This Week's Drashot - Enjoy!

To Be Stiff-necked

Friday, 10 August 2012

          We idealise childhood as a time of innocence.  But if we’re honest, we acknowledge that children can be exceptionally cruel toward one another.  Every parent in this room has, at one time or another consoled a child who came home from school and told you that he had been bullied or taunted with hurtful names.  Most of us, no matter how far past the age of 50 we are, can remember such incidents from our own childhood.  In the deep recesses of our memories, we remember being called names.  And we probably still remember how our parents taught us to respond.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me.

          We would say it in a mocking chant, as if to belittle the one tormenting us.  Remember?

          Hey, you’re a little pipsqueak!  I’ll bet your mommy has to tuck you into bed every night with a warm glass of milk!  You’ll never be a real man!

          Sticks and stones may break me bones, buts words will never harm me!

          There’s only one problem with this response.  It is patently false.

          The truth is that hurtful words or names can be very harmful.  If you remember what names they called you, 40 or 50 or even more years on, then you know what I mean.  What’s more, the Sho’ah taught us that hurtful words are a first step toward physical harm. 

If you can say things that denigrate an entire class of people, and are not seriously challenged, then eventually you can bring great bodily harm to them with little protest from anybody else.  This is why the Nazis, while being most assuredly an anti-Christian movement, drew upon centuries of the Christian church’s teaching about the Jews’ ‘loathsomeness’ to immunize the European peoples to their anti-Jewish programme.

But it isn’t necessary to try to create a Final Solution to hurt someone else.  We know that names, even if they do not lead the name-caller to do us bodily harm, sting and hurt.

In this week’s Parashah, we read of G-d’s calling us a very familiar name:

“The Lord further said to me, ‘I see that this is am k’shei oref, a stiff-necked people.’” (Deuteronomy 9.13)

So G-d thinks we’re stiff-necked.  We’ve been called worse.  What does it mean, though to be stiff-necked?

In one of my favourite movies, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Tula complains about her father’s unyielding attitude.  I’m the man, the head of the house! Tula, mocking her father, complains to her mother, Maria.  Maria, in turn, informs her daughter:  The man may be the head, but the woman is the neck!  And she can turn the head any way she wants!  But when the neck won’t turn, then the head remains pointed resolutely in one direction.

Isn’t stiff-necked a condition from which we may suffer, for example if we sleep in a cold room and wake up unable to flex our neck?  It can be a painful affliction, because to turn one’s neck to and fro is a natural movement and, if it resist, it will hurt.  But to be stiff-necked in this way is not a wilful affliction.  So what does it mean?

Stiff-necked, in the context of the verse I cited means ‘stubborn.’  It means being unwilling to change, unwilling to yield to authority.

Every parent has struggled with a stubborn child, a child who had a strong will and was difficult, if not impossible to move in a different direction.  That child frustrated the parent to no end.  Especially if the stiff-necked child is a teenager or even over the age of majority, there are few sanctions a parent can apply to modify the child’s behaviour.  The parent may be forced to stand back and watch the child hurt himself or, G-d forbid, ultimately self-destruct.

This is the characteristic that Moses is talking about when he asserts that G-d has told him that the people he leads is stiff-necked.  It is meant to be taken as a negative trait.  It means they are individualistic, and resist authority – even that of G-d, who has freed them from Egyptian bondage and performed many signs and wonders for them.

While it is most certainly a sign of a difficult character to be completely stubborn, the opposite is also quite undesirable.  Have you ever known someone with no backbone?  Someone who yielded to every wind that blew no matter from which direction?  Someone who always acted on circumstances, never on principles?  If you’ve met such a person, he was probably a politician!  The very word politician is almost universally considered a negative.  It means someone who will say or do anything to get what he wants.  You’ll never know what he really stands for.  In reality, he stands only for himself.

So some stubbornness is a good trait, and we need a little stiff-neckedness to live a meaningful and moral life.  If we’re honest, we want our children to display some stiff-neckedness at times.  By resisting using illegal drugs, even though everybody is doing it.  By resisting binge drinking, even though everybody is doing it.  By resisting promiscuous sex, even though everybody is doing it.  By not stealing, for example pirating software or music media, even though everybody is doing it.  We want that everybody to not include our child.

