctity and loyalty count dearly for us.
We are loyal to our tradition, and in so doing, we affirm the foundations of a religious community that is built on our common history and common beliefs and common language and land, as well as challah and matzah balls and klezmer and, don’t ask me why, slivovitz too. We are a full service, thick community that helps its members to thrive in good times and bad. And that positive attitude towards loyalty, based on values and history informs our love for America as well. In the Diaspora, Jews have never fared better that we fare here, we know it, and we are intensely loyal to this great country in which we are blessed to live.
And we honor the sacred. Our tradition is a life affirming tradition, that recognizes the divine in every person, and in all of creation.
I end with this point. What we have learned and internalized about pluralism in our tradition can be applied to the current malaise in America. We can ask: What would Bet Hillel do? And we can respond by promoting dialogue that seeks to find the truth, but has the humility to know that no one knows the whole truth or the absolute truth except for God, and we are not God. Our opinions are always fallible, but they get closer to the truth when we engage in conversation and open our hearts to the other side, and when we use our intellectual gifts in the service of the values we hold in common, the values embodied in the Constitution, values that honor the diversity in our population and turn it into a beautiful tapestry. That’s what I imagine.
America needs us to act as our best, theologically liberal Jewish selves. And to quote a favorite character in a popular TV show, I pray, let us not refuse the call.
Ken yehi ratzon.
Mike Comins
This year I read Jonathan Haidt’s book, the Righteous Mind, Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, and it has inspired me to take on what I think is the major problem in this chapter in American history, namely the identity politics of our time, and the seemingly unbridgeable partisan divide, between the coasts and the middle America, between the cities and rural America, between evangelicals and secular people. Don’t worry, I will not mention the name Donald Trump.
Let me give you the conclusion. I will make the case tonight that the future of American democracy depends on liberal, religious communities like ours. I’m not talking about political liberals. There are many political conservatives in the room tonight. The fact that they are here and not at Chabad shows that they are liberal theologically, that they are not fundamentalists with regard to beliefs about God and Torah. We are theological liberals here, and I believe that the future depends on us.
And apropos Yom Kippur, I will start with a confession with apologies to all my fellow lefties in the room tonight who will now consider me a heretic. From the very first time I heard it, I hated John Lennon’s song imagine. You know, Imagine all the people…maybe I’m a dreamer… More that any other song, it has been the anthem for various peace movements and lefty causes.
I was sixteen when it came out in 1971. It’s a great melody as you know and the song starts,
Imagine there's no heaven No hell below us Imagine all the people living for today
That sounded pretty good. I was down with that. But then it continued,
Imagine there's no countries It isn't hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too Imagine all the people living life in peace, you
What could be better? But I hated it. Imagine there’s no countries? Easy for you to say, Mr. Lennon, but we Jews lost 6 million to Hitler, in large part, because we didn’t have a country.
And no religion too
Well the best, most exciting, most meaningful things in my 16 year old life came from my friendships and activities in my Jewish summer camp and my Temple youth group, in the excitement and pride as a Jew that Israel gave me, and my work in getting persecuted Jews out of the Soviet Union. I was part of a network that made weekly phone calls to Jewish dissidents, which in and of itself protected them but also allowed us to let reporters know what was happening.
I loved being Jewish, and I wasn’t interested in giving it up.
All of which takes me to the book by John Haidt. He is a pioneer in the field of moral psychology. Unlike a moral philosopher, he does not come up with arguments about why you should take this or that position on ethical issues. Rather, Haidt researches how ethics function. He researches why people act the way they do.
To explain why morality differs from culture to culture, while there is also a lot of commonality between cultures, Haidt proposes that we think of morality like ethnic food. Indian, Chinese, Cajun, MacDonalds, the variety of cuisines around the world seems infinite, but it is not unlimited. All human beings have the same taste receptors: sweet, bitter, savory: each cuisine must fit within parameters dictated by human anatomy, so unsurprisingly, there is a fair amount of conformity and a lot of overlap between cultures. But local conditions, hot or cold climate, what kinds of food are available, and just the internal development of different culinary traditions have lead to the great variety of cuisines that we know.
Haidt applies this model to morality. He identifies five different moral receptors, universal moral possibilities, that all cultures wrestle with and that people act upon but each culture, and each person within a cultures does so in their own way. Here are the five. Each is on a spectrum.
