Donniel Hartman SHI

Change can’t happen in a day

Judaism is an aspirational religion that, while accepting the reality of failure, believes in the human capacity to transcend and achieve levels of excellence in our everyday lives.

“You shall be holy, for I the Lord God am holy.” (Leviticus 19:2) “You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” (Exodus 19:6) These are but two of the more potent examples of the aspirational quality of our tradition and its immense respect for the capacity inherent within the human being. As beings created in the image of God, there is nothing that we cannot do, a factor which created a tradition defined by commandment and expectation.

A significant manifestation of this future is the commandment of teshuvah. We expect people to honestly assess the content and the quality of their lives, regret and admit their failures, and commit to embarking on a new direction. This expectation is brought to a climax during Yom Kippur, where the Vidui (Confession), which lies at the nucleus of the Yom Kippur liturgy, places before us the realities of our sins and challenges us to honestly confront what we have done with our lives.

It is, therefore, deeply troubling to recognize the profound failure of Yom Kippur as a force for change. The passion, seriousness and devotion that accompany many of us throughout Yom Kippur peters out into a form of amnesia during the break-fast meal, as we return to our behaviour of yesterday.

Yom Kippur is a synagogue success story. More people show up than on any other day, pounding their hearts with great devotion as they cry out, “Ashamnu.” (“We have sinned.”) However, Yom Kippur’s impact on Jewish life seems to be marginal.

This is not a new phenomenon. It may be the meaning behind Isaiah’s critique of the Jewish people and their fast days: the people indeed fast, “starve their bodies” and “lie in sackcloth and ashes,” however, this is not the fast day that God desires, but rather a day in which we “unlock fetters of wickedness and untie the cords of the yoke and let the oppressed go free.” (Chapter 58) To paraphrase Isaiah, the quality of repentance is not judged by what one does on Yom Kippur, but by what one does afterwards.

The problem with Yom Kippur in the synagogue is that it is too complete and comprehensive. It creates the myth of putting all of one’s life and behaviour up for judgment, where we confront every one of our failings and repent for them all. The list of sins in the Vidui is too extensive to have any impact on the life of a real person. For a prayer, and within the isolated environment of the synagogue, it is fine. As a force for facilitating change in real life, the comprehensive nature of our service makes it impossible to be a significant factor in everyday life.

Change, growth and improvement are rarely radical epiphanies, but are rather slow and gradual processes. As Maimonides in his Guide for the Perplexed teaches us, radical transformation away from that to which one is accustomed is impossible. (3:32) According to Maimonides, God and the Jewish tradition had immense patience with the idolatrous, slave mentality of the people who came out of Egypt and did not require them to accept or adopt either beliefs or practices that were radically different from that to which they had grown accustomed. We must do the same both with ourselves and with others.

If Yom Kippur is to be the force our tradition aspires it to be, it must cease to be the culmination of the process, and instead serve as its beginning. The purpose of the all-inclusive lists cannot be to ask an individual to review all of his life, but to create a menu from within which every individual can find one dimension, one quality that they can commit to working on.

Yom Kippur must cease to be a forum for New Year’s declarations and instead become a catalyst for a new culture among the Jewish community, a culture that fosters individual responsibility, reflection and a commitment to being a teshuvah person. As a teshuvah person, one commits to the ongoing and difficult path of constantly aspiring more from oneself. As a teshuvah person, one neither views oneself as an ideal, nor fools oneself into believing in overnight conversions.

Our tradition teaches us, “It is not for you to complete the task, neither are you free to desist from it.” Nowhere is this saying from The Ethics of the Fathers more relevant than in the task of building a life of value. This year, let us take teshuvah out of the synagogue, disconnect Yom Kippur from its myriad rituals and place it at the foundation of our everyday lives.

Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman is president of the Shalom Hartman Institute and author of the 2016 book Putting God Second: How to Save Religion from Itself. Articles by Hartman and other institute scholars can be found at shalomhartman.org.

To embrace teshuvah

“King David Playing the Harp,” by Gerard van Honthorst, 1622. All of the biblical heroes are imperfect, as are we. (photo from artsandculture.google.com)

One of the beautiful ideas behind Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is the notion that we need to reflect, review and rethink who we are and what we have achieved in our lives. We should never see who we are and what we have created as the ultimate expression of who we ought to be. There must always be a gap between who we are and who we ought to be, between reality and our aspirations. When our aspirations are fulfilled, there must be something wrong with our aspirations.

This is the fundamental idea behind teshuvah and its challenge to us – to embark on a process of self-criticism and reflection. To embrace teshuvah is the ultimate aspiration of our humanity, for the highest level that humans can achieve is not one of fulfilling all our values, but of constantly maintaining a tension in which goals serve as a foundation to evaluate the lives we have created and to challenge us to move forward and beyond.

An expression of this idea is found in the biblical depiction of heroes, all of whom are imperfect. We are never given a hero who embodies everything. Sometimes, it’s embarrassing. The biblical heroes seem too human, permeated by too much imperfection. The Bible is teaching us that being a hero doesn’t mean that one is devoid of imperfections; it means that one must do something about those imperfections.

By elevating these people to be our ideal, it challenges us to emulate them. You are going to fail like Moshe or Avraham. You are going to sin like David. There are going to be multiple dimensions of your life, whether it’s in your worship of God, with your spouse, with your children or with your friends, where you’re not going to be who you ought to be. Welcome to the human story. Our religion has no fantasies about human beings. It has aspirations from human beings.

For human beings to embody the aspiration of self-criticism and reflection, it is not only the individual who must be open to change but also the societies within which we live. People around us often want us to remain who we are. People don’t want us to change. They have gotten used to and comfortable with our imperfections, for it gives legitimacy to theirs.

