By Rabbi David Jaffe
Elul is time for waking up. The shofar, sounded each morning for the next 29 days, cries to penetrate a heart numbed to the possibility of change.
We have many good reasons to feel numb these days. After the initial heartbreak, how can the heart stay raw and open after hearing Rachel Goldberg, who brought so much of the world along with her in hope and action as the mother of a hostage taken by Hamas, eulogize her murdered son, Hersh on Sunday, saying, “...finally, finally, finally, finally you are free”?
How can the heart stay raw and open while witnessing the death and devastation in Gaza, so great that many thousands of children have been killed and hundreds of thousands threatened by an outbreak of polio, a disease eradicated decades ago?
The introspection and shofar of Elul calls us to stay open to the possibility of growth and change despite it all. Just as this is true on a inner level, our hearts can also become numb to the possibility of something different and more human on the macro, societal, and international levels. While we may intellectually believe that a different, more compassionate world is possible, how much do we really believe it and feel it at a heart level? The intense violence and domination by powerful forces in so many places around the world can breed cynicism and despair that anything else is possible.
It is in response to this particular form of numbness that I want to raise up the memory of Rabbi Michael Lerner, Zichrono L’vracha, who passed away last week.
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Rabbi Lerner was a student activist leader in the anti-Vietnam War movement in the 60s and early 70s, pioneered research into the spiritual and emotional needs of America’s working class and its move to the political right, and founded Tikkun magazine and the Network of Spiritual Progressives. We at Kirva stand on Rabbi Lerner’s shoulders, and our efforts to integrate Jewish spiritual wisdom and practice with social change activism build on the intellectual foundation he created over the past five decades.
Until his last active days, Rabbi Lerner was insistent that values of kindness, compassion, interdependence, and climate sanity were not only possible to act on in the public sphere, but were the only rational way to run a society. He saw acting on these values in the political sphere and in nation-building as an essential contribution of Judaism to the world. In sharp and prophetic terms he challenged the mainstream Jewish community’s rightward political shift in the 1970s and 1980s in the U.S. and in Israel as an abandonment of Judaism and an embrace of Hellenistic, assimilationist forces that “accommodate the powerful.” See this excerpt from his seminal 1994 book, Jewish Renewal, which describes dynamics of the 1980s in a way that is so relevant to today:
“…the values that led many young Jews away from the Jewish world were particularly Jewish values, reflecting a moral sensibility that was distinctively Jewish. Conversely, those who owned and controlled the institutions of Jewish life were embodying values many of which were distinctively not Jewish, or more precisely, were contemporary manifestations of the Hellenistic tendency within a certain strand of Judaism, a tendency that accommodates to the powerful and diverts Judaism from its revolutionary ethical/spiritual roots. I believe that the process of Jewish renewal- insisting on spiritual aliveness, reintegrating the politically transformational elements into that spirituality, reconnecting with the power in the universe that makes possible transcendence and compassion – has the capacity to recapture the moral imagination and spiritual yearning of these alienated, sensitive, and gifted Jews." (p. 13)
Rabbi Lerner never gave up or numbed to the revolutionary potential of Judaism. For over 50 years he prodded, cajoled, and insisted that emotional and spiritual life, as well as values of compassion and kindness, be taken seriously as elements of politics and statecraft. He understood the need for tactical compromises in politics but insisted that we should never give up on advocating, as a starting point, for a world built on compassion, kindness, and climate sanity. He was ridiculed and despised by many within the general and Jewish establishment throughout his life, as are many of us who insist that Jewish values not be abandoned when it comes to wielding power in the public sphere. At best, we are seen as naive and irrelevant. Such reactions can numb the heart to the potential influence of Jewish values in our public lives.
Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, the founder of the Modern Mussar Movement, called Mussar a discipline for the “numb of heart/Timtum haLev.” Mussar’s sharp teachings, embodied chant practices, regular introspection, and small actions are all designed to arouse us from any of the ways we’ve gone numb or asleep. This is also the role of Elul in the Jewish year.
In honor of Rabbi Lerner’s memory may we use the opportunity of Elul to penetrate any of the ways our hearts have become numb from grief, violence, cynicism, or despair. May we awaken to the value of our moral inclinations and channel them to live lives of deep connection and compassion and never stop insisting that Jewish values of compassion, humility, dignity, and kindness can and should be central to how we run this world. Please join us for the annual KIrva Teshuva Workshop where we will put these teachings into practice.
Chodesh tov,
David
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