Stop Whining and Start Moving

I have nothing against complaints. Complaints are society’s quality control mechanism, targeting ineffective things for improvement. More importantly, righteous protest is the first stop on the road to freedom. From the Exodus to the civil rights movement, outcries against injustice are a call to responsibility.

Yet there are complaints, and there are complaints. Many of today’s protests are old fashioned whining, with paranoia and self pity masquerading as calls for justice. A few insensitive cartoons in an obscure Danish paper, and all of a sudden you have a worldwide cause celebre. A public figure makes an errant remark, and all of sudden, there are accusations of anti-Semitism or sexism or racism. These complaints are more about making noise than pursuing justice.

Whining is a form self pity, and a way to shift the blame to someone else. This way, we are no longer responsible or in control. And it is natural. We all like to indulge in self pitying fantasies of helplessness.

So how do you break out of a whining spell? Do you need to read books or attend workshops? Actually it’s very simple. You just have to move on. When the Jews were being chased by the Egyptians at the Red Sea, they cried out to God, paralyzed by uncertainty. God’s answer was simple: "Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to move on”. God’s advice, to rephrase it in a less formal way, is to “stop whining and start moving”.

God tells the beleaguered Jews at the Red Sea to move on, because no one should ever believe that they are helpless. The moment we start whining, we must find ways to take action, any action, to change our circumstances. Even in the bleakest moments, a person can choose his destiny.

I draw inspiration from people who made the best of awful situations, like Rami Harpaz. Harpaz was an Israeli pilot who was an Egyptian prisoner of war for 3 years, along with 9 other Israelis. During this time, they conducted classes for each other, and worked on plans for their lives once they were freed. Then one day, a parcel arrived with a copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and they immediately started to work on a translation. Together, the ten P.O.W’s completed a translation, which is now one of two standard Hebrew translations of Tolkien. They may have been prisoners, but they refused to give up. Harpaz put it best in a recent interview: 'Falling into captivity presents one with a number of choices. You can either pity yourself and wallow in misery, or do something to organize your time as constructively as conditions allow”. His advice is useful to anyone, no matter what their situation: when you’re feeling sorry for yourself, you have to stop whining and start moving.

Hi! this is a first crack at an op-ed about Seville (see links in previous post).

Can Imams and Rabbis Make Peace?

This story does not have a happy ending.

Last week I traveled to Seville, Spain to attend the Second World Congress of Imams and Rabbis. On the surface, the Congress, organized by the Hommes de Parole Foundation, followed a good plan. First, you bring together religious leaders, who ostensibly are committed to goodness and generosity. Then, they meet in Andalusia, the cultural center during the “golden age of Spain”, where arts and literature, along with warm Jewish-Muslim relationships, blossomed in the 9th – 12th century. You start the proceedings in areas of common concern, like family, technology and secularization, and set a positive tone for a more freewheeling conversation on the following day. After four days of proceedings, you hope these leaders can contribute something positive towards world peace, and towards peace in the Middle East, in particular.

With all of this careful planning, the conference began with high hopes. But, like the “best laid plans of mice and men”, it quickly started to unravel. A session on the first day about family was disrupted by sharp voices of discord. An Imam from France was angered by a proposal the night before to outlaw insults to religious figures such as Mohammed; he called this proposal ludicrous. Some of the Palestinian Imams issued harsh attacks on Israel, and insisted that the only thing worth talking about was the Arab- Israel conflict. The Israeli Rabbis became leery and apprehensive. At the same time, many of the Rabbis and Imams from other places around the world were wondering if their concerns, often local ones, would be drowned out by the politics of the Middle East. This conference now felt uncomfortable and chaotic, the religious version of a bad day at the U.N.

Yet precisely when chaos started to set in, a quiet transformation was taking place. Rabbis and Imams began to talk to each other. Over dinner and in the lobby, conversations about the theological, the political, and even the trivial began to sprout. At night, the musically minded sat together and shared Jewish and Muslim songs. I began a series of heartwarming conversations with Ibrahim, an Imam from London. We spoke of the challenges we both faced in our communities, of being religious minorities, of sustaining faith in secular times. While no comprehensive solution to the Mideast conflict was achieved, many of us genuinely connected on a personal level.

These informal interactions made the conference into a genuine success. It’s impossible to expect that a couple of clergymen will fashion a blueprint for peace in a half a week. But what we did do is open lines of communication. Perhaps someday, both communities will have more to say to each other. For now, communication is an excellent first step.