Some rabbis in the Talmud were deeply worried about the social pressure to maintain mediocrity and lock everyone within the status quo of their failings. As a result, in Tractate Baba Kama 94b we find the following teaching:

It once happened with a certain man (thief) who desired to repent and make restitution (to those from whom he stole). His wife said to him: “Fool, if you are going to make restitution, even the clothing which is on your back would not remain yours.” He consequently refrained from repenting. It was at that time that it was declared: “If robbers or usurers are prepared to make restitution, it is not right to accept it from them, and he who accepts it does not obtain approval of the sages.”

A thief’s desire to complete his or her process of self-correction by making restitution is clearly understood and valued. The problem is that this standard may inhibit them from beginning the process. A lifetime of harm cannot be erased and, as a result, may lock us in our imperfections under the argument that one can never really begin again. “Fool, if you are going to make restitution, even the clothing which is on your back would not remain yours.”

In response, the rabbis teach that we have a responsibility towards each other to enable these new beginnings. A Jewish society is one where we make sure that reflection, self-criticism, self-evaluation and the ability to accept new horizons and new ideas are things society fosters and encourages, even at a high cost. We are individually responsible to not merely refrain from hindering each other’s growth, but that we must be willing to forgo what is rightfully ours in order to ensure that our fellow citizens will grow and change.

A Jewish society is not simply characterized by a high level of kashrut or Shabbat observance. A Jewish society is one where we allow others to do teshuvah, where we are not threatened by others’ desires to move in a new direction. A Jewish society is one that understands that to be fully human is not to accept our failings: to be fully human is to aspire to overcome them.

Shana tova to us all.

What is freedom?

“Israel in Egypt” by Edward Poynter, 1867. (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

There is a certain inherent ambivalence when we think of the meaning of freedom and its association with the holiday of Pesach. One of the essential features of the liberation story is our freedom from human subjugation: “Yesterday we were slaves to Pharaoh, today we are free men and women.”

This freedom, however, did not come about as a result of a revolution instigated by the Jewish people but, rather, as the biblical story relates, through the redemptive hand of God. As a result, this physical redemption is often connected with a religious duty: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery; you shall have no other gods besides me.” (Exodus 20: 2-3)

What is the nature of this connection? Is it an obligation or an opportunity? Is our commitment to God and the Torah a price we pay for the Exodus, or is it a gift – a gift made possible by our physical freedom, but one that we may choose whether or not to receive? The question we as Jews ought to reflect on this Pesach is whether the freedom from Egypt is limited to liberation from physical servitude, or does it include freedom of conscience and faith.

Historically, Jews did not engage extensively in questions of personal autonomy; at most, they spoke about what Isaiah Berlin referred to as “positive liberty” (Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty). As opposed to the simple, more intuitive concept of negative liberty – “the freedom from” constraints or compulsion, positive liberty is “the freedom to” – the freedom to be all one ought to be, to do that which is the fullest expression of one’s potential. The notion of positive liberty is clearly present in the rabbinic tradition, in such statements as, “There is no free person but he or she who studies Torah.” (Avot 6:2) Freedom, for Jews, has traditionally meant “the freedom to” – the ability to achieve complete self-realization, through a firm, unwavering commitment to God and His word.

Standing alone, however, positive liberty is an extremely precarious concept. We need look no further than the 20th century, when different fascist leaders established their rule on a promise of positive liberty (the freedom to live in a stable society, the freedom to attain financial prosperity, the freedom to fulfil one’s destiny as a member of the master race), to appreciate the danger it harbours: the creation of oppressive, totalitarian regimes, violently trampling the rights of their citizens in the name of freedom. Without the underlying basis of negative liberty, positive liberty means nothing more than the freedom to do that which others determine you ought, to fulfil what others have decided to be your potential.

This question becomes all the more pointed in the context of the state of Israel. So long as Jews lived in Western liberal democracies, they vicariously inherited the value of negative liberty and functioned within its confines. But an essential question facing the modern state of Israel, the only Jewish democracy, is what concept of liberty does it officially espouse? Is Israel a “free state” that dictates the forms of Judaism that are most appropriate? Or does it guarantee its citizens the right and conditions to determine their own individual Jewish path?

If Pesach is going to be not simply a liberation story of our past but a modern, continuous liberation story “in every generation,” we must recognize that positive liberty is an incomplete liberty, that the freedom from Egypt – indeed, our very existence as a free people in our own country – must be accompanied by a commitment to religious freedom and the diversity it will engender.

The spirit of Pesach requires a national pledge to free Israeli society of all and any vestiges of religious coercion, including the manipulation of public funds in order to constrain spiritual choices. In the spirit of Pesach, we must commit ourselves to speaking only in the language of education, and never in the language of indoctrination and coercion.

One of the great paradoxes of Israeli society is that those who function in the name of positive liberty actively limit the actualization of the spiritual potential of Jews. Consequently, the state of Israel is one of the only places in which non-Orthodox Jews can barely receive a Jewish education. Religious coercion and legislation hasn’t furthered our marriage with God; rather, it has created an ever-increasing rift and divorce.

The freedom of Pesach has multiple dimensions. It is our responsibility to ensure it is understood and employed as a catalyst for progress, as a basis for assimilating the broadest notions of negative liberty within our religious language and values. Just as we reject being enslaved by Pharaoh, so, too, must we reject the subjugation of our minds and souls to any authority. In the end, if God is to be the God of the Jewish people, if Judaism and its values are to shape our lives, it will not be because we owe God for our redemption from Egypt, but because we choose a life with God as free men and women.