Care/harm that’s the compassion receptor
Fairness/cheating that’s the justice receptor
Loyalty/betrayal That’s the good tribal member receptor
Authority/subversion good soldier receptor
Sanctity/degradation the religious or spiritual receptor
Our culture, says Haidt, without embarrassment or irony, is weird. That’s what he calls us: Weird. Western, Educated, Industrialized, rich and democratic. WEIRD societies are a very new phenomenon in the world. And what characterizes us is that we place a high value on individual fulfillment and individual choice. So we are big on the receptors that level the playing field and support freedom without imposing on others. We are big on Fairness vs Cheating, and we are big on Caring vs harm. If you are extremely weird, then most anything that other people do is OK with you, as long as it doesn’t violate the norm of: Do No Harm to others, that would be our libertarian friends, and another strain of the extremely weird are those who emphasize Care and Be Fair, that would be our Social Justice and human rights warriors.
Other societies, however, most societies, put more emphasis on the other three receptors, on loyalty, on authority and on sanctity. In these societies, the welfare of the group tends to be more important than the individual. Duty, for example, might be valued more than freedom. The family and the clan is usually more important than the state or the nation.
In American society, explains Haidt, secular liberals are usually committed to Do No Harm and Care and Be Fair, but not the other three. Conservatives, on the other hand, in addition to believing in Care and Be Fair and Do No Harm, conservatives are much more affirmative towards Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity, and when there are conflicts between these five loci of moral behavior, they are more likely to compromise on the first two that liberals hold dear, on justice and choice. I hope this brief summary makes sense.
On Haidt’s model, you can see why evangelicals vote conservative. Sanctity, loyalty and hierarchy count strongly in their communities. And you can see why minorities and those whose culture is more global and draws on numerous local cultures, tend to vote liberal. You can see why people who live in what the social scientists call thick communities, particular religious communities, communities tied to traditions where people have a history together, communities with inherited structures that are built on loyalty and hierarchy, such people tend to vote conservative.
Now these are very broad generalizations, I’m not trying to argue that every individual fits neatly into these broad tendencies. They don’t. It may not even be a majority of people. But I do think Haidt is on to something. He explains identity politics in a deep way. He really explains why I, a left leaning Reform rabbi, could hate the song, imagine. He explains why some privileged people identify more with oppressed people than with their peers, and why some religious people are willing to give up on justice issues in order to preserve their community and their way of life.
So, what do we do with that? How can a people so deeply divided as we are in America today, bridge the gap and find common ground.
I’d like to take these questions, and see what Jewish sources say about how to live with disagreement in the commons, how to disagree in public places and civil society, with an emphasis on civil.
First, I’d just like to imagine a page of Talmud.
Describe.
This is pluralism in action. Everyone here thinks they are the correct interpreters of God’s will in the world, and they disagree with each other. By our standards, they were really rude. Nachmonides would often quote verbatim the pre-eminent commentator Rashi, and then say, Rashi is completely wrong, and then give his opinion.
To understand how we got there, we need to go back to the very beginnings of the rabbinic tradition, to the sages Hillel and Shammai, and their disciples, Bet Shamai and Bet Hillel, the houses or the schools of Hillel or Shamai. Our first major disagreements in Jewish law take place between them in the first century.
I wrote a seminar paper at Hebrew University in which I analyzed all 300 of their disagreements and I tried to see the patterns and tendencies of each school. Some of their arguments are classic, like when they debated about whether one should praise every bride as beautiful on her wedding day. What if she is blind or lame, said Bet Shammai? The Torah says, don’t lie. Find something besides beauty to praise her for. Bet Hillel said, every bride is graceful and beautiful.
I often thought that Bet Hillel was right. Another example. Bet Hillel say you can get married with a wedding ring that’s worth a pruta, a ring worth a few dollars, so that no one would be prevented from marrying for financial reasons, but I also liked Bet Shammai for saying a man had to present good reasons for divorcing his wife, whereas Bet Hillel said a man could divorce his wife if he didn’t like the way she makes him soup. Believe me, I couldn’t make that up.