More importantly, the conference offered an alternate model of reality. The general expectation is that any gathering of Jews and Muslims will be much like a wrestling match: noisy, nasty, and ultimately embarrassing. Yet in Seville, we realized that Muslim-Jewish conflict need not be the norm. The vast majority of us sat together, ate together, and became friends with each other. Despite disagreements and disputes, we appreciated our time together. Unfortunately, the comfortable everyday socializing we had in Seville is far too uncommon elsewhere.

In one of my conversations with a Muslim diplomat, I related to him a Chassidic story. A King is told by his advisors that there is no healthy grain for the coming year. The only grain available is diseased and will temporarily turn the entire population insane. The King and his advisor realize they have no choice but to eat the tainted grain themselves, and then lose their own sanity. But they decide that both of them will make a mark on their foreheads. This way when they look at each other’s forehead, they will realize for a short moment they are both mad, that their imagined reality is completely distorted. I explained to him that conflicts between Muslims and Jews, like all conflicts, are a bit of temporary insanity. And for three days, the Rabbis and Imams were stopping for a moment to look at the mark on the forehead, and remembering what peace could be like.

The conference of Imams and Rabbis did not proceed as planned. But well executed plans are not the only barometer of success. Success can lurk under the surface, at coffee breaks and late night conversations. Sometimes, it is an achievement for Rabbis who have never met an Imam, and Imams who have never met a Rabbi, to sit and talk to each other amicably.

As I was switching planes in London, Ibrahim came over and gave me a big hug. No, we weren’t anywhere near the end, but at least we had made a first step. And I realized that this story doesn’t have a happy ending….yet. However, many of us were moving in the right direction, one conversation at a time. And if we keep talking, it just might have a happy ending eventually.

Hi! i'm back from Seville. I will be posting about this early next week, I hope. In the meantime, you can read about it here and here and here.

Beat the Deadline

An e-mail recently arrived from my ever patient editor, stating: “Reminder-Today is the deadline for your column”. Yes, I had forgotten about the deadline, and I hurried to get something finished in time.

Deadlines work. They motivate procrastinators to finally get something done. They push people to make quick decisions. That’s why on the Home Shopping Network, it announces “there are only 23 minutes left to buy this item”. Deadlines come when a window of opportunity is closing, and people don’t like missing opportunities.

There is something jarring about the word deadline. And for a moment that day, the word deadline reminded me of that ultimate dead-line, death.

We ignore this ultimate deadline. Woody Allen put it this way: “It’s not that I’m afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Indeed, the Midrash says that the ability to repress thoughts of death is a divine gift, without which we’d become depressed and cease to be productive.

However, disregarding death is a mistake. The Bible says “the heart of the wise man is in the house of mourning”. The house of mourning can be a house of learning, with the ultimate deadline teaching the lessons.

Life is easily wasted. The famous quote of Marcus Aurelius, “live each day as if it were the last”, reminds us that the key to life is beating the ultimate deadline. Enjoy life before it’s too late. The Talmud says “grab and eat, grab and drink, for this world we will leave is like a banquet”. Live a meaningful right now. Rabbi Eliezer says that one must repent every day, because each day may be one’s last. Life’s too short to ignore our spiritual possibilities.

Death also teaches us what’s truly important. Our priorities change if we think about what our legacy will be. A French newspaper prematurely published an obituary for Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite in 1888. Nobel read his own “obituary”, and disturbed by its critical tone, decided to create a better legacy for himself by establishing the Nobel Prizes.

You don’t need to establish (or win) a Nobel Prize to create a legacy; even small acts of greatness count. The Talmud tells of an elderly man who was planting a carob tree, a tree which takes 70 years to bear fruit. A Rabbi asked the man: do you expect to eat carob fruit 70 years from now? The man answered, that he was planting the tree for his children, much like his father before him had planted trees for him as well. This simple tree was his legacy, an act of intergenerational love lived on, well past any deadlines.

I hope my editor will be happy; I’m getting this article in on time. I also hope that some day, when I face the great editor upstairs, I will have everything I need in order, just in time for the deadline.

Lost in Time

I am starved for time. Pressing matters appear out of nowhere to shred my schedule, and my "to do" list gets pushed to the next day. Then, on the next day, the same "to do" list will most likely be neglected again.

