Drashot for Parashat Re'eh - Enjoy!

Do the Right Thing

Friday, 17 August 2012

Over the years, as one of very few rabbis wherever I happened to be living and working, I’ve usually received frequent requests to speak to groups of non-Jewish adults or youth.  Particularly youth of high school age, either in a church or school setting.  I always accept such invitations if I possibly can; I consider it a privilege to represent the Jewish people by conducting a serious conversation about religious issues with those schooled in a different tradition.  And perhaps I am a bit naïve, but I believe that education can be, and often is a powerful weapon against prejudice.  With regard to Jews, there are so few of us in our world that many of our neighbours go through life without knowingly encountering a Jew on a personal level.  Often, as a result they hold negative – and false – stereotypes of Jews all their lives because they don’t have the knowledge to overcome those stereotypes.  So this week, when a religion teacher from The Southport School rang me up to request a couple of appearances before twelfth-year students in his school, I accepted immediately.

                Usually, such requests come carte blanche – open to whatever I might want to prepare and say.  I usually arrive without an agenda, and the students’ questions quickly steer the conversation into interesting ground – or not.  In this case, the teacher had a very specific subject in mind.  He wanted me to address Jewish views on Good and Evil.

                Of course, Jewish ‘views’ on any subject must by necessity be taken as a plural.  We are, after all not an ‘orthodox’ faith but an ‘orthoprax’ one.  This is confusing, because one thing that most people do know about Judaism is that the most traditional form thereof is called, ‘Orthodox Judaism.’ But I tell people that ‘Orthodox’ is something of a misnomer since the main tenet of Orthodox Judaism is conformity of practice, not doctrine.  Yes, there are certain dogmas that are considered essential to Orthodox Judaism.  But in Orthodox – and indeed all – Judaism the key is not doctrinal agreement, the way it is in so much of the Christian world.

                But having made the above disclaimer, Jewish views on Good and Evil are fairly predictable.  We teach that there is both Good and Evil extant in the world.  The human being is neither; in any given situation we have the capacity to act in such a way as to bring a Good result, or in such a way as to bring an Evil result.  Sometimes – actually, quite often – the Evil result is accidental.  As Dennis Prager points out, and accurately I believe, more Evil is brought into the world by those with good intentions, than by those with evil intentions.  He offers as an example Communism, arguably one of the worst experiments of the Twentieth Century.  Nobody who has read anything about the histories of the Soviet Union or the various People’s Republics of the Twentieth Century can deny the amount of suffering brought to so many hundreds of millions of people by proponents of this system, whose ideology sounds noble enough.  The problem is that nobility and the centralised power of the totalitarian state are essentially incompatible.  Where the state has only limited power over people’s lives there is inevitably suffering, but never on such a scale as exists in totalitarian states.  This, completely irrespective of the system’s overall ideology.  Absolute power corrupts…absolutely.

                Often, though we make decisions and act in ways that can be predicted to bring an Evil result.  And that does not make a person Evil by nature, it simply means that they could have chosen better in the specific situation in question.  But confronted with a choice, they chose a specific path.  Instead of looking at the choices available and deliberately choosing the one that could be predicted to bring the more upright result, they followed some other instinct – usually their own selfish desires – even though they knew it was not the best choice.  It was what they wanted at the moment.

                We have an expression:  Mitzvah goreret mitzvah, aveirah goreret aveirah.  One mitzvah brings another, and one transgression brings another.  In other words, when we purposely do the right thing, we in effect train ourselves to do the right thing the next time.  One mitzvah brings another because we get in the habit of doing mitzvoth.  On the other hand, if we decide to do other than the right thing, the danger is not only the specific act but that we are training ourselves not to consider the Good the next time we act.   One transgression trains us to allow ourselves to transgress the next time.

                This is why this week’s Torah portion begins with the charge:  See, this day I set before you blessing and curse:  blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your G-d that I enjoin you this day; and curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God.

We’re used to seeing such juxtapositions placed before us in the Torah.  Blessing and curse.  Good and Evil.  Life and death.  And in each case, we’re urged to choose the better path.  And each choice that we make, in each instance where we have such a choice, develops in us the character that will influence our choices afterwards.  Perhaps we chose what we desire at any given moment, knowing that there is something ethically problematic about that choice and there are no obvious negative consequences.  In other words, we ‘get away; with it.  We’ve just conditioned ourselves to make a similarly problematic choice the next time, and we’ve increased the chances that we will.  If we make the Good choice, even though it might now be what our heart desires at the moment, we have conversely conditioned ourselves to make the Right choice, even though it’s the difficult one, the next time.