But the general rule, later sages wrote, is the Halacha, Jewish law, follows bet Hillel. Here’s the Mishna that explains it:
Bet Shammai and bet Hillel argued for three years. One side said: the halackha is in accordance with us. And the other side said, “The halakha is in accordance with us.” Finally there was a divine pronouncement, a bat kol, saying, eilu veilu, these and these are the words of the living God, but the halakha is in accordance with Beit Hillel.
God talks in this rabbinic story, so it’s clearly a mythical story that was written after the fact, to explain why Bet Hillel was usually accepted over Bet Shammai, and it is very revealing. Notice that God never said that Bet Hillel was right and Bet Shammai was wrong.
This really troubled later rabbis, who discuss it in the Talmud. The point of rabbinic debates is to resolve how to do God’s will in the world. Now, how could opposing opinions both be the will of God? Doesn’t truth count.
The Talmud offers a solution. The minority view might be correct for a different time, or a different set of circumstances. So if, say in America society today, where it is generally agreed that your spouse’s soup recipe is not a grounds for divorce, we can now go with Bet Shammai’s opinion. Makes sense. But there is something deeper going on here that contemporary Rabbi scholar Rueven Kimmelman describes well. Both Bet Shammai and bet Hillel are equally intent on carrying out the divine will, both sides are committed to finding the truth. But human beings are not God. Ultimately we can’t know truth with a capital T. What we CAN recognize is that others with whom we disagree are equally committed to the quest for truth, and to the values that empower the discussion. Both Bet Shammai and Bet Hillel are loyal to Torah and to the rabbinic method of argument and debate. Both had what I’ll call theological humility. And God God’s self validates this by saying, both opinions are the words of the living God.
This attitude allowed each to follow the majority in making decisions for the sake of the unity of the Jewish people. And that was no small matter. For instance, the two houses disagreed on the leverite marriage laws, which affected who could marry who. And yet the Mishna records,
“Notwithstanding that the one school prohibits what the other allows, the disciples of the two schools have never refrained from intermarriage with one another.” According to this tradition, on even the most difficult issues, they were humble and practiced pluralism.
Later rabbis also asked another question. If both Bet Shammai and Bet Hillel speak truth, why does Halacha, why does Jewish law follow Bet Hillel?
Another quote from the Mishna. “Bet Hillel said, pursue peace, love all of God’s creatures, and bring them to Torah.” This source reflects one of the early stories where a gentile who wants to mock Judaism goes to Shammai and says, teach me the Torah while I stand one foot. Shammai rightly shows him the door. When the gentile goes to Hillel, Hillel answers him. Love your neighbor as yourself, the rest is commentary, if you really care, go study. And the gentile does and becomes a Jew.
The point is that truth is not the only criteria. One of the things I heard when I was studied in an orthodox yeshiva is that you never want the smartest guy in the room to be the head rabbi. Because it was recognized that in the Jewish legal system, if you’re smart enough, you could prove that pork is kosher. Rather, you want the person who is smart with a heart, who will use his intellect to serve the people well. Bet Hillel pursued peace, and so their understanding of the truth won out.
Another reason that Halacha follows Bet Hillel is found in the sources. Bet Hillel studied the opinions of Bet Shammai before studying the opinions of their own rabbis. 17 instances are recorded when Bet Hillel heard the arguments of Bet Shammai, and changed their minds to agree with them. There is only one instance of bet Shammai following Bet Hillel.
This is critical to the Jewish version of pluralism that informs our tradition. The sources say that Bet Hillel was open to hearing the other side for two reasons. One, the other side might be right. And two, you understand your own position better, you have a better chance of reaching the truth, when you join a conversation and your opinion is challenged. THAT’s why our holy books are collections of conflicting opinions.
To sum up, truth counts, but we must be theologically humble, and we must hear other opinions in order to reach the truth as best we can, and in general, our understanding of the truth should lead to peace.
Now I’d like to go back to Jonathan Haidt and hopefully bring this all together. Haidt mentions two things that I think are very important. First, he argues that the secular, liberal critique of religion, which bases itself on disproving religious dogmas, really misses the point. Sanctity plays an important role in human life for everybody whether you are religious or not. We’re not going to read it tomorrow, we do the alternative reading, but traditionally on Yom Kipppur afternoon, we read ch. 18 of Leviticus, which lists the various incestuous relations that are forbidden. Theoretically, in a WEIRD society, if a relationship is consensual and does not violate Do No Harm to others, incest shouldn’t bother a good libertarian or a good liberal. But of course it does. I’m sure we can bring some good rational reasons to oppose incest, to protect the children from genetic diseases for example, but for most people, we don’t engage in reasoning, we just feel disgust. Feelings of purity and pollution are important players in the moral life.