As you know, our Torah is considered a holy book by our Christian neighbours also.  This is a good thing; we know that the Torah’s moral message is universally applicable.  We don’t care much if our Christian neighbours eat prawns or not, but we do care that they agree with us about the great ethical principles taught in the Torah.  Sometimes they use the Torah only as an historical context for the appearance of their Messiah, but that’s another issue.  They will read the account of the stiff-necked Jews and see themselves as comparing favourably.  They often call us stiff-necked because we don’t see Jesus of Nazareth as the saviour of humanity, and therefore don’t join them in their quest to spread the Good News.  That we don’t abandon our Jewish heritage to join them.

There’s an example of being stiff-necked as a good thing.  If we weren’t stiff-necked in this way, there would be no more Jews.  Since you’re here in shul tonight, I think I can safely assume that you agree that would not be good.

So being stiff-necked is a two-edged sword.  It can be an impediment to the Good Life if it causes us to be unteachable, if it makes us so rebellious that we refuse to consider the wise words of others.  But some degree of stiff-neckedness is a good thing.  It makes us steadfast against the winds that buffet us from all sides  The winds that conspire to overturn our values or get us to turn away from our heritage.

As we celebrate Shabbat together, may be resolve to be stiff-necked enough to stand up for what we believe, and may we pray that our children will do likewise.  May we pray that our stiff necks will help us to live lives consistent with the values we hold dear.  May we pray that we will not, however, be so stiff-necked as to be unable to accept correction and instruction.

To Every Action there is a Reaction

Saturday, 11 August 2012

Many of us have, at one time or another read the cute essay by Robert Fulghum, entitled All I Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten.  It was published in a book of essays by the author, under the same title, in 1988.  There certainly is a lot of truth to the author’s assertion.  Most of what is important in life came to us under the rubric of ‘basic rules for living’ that we learned already in kindergarten.  Sharing, being kind to one another, cleaning up after themselves, and living "a balanced life" of work, play, and learning.  If only we adults would keep these basic rules in mind and follow them, life would be so much better.  Of course, those are all important rules, and we do well to follow them all our lives.  But there are other important rules in life that, if we’d stopped our education after kindergarten, we never would have learned.  The rule that I’d like to highlight this evening, comes from Newtonian physics.

          Now, Newtonian physics doesn’t quite have the simple elegance of the rules we learned in kindergarten.  But Newton’s Third Law is so elegant and applicable to everyday life that many of us can reach into the deep, dark recesses of our memory and quote it.  To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  In the ensuing years we have learned to apply this lesson from physics to other areas of life.  The lesson, in its broadest sense, is this:  Every act has consequences.  Internalising this principle, and applying it to everyday life, is one of the important chores associated with becoming an adult.  We can understand the stories of our lives to be a series of “if – then” statements in action.  We understand non-acceptance of this principle to be a mark of childhood.  If we’re honest, many of us must admit that this was not the easiest of life’s lessons to learn.

My brother once told me a cute story about his first daughter, my niece, Anne.  They had taken her out for ice cream for the first time.  Previously, they had only eaten ice cream at home.  Little Annie was a big fan of ice cream – no surprise!

          So the little girl wolfed down her cup full of ice cream, down to the very bottom.  And when there was none left, she registered surprise on her little face.  How could it possibly run out??!  And then her face screwed up into a mask of outrage, and she began crying!

          Obviously, my niece had not until that point learned the important law of cause and effect.  If you finish your ice cream, then there isn’t any more.  And that was apparently a painful lesson for a one-year-old to learn!

          This week’s Torah portion presents a big “if – then” statement, found in chapter 11 of Deuteronomy:

          “If you obey the commandments that I enjoin upon you this day, loving the Lord your God and serving Him with all your heart and soul, then I will grant the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the late.  You shall gather in your grain and wine and oil.  I will also provide grain in the field for your cattle, and thus you shall eat your fill.  Take care not to be lured away to serve other gods and to bow to them.  For then the Lord’s anger will flare up against you, and He will shut up the skies so that there will be no rain and the ground will not yield its produce and you will soon perish from the good land that the Lord is assigning to you.”

