Judging, Returning, Repairing, & Not-So-Secret Despair (Shoftim)

This week, I’m making right something that turned out wrong.

Last week, hoping to inspire the crowd during a Torah teaching I led, I presented an excerpt from a book I was loving.

But taking it out of context proved to be difficult; some people misinterpreted the message. So I want to explain it.

I had been only halfway through the book when I put it down for a couple of weeks; though I loved it, the truth of the message was painfully difficult. So I took a break. As I’ve shared with my readers, I’d already been feeling despair over the state of the world.

But after the misinterpretation and a conversation with the author (I know people in high places, you know—haha), I thought, I’d better finish reading. So I picked it up that very Shabbos afternoon and did just that.

Finishing to the end changed everything for me. As I approached the last pages, finding a hopeful message, I burst into tears. I wanted it to be true and possible.

The book is called, The Secret Despair of the Secular Left, by rabbinical student Ana Levy-Lyons. (She’s been a lot more than that in her life.) Here, she talks about what’s gone wrong in our modern society: our loss of connection with the Earth and our bodies, and between people and communities. Without idealizing religious life, she helps us understand the downside of living in a predominantly secular world, starting with the disappearance of a sense of awe.

She takes us on a journey through all the things that have gone awry, and the damage that’s been done by living a life dominated more and more by the internet, a “virtual” life with physical separation, leading to increasing alienation; how we’ve traded serendipitous meeting for the ease of online shopping, how profit drives absolutely everything, from the way we eat to the way we farm, from employers paying for abortion to adoption, from the way we feed our babies to entrusting our infants to the care of others while taking care of children that don’t belong to us.

It is these things and more, she argues, that have left us in despair; it’s a connection that’s been lost so thoroughly, we don’t even know what we’re missing and why we feel the way do.

Ironically, at the same time, she points out, we have been trained by our powerful capitalist system to believe and accept without question that individualism and personal choice need to and should override the greater good of society and the health of our Earth—to the point where we can’t “judge” anyone or anything for their “personal choices.” But the reality is that we often have no choice at all.

This goes further when, for the sake of ease, we still buy from Amazon. even if we hate Jeff Bezos and all he stands for. And those who can afford it still get on an airplane without hesitation for pleasure trips, putting their own personal desires above the deleterious effect that flying has on our planet. Even if we accept that global warming is real.

The thought that, as a collective, we haven’t stopped to think that maybe we should actually change our behavior when we do have a choice. Because the idea of sacrifice for the greater good has basically left our vocabulary. (How and why that happened is an interesting thing Levy-Lyons talks about in the book).

Thus, we’ve adopted a defeatist attitude; “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” and, “If only a few of us are doing it, what difference will it make anyway?” Or, “We can’t possibly overcome this huge machine that’s gotten so out of control.” Or, “We’ll just wait for this crazy guy to get out of office, and we’ll get our American democracy back on track.” But we’ve gone so far off track, we really can’t afford to wait.

Though it’s certainly depressing to read about, at the end of the book, Levy-Lyons brings us to the possibility of repair, ending with a chapter called Days of Awe, referring to the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. In that chapter, she has a section on Teshuvah which, in traditional language, means “returning to God” or “repenting.” For our more modern sensibilities, it means recognizing wrongdoing and repairing it.

With the new moon this week, we have entered into the Hebrew month of Elul, precisely the time when we begin thinking about return and repair as we approach the High Holy Days. Every day during this month we are to hear the call of the shofar, the ram’s horn, waking us up to fixing what we’ve messed up, telling us to spend time examining our actions and our hearts so we can make changes in the coming year. So we can make things right that we’ve wronged.

This week’s Torah reading, Shoftim, meaning Judges, gives the Israelites a legal system to follow when they enter the Promised Land. The title itself implies judgment.

After all, how are we to live life in a new land, in a different, new way, that brings justice and fairness, but without judgment? How can we repair something that’s gone wrong if we don’t examine it and think deeply about its consequences?

Not everything is neutral, as Levy-Lyons points out, as in the “right to personal choice,” itself an idea planted by a system driven primarily by profit.

The Torah text, interestingly, addresses the idea of false prophesy, and how we are to know we are being defrauded. It answers that, if the prediction made by a prophet does not come true, then we know it was false.

But Rabbi Shai Held disagrees with the Torah. (What???)

He explains that, sometimes, if the words of a prophet “fail to materialize,” it can be for a very different reason than being false prophecy: namely that the words of the prophet yield a change of heart and action in the people, which is indeed the intention; “The people’s repentance (teshuvah) in turn elicits a change in God’s plans.”

We see this in Jeremiah, who “makes the theological point explicit: the future is open…but God’s plans for the future are contingent, dependent to some extent on the free decisions the people make about whether or not to respond to God’s call…Even God does not know what God will do until the people exercise their own freedom in responding to or defying the prophetic summons (italics added).”

Held ends by saying, “This is one of Judaism’s most radical messages: even in the face of all the horror and sadness, hopelessness is not a luxury permitted to us. The choices we make and the paths we take really can affect the future of the world we live in. To live with God, [the Jewish Bible] reminds us, is to live in a world in which the future always remains open (The Heart of Torah, Vol. 2, pp. 241-244).” At the end of her book, Levy-Lyons encourages us to resist, even in quiet ways, to go against the grain of our seemingly overpowering culture and not give in to despair, just as Shai Held does.

People have always resisted injustice in quiet ways throughout history. Smaller actions can end up having a great impact over time, rippling out from one person to the next, from one community to the next.

Levy-Lyons encourages us to reclaim in-person socializing and meeting, reclaim control of our attention and time from the internet and social media, turn away from watching images of nature on screens and interact with the earth IRL (In Real Life), and experience the awe firsthand.

I would add, we should use air travel thoughtfully, be more conscious of the water we use, and stop ordering from Amazon even though its name tells us it’s greater than anything we can imagine, threatening to carry us away like the great river to a land from which there is no return.

Clearly, we can’t wait for our government to make laws about these things. It wasn’t happening fast enough before. Now the progress we had made is being turned back, so we must take things into our own hands, and increase the acts of resistance already being carried out by a lot of brave people.

When we want to do teshuvah in an honest way, we have to face what’s difficult and painful, and make right what we’ve wronged, first by examining, then by taking responsibility, then by changing our actions.

Because the future is still open.

So let’s do it. Join me.

And say Amen.