Often such feelings are not rational in that they aren’t true because they are universal, which makes fairness supporters uncomfortable. Rather, they are local. People raised in strict Jewish or Muslim cultures often have a visceral reaction of disgust towards pork, which doesn’t exist at all in other cultures. We can educate and change emotions like disgust, but the point is that emotions are central to our moral lives, and they are often culture-specific.
Second, long time members of the Haverim have heard me say before, how do you tell a Nazi that they’re wrong. You believe in some version of the Golden Rule, the Nazi believes in survival of the fittest, and logical arguments can be made on both sides. In the end it comes down one’s deepest intuition about the nature of the universe and the nature of human beings. And those intuitions are greatly affected by the culture you grow up in. As a religious Jew, I have received the wisdom of Jewish tradition, and I have been educated to feel it. Human beings are created in the image of God, every life has infinite value. Every person is sacred. In appealing to our sanctity receptor, religion anchors our moral lives in a way that secular culture cannot.
Finally, and this is more me than Haidt, the first two receptors that guide WEIRD societies, Fairness and Care/Do No Harm, are good at describing what we are against, we’re against injustice and oppression and we’re for free choice, but they don’t do enough to build the thick communities that we need to thrive as human beings. They help some but not enough when it’s time to figure out how to do a wedding or a funeral or how to eat right or what kind of music to create or how to love a spouse or raise a child or honor one’s parents. I recently heard about a study that shows that baby boomers are much lonelier, more isolated and less supported in their old age than previous generations. It makes sense. Many Americans are missing a thick community. As the saying goes, it takes a village to raise a family, but many people struggle to find that village in our society. There is a gap between the nuclear family and society at large; a gap that thick communities reliably fill.
So let me now return to the conclusion with which I began. I believe that how well we fare, whether or not liberal religious communities thrive, will have a big effect on the future of American democracy.
We theological liberals affirm both sides of the cultural divide that afflicts our society. We take seriously and we act seriously to fight oppression, to spread justice, and to ensure individual choice and opportunity. All the liberal Jewish movements, Jewish Renewal to Conservative, now accept our LGBTQ brothers and sisters in our congregations and into the rabbinate. This, of course, followed the full acceptance of women into every aspect of Jewish life. As a Reform Rabbi, I am particularly proud of my movement’s emphasis on Tikkun Olam, where in addition to the charitable works that characterize our synagogues, we sponsor the religious action centers in Washington and in Jerusalem, to fight the political fight for social and environmental justice.
AND, at the same time, we take seriously, and we act seriously, to honor the other moral receptors. Perhaps not so much authority, but sanctity and loyalty count dearly for us.
We are loyal to our tradition, and in so doing, we affirm the foundations of a religious community that is built on our common history and common beliefs and common language and land, as well as challah and matzah balls and klezmer and, don’t ask me why, slivovitz too. We are a full service, thick community that helps its members to thrive in good times and bad. And that positive attitude towards loyalty, based on values and history informs our love for America as well. In the Diaspora, Jews have never fared better that we fare here, we know it, and we are intensely loyal to this great country in which we are blessed to live.
And we honor the sacred. Our tradition is a life affirming tradition, that recognizes the divine in every person, and in all of creation.
I end with this point. What we have learned and internalized about pluralism in our tradition can be applied to the current malaise in America. We can ask: What would Bet Hillel do? And we can respond by promoting dialogue that seeks to find the truth, but has the humility to know that no one knows the whole truth or the absolute truth except for God, and we are not God. Our opinions are always fallible, but they get closer to the truth when we engage in conversation and open our hearts to the other side, and when we use our intellectual gifts in the service of the values we hold in common, the values embodied in the Constitution, values that honor the diversity in our population and turn it into a beautiful tapestry. That’s what I imagine.
America needs us to act as our best, theologically liberal Jewish selves. And to quote a favorite character in a popular TV show, I pray, let us not refuse the call.
Ken yehi ratzon.