          Those of us who were raised in the more traditional sectors of Judaism, or who visit more traditional shuls on occasion, recognise the passage; it is the second of the three paragraphs of the traditional Shema, excised in earlier Reform prayer books, but included in the latest iteration, Mishkan T’filla-World Union Edition.  I didn’t know that the paragraph was in there until just the other day, when it was pointed out to me that it appears on page 66, in the weekday morning service.

When in rabbinical school I asked one of my teachers why the passage had been cut out from Reform liturgy, he minced no words:  It presents a worldview that is unacceptable to modern Jews.  The idea that agricultural abundance is a sign that a nation is obeying G-d, and that drought is a sign of disobedience, is anathema.  It opens the door for looking upon any and every people suffering the misfortunes of drought, and thinking:  they brought it on themselves by disobeying G-d.  This is not, the teacher asserted, a healthy view to reinforce.

          Perhaps not.  When nations are beset by natural disasters, we should be charitable and find within us sympathy and want to help.  To dismiss, for example the chronic droughts of sub-Saharan Africa as a consequence of poor stewardship over the land is unhelpful on a certain level.  If we focused on fault, we would not be inclined to help.  But at the same time, if we deny man’s role then we are not telling the truth.

So for the sake of the meta-message – that our actions bring consequences – not getting lost, we should not gloss over the facts.  And that our actions bring consequences is undeniably an important life lesson.  It’s something we must master if we’re ever going to “grow up.”  It is true on the personal level.  The decisions we make, the actions we take largely determine our own ultimate destiny.  Oh, it’s true that luck plays a hand.  But our actions can easily overpower the forces of luck.  Good decisions can negate bad luck, and of course bad decisions can negate good luck.  But what’s true of our personal destinies is also true, in spades, of our national destinies.

And stating the lesson in terms of the land’s health provides an important lesson in in the physical realities of life on our fragile planet.  The things we do today, the lifestyle decisions we make, can and will impact on the earth tomorrow.  Droughts don’t just “happen”; they and other climactic irregularities are the result of a nexus of influences, including the way we live, the way we waste or husband our natural resources.

If you haven’t already figured it out, I’m not among of the Global Warming Panic crowd.  The earth’s climate has a way of cooling and warming in periodic but irregular cycles, regardless of what we do or don’t do.  Remember how Greenland got its name – it was land of verdant greenness, where now it is a land of ice and snow and chilling winds.  The level of man-made carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere did not cause that!  So I’m not here to tell you that, if we don’t reduce our carbon footprint and fast, we’re toast.  But having said that, there’s no denying that, over time, we do influence climate and are partly responsible for the way things change.  One need not be a “tree hugger” to recognise this.

          And guess what?  The law of preserving the earth is already considered to be one of the 613 commandments in the Torah.  Bal tashchit (Do not destroy) is found in Deuteronomy 20, in Parashat Mishpatim which we shall read in several weeks’ time.  Bal Tashchit is overtly a prohibition against uprooting and destroying the fruit trees of a besieged city.  But from this simple passage, the Rabbis derive a few broad principles.  One of them is that one does not waste resources needlessly.  It forms the basis of a Jewish environmental ethic.  It doesn’t inform us that we need to maintain, or return to a primitive lifestyle.  It does inform us that we should never waste resources needlessly, that we should temper our enjoyment of the environment with an impetus to preserve it.

          Do we recognise Bal Tashchit as not only a good principle but a Divine imperative to conserve and preserve that which G-d has generously given us?  If so, then Deuteronomy 11 becomes an important passage to remember and consider.  Disobedience of G-d’s law concerning the preservation of the earth does bring consequences. If we wish to live and flourish and prosper, we and all peoples would be well-advised to take care of our environment.  If we do not, if we serve and bow down to the god of unbridled consumption, then the consequence may very well be as predicted in this week’s parashah.

broken, can lead to environmental desolation.