This is why Judaism’s view of Good and Evil is so predicated on the individual choices that we make, all day long, day after day.  We do not see the human being as inherently evil and in need of some radical act to find redemption.  On the other hand, we do not see man as being inherently good, so he can just relax and enjoy himself.  Rather, we are capable of both Good and Evil.  Influences toward both paths exist within and without.  Those within us, we label yetzer harah and yetzer hatov – the evil urge and the good urge.  Life would be so much easier if we only had the good urge.  But if we’re honest, our experience tells us that both are there, fighting as it were for predominance.

Tonight we enter Shabbat which is also Rosh Chodesh Elul.  We enjoy our customary Shabbat repose, and take our regular opportunity to use this leisure to contemplate our lives.  This is also the beginning of the month which serves as the ‘countdown’ to Rosh Hashanah and is, traditionally a time of stock-taking, a time when we examine the inner man and begin to ask ourselves what kind of person we would like to grow to become in the next year.

As we enter this all-important month, then, I urge you to consider the nature of Good and Evil.  We can roll our eyes at yet another advice to make every choice count.  Or, we can resolve to make every choice count.  That is the choice that is before us today.  May we have the clarity of vision, and the resolve to make the best choice.

Don’t be a Tightwad with your Family

Saturday, August 18 2012

Back in my home country, in the United States, the signs of the times are clear.  In virtually every state, in virtually every city, one sees adults standing at motorway off-ramps and other key highway intersections, holding up signs that read:

                Unemployed (so many) months.  Need work.

                In neighbourhoods both prosperous and modest, there is an almost constant flow of people looking for work – any work, and usually unskilled – around other people’s homes.  On main thoroughfares, one sees middle-aged men dressed up in silly costumes to attract attention, waving signs advertising this or that business.  It is praiseworthy to do any work that is not legally or ethically problematic, in order to meet one’s financial obligations.  Still, it is hard not to feel sad at the spectacle of grown men wearing chicken suits, or dressed as the Statue of Liberty.

                America the mighty has been brought down to a level of national penury unknown since the Great Depression of the 1930’s.  A worldwide economic meltdown due to the rising costs of fossil fuels, hit my country hard starting in 2007.  Paired with that was a bursting of the bubble into which housing prices had risen.  Government policies both fuelled and burst the bubble.  Since then, uncertainty and jitters by the business community and consumers, over government policy to come have stymied recovery.  The result is the creation of seemingly-permanent unemployment of well into the double digits.

                It is human nature to indulge in a little schadenfreude – either secretly or openly – when a perennial winner becomes a loser.  But right now, most of the world is not cheering America’s economic woes.  Most of the developed world is suffering right along with the USA, and many of our friends in Europe and elsewhere are doing even worse.  Australia seems to have avoided the worst of the downturn, but here too there’s enough suffering to go around.

                Amidst all this woe, we read this morning from Parashat Re’eh:

                If, however there is a needy person among you, one of your kinsmen in any of your settlements in the land that the Lord your G-d is giving you, do not harden your heart and shut your hand against your needy kinsman.  Rather, you must open your hand and lend him sufficient for whatever he needs.  Beware lest you harbour the base thought, “The seventh year, the year of remission is approaching,” so that you are mean with your needy kinsman and give him nothing.  He will cry out to the Lord against you, and you will incur guilt.  Give to him readily and have no regrets when you do so, for in return the Lord your G-d will bless you in all your efforts and in all your undertakings.  For there will never cease to be needy ones in your land, which is why I command you:  open your hand to the poor and needy kinsman in your land.

                Taken literally, this means that one should not curtail one’s lending of money to one’s disadvantaged kinsmen because the Sabbatical Year – when debts are erased – is approaching.  Even as the seventh year approaches, there are still poor and needy out there who need assistance.  As our text asserts, and quite accurately: “There will never cease to be needy ones.”

                The challenge is to apply this instruction, since the law of the Sabbatical year – which only applies in the Land of Israel, and some would say only while the Temple was standing – is not something we practice.  I propose that we apply Rabbi Ishmael’s Fifth Principle, of his Thirteen Principles for the Explanation of the Torah.  He elucidates them in his Baraita that has come to be used as an introduction to the Sifra.  That principle is U’frat u’khlal – drawing a general principle from a situation-specific instruction.