Yes, I should learn something about time management. Indeed, there's no shortage of books about the subject. And there are "next generation" organizers (good organizers are never of this generation), promising to make us more efficient and successful. These books and tools are great. But what truly confounds me is not my own inefficient habits. Rather, I am perplexed by time itself.

How should I spend my time? At a certain point in life (middle age, to be
exact) we begin to wonder more and more whether we are using our time wisely. We have spent the previous twenty years driving ourselves harder and harder, utilizing time as the highway to distant goals. Each time we reach a goal, we race headlong into another project, working again on future objectives. At times, when our work is challenging and satisfying, we can imagine racing down this highway forever.

At the same time, I have doubts about this endless highway of ambition. Aren't we supposed to stop and smell the roses? Perhaps time is like a hot cup of tea, meant to be slowly savored in Zen like tranquility. Maybe, the rat race is just a soul stifling sideshow. It might be better to pull a Gauguin, and disappear into the South Pacific. So I am torn, with voices in mind my pushing and pulling, debating the relative merits of leisure and late night work.

The voices in my mind (all former Yeshiva students) quote Bible to me. The Sabbath is a day of rest, and sitting back and appreciating God's world is something holy. Yet, the Torah promotes an ambitious work ethic. The Book of Job says "man is created to work". Appreciation and ambition both make convincing arguments, and both are correct.

What time really demands is the ability to shift gears. One must be able to move between ambition and appreciation, depending on the situation. At times you have to leave the fast paced business world to spend time with family, and at times you have to pick up the pace and accomplish more. True time management is learning how to find time for both labor and leisure. For those of us lost in time, it may be best to put aside the next generation planners and consider some ancient advice. The Book of Ecclesiastes tells us "There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven". There is a time for smelling roses and a time for running races. The key is to accept the fact you have to do both.

The Miner’s Tragedy and the Narrowing of the Orthodox Mind

The dual tragedies of the Sago mine explosion and the Alma mine fire, which left 14 dead, had a powerful impact on public opinion. Immediately after these disasters, there were calls for reexamining mining procedures, and finding new ways to upgrade mine safety.

As could be expected, Jewish organizations stayed silent. Mine safety is not considered a “Jewish” issue. This parochialism is perhaps forgivable in secular Jewish organizations whose entire purpose is to protect specifically Jewish interests. However, I find it disturbing that religious organizations, particularly from my own community, the Orthodox community, have not spoken up. Their mission is to articulate an Orthodox voice on matters of religious importance. And mine safety is an important religious issue.

Safety is a religious obligation. The Bible requires that a roof be properly gated to prevent people from falling off it. The Talmud understands this commandment as a general directive to remove any safety hazard. The late chief Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Benzion Uziel, included in this commandment the employer's responsibility to ensure occupational safety, and the late leader of the Edah Hacharedit, Rabbi Yitzchak Isaac Weiss, saw this commandment as an injunction against reckless driving. If all forms of safety are a religious concern, why are Orthodox Jews silent about mine safety?

Regrettably, the silence on mine safety can be traced to a false dichotomy between the ethical and the ritual held by some in the Orthodox community. They see ritual requirements, such as the kosher laws and the Sabbath, as “true” Judaism, and underemphasize Judaism’s ethical and humane requirements. This is why it’s not unusual for Orthodox Jews to be extremely punctilious about ritual commandments, and at the same time smoke like chimneys and drive like maniacs. In particular, we ignore what Rabbi Walter Wurzberger called “an ethic of responsibility", for committed Jews to take responsibility for the world politically, ethically, economically. Even worse, basic interpersonal ethics are at times ignored. Indeed, all too often, we are treated to the sad scene of Jews walking out of criminal court proudly displaying knitted kippahs and fur shtreimels and black fedoras. They remember God, they just forget His ethical commandments.

This false dichotomy between the ethical and ritual is not new. Amos and Isaiah react to unethical people who want to buy God’s favor by performing the ritual of sacrifices. The prophets denounce this hypocrisy, and explain that God despises the sacrifices of unethical people, and ask man to “learn to do well; seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, and plead for the widow”.

While the ritual commandments play an indispensible role in Judaism, it is important to recognize that ritual is a double edged sword. On the one hand, ritual can create true piety by intensifying man’s relationship with God, and reinforcing man’s moral integrity. On the other hand, ritual can disintegrate into superstition, with rituals becoming a magical way to call down God’s blessing, wholly disconnected from issues of character and morality.

In contemporary society, there is a new phenomenon behind this false dichotomy. Orthodox Jews are often seen as exotic figures straight out of the movies. We look different, eat different foods, and have different holidays. In a recent interview with a Quebec magazine, the reporter asked me why Orthodox Jews wear kippot, what is an eruv, and why we eat in the sukkah. What interested him most were the “unusual” things Orthodox Jews do. To many outsiders, Judaism is about the things that make us mysterious and different.

Unfortunately, we have internalized the Hollywood view of Judaism. Because we are obviously different than the rest of society, we imagine the primary purpose of Judaism is simply to be different. This is why mundane topics like safety and ethics are neglected; after all, being ethical isn’t all that exotic.

Even influential Jewish thinkers are vulnerable to this misconception. In a recent article in the Jerusalem Post, an important Orthodox writer argued:“…if Judaism was merely a good-deeds religion there would be nothing to differentiate us from many secularists and people of other faiths…… this is not what Judaism is primarily about. Our religion is about Torah and mitzvot, about obedience and limitations….”. Sadly, this writer unwittingly provides the recipe for a narrow Judaism more interested in being different than in being good.

Of course, as both Rabbi Akiva and Hillel emphasize, ethics are the foundation of Judaism. Yet this emphasis does not devalue the Torah’s rituals. On the contrary, combined with ethics, these rituals become part of a powerful, meaningful whole. Judaism is not about being exotic, it's about being holy. Defining Judaism solely by being different puts us in danger of becoming caricatures of ourselves.

Indeed, many great Rabbis hold a much broader view of Judaism. Rabbi Yehuda Amital, the former Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivat Har Etzion, was once asked what position he would seek if he was asked to join the Israeli cabinet. He explained he would want to be minister of Health, because Halacha demands one be more stringent about health than any other religious requirement. The late Klausenberger Rebbe, Rabbi Yekusiel Halberstam, saw treating other human beings with great compassion as his legacy, and made it his life’s work to open a hospital in the city of Netanya. To these Rabbis, safety and ethics were not at all secular concerns.

Safety is a religious issue, and there is a Jewish view on the mining disasters. Thinking otherwise produces a movie set Judaism that is both narrow minded and empty.

The Lost Art of Hello

It should be easy. The Mishnah says “one should greet everyone with a pleasant face”. At first glance, this Mishnah seems redundant. Doesn’t everyone say hello?

Actually, saying hello is not so simple. Yes, we imagine that we greet others properly. But in actuality, life can get in the way. When we’re rushed or stressed or haven’t had our first cup of coffee, (my personal weakness), the greeting we give is often meager and grumpy. Without a good mood it’s hard to give a truly welcoming hello.

And that’s too bad. A greeting is too important to be a rote reaction dependent on a passing mood. A proper greeting is a mini-mission, an attempt to add warmth and cheer to another person’s day. You must block out annoyances and distractions, and offer a genuine person to person welcome.

Unfortunately, the welcoming hello is a lost art. People don’t say hello anymore. We certainly don’t address strangers, even when crowded together in an elevator. In fact, big city etiquette demands we avoid making eye contact, acting as if the other person isn’t really there. But we don’t only ignore strangers. Even with acquaintances, our greetings are designed to offer a minimum of friendship with a maximum of time efficiency.

Even worse is how we treat proper greetings with contempt. People who offer greetings are often held at a distance, as if they are some sort of threat. In particular, I am shocked how people in the service field are often abused. We turn our heads away from Wal-Mart’s greeters, and shout our complaints at the secretary before she has a chance to say good morning. Their welcoming hellos are usually ignored.

Small towns do things differently. As the sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies noted, big cities develop because it is in the economic and political interests of those who live there. They are instrumental societies based on personal interests. By contrast, in small towns the community is an end in itself. People are there because they desire living in a community. That’s why strangers will receive far more hellos in Thunder Bay than they will in downtown Manhattan. Small towns know what community is all about.

It’s time to bring that small town spirit into our communities, however large they are. Isn’t it distressing that on Shabbat, in Montreal or Brooklyn or Miami, people don’t automatically say “good Shabbos” in the street to each other? Isn’t it wrong for a visitor to enter a synagogue without even one person offering a hello?

I am proud that in our synagogue there is a small cadre of people who perform the lost art of hello. When someone enters, they greet them and make them feel at home. Armed with a few words of conversation, they keep the spirit of community alive. Their mission is simple yet holy: “greet everyone with a pleasant face”.