                The Prat then, is the specific instruction to not curtail one’s lending to the poor as the Sabbatical Year approaches.  The Klal is the general principle of not refusing to lend to a poor kinsman because of a general fear that they won’t ultimately be able to pay you back.  When approached by a needy kinsman for a loan of a modest sum which will with reasonable certainty be used by the recipient for basic needs, one should lend without hesitation.  This, even though you’re sure he’ll never be able to pay you back.  Who knows; he may surprise you and actually pay you back.  But just because you’re sure he won’t, doesn’t mean you should give and specify that it’s a gift.  A gift was not requested.  To ask for a loan is not the same as to ask for a gift.  Many are those who can work their way past the embarrassment of asking for help if that help is understood to be a loan, but who would have a more difficult time conceding that they will never repay it.  In this case, it is good to apply the principle:  let it be understood as a loan, even if you absolutely sure it will never be repaid.  And if in fact it turns out that the recipient cannot repay the loan in a reasonable time, be willing to ‘write off’ the loan in consideration for any alternate repayment he may offer – for example, to work it off, even though you need no particular work done by this relative.

                I’m sure that these words resonate with many of you this morning.  Many parents are asked by their grown children at various times for help in the form of a loan.  Of course, we want to help our children while they establish themselves in their own right.  Unspoken is that, if we refuse them something they’ve had the courage to ask for, they will distance themselves from us and we will not enjoy the society of our children and grandchildren as we age.  Many of you have been ‘hit up’ by your children, and many of you have given to them, even if you weren’t sure it was what you wanted to do.

                I talk specifically about our children, because financial duress is so much a generational phenomenon.  Even those of us who have not been spectacularly successful find ourselves enjoying more financial independence as we grow older, earn more, and learn to better manage our finances.  It is easy to accuse younger generations of sloth and excess.  There may be some truth to such accusations.  But some degree of financial instability is a function of young adulthood.  It is easier to waste, when one has most of one’s working life ahead to correct one’s mistakes.

                But I don’t think we can draw any inference from our text, that we should feel compelled to enable close relatives to invest unwisely, or to buy luxury goods, or to avoid having to develop their own sense of thrift.  Surely, many requests for cash from children or close relatives fall into these categories.  Many of us have felt, at one time or another, that in acceding to requests for cash we were thereby helping the requestor to avoid learning an important economic lesson that would serve him well in life.  I’m not talking about those kinds of requests here.

                Clara and I have not been spectacular earners.  We do okay.  But our thriftiness and self-control regarding consumer spending has given us the freedom to save for the inevitable rainy day.  We have also loaned considerable money to relatives.  The asker always needed it critically, for basic living expenses or to keep a business out of bankruptcy.  Sometimes the loan was paid back, and sometimes it was not.  If not, we never hounded the relative for repayment. When agreeing to make the loan, we had already conceded in our minds that we would probably never see repayment.  So if we were repaid we took that as an unexpected gift.

                One of the casualties of the modern Welfare State has been the breakdown of the extended family.  With the government’s social safety net, the family do not need one another for basic, mutual support as in the past.  For those without extended family able to help one another, the Welfare State has undeniably been a godsend.  At the same time, the weakening of extended family structures has been an unfortunate by-product.

                It is undoubtedly a pain to be ‘hit up’ for loans from grown children, siblings, or other relatives.  Most of us, even if we have been financially successful, have earmarked most of our cash assets for specific purposes.  Those purposes are all valid purposes, and we should after all get to enjoy the wealth – whether great of modest – that we’ve been able to amass.  But we must never forget that blood runs thicker than water.  Even though the Nanny State has desensitized us to our sense of mutual responsibility in our families, we should consider it a gift when we are privileged to help our kinsman.  Finding a balance between helping people to meet basic needs, and financing frivolous spending, can be difficult.  So can finding the balance between helping and hindering through largess.

                The Torah does not take into account the Nanny State.  Instead it presupposes extended families serving as mutual support systems, as the first defence against poverty and penury.  Even the Torah understands that sometimes these family systems will break down; it prescribes fixes for such cases.  But when we allow the mindset of mutual support to break down to the point of being unwilling to help our kinsman, we all suffer.  May we be infused with wisdom as we navigate the balance between mutual assistance, and dependence.