December, 2023 Megillah
RABBI'S NOTES
Last month, as the horrors in Israel and Gaza and beyond were proliferating (as they continue to do), we initiated a listening project at the shul. This was an effort to offer understanding, shelter and solace without asking people in our community to express their thoughts and feelings publicly, to defend their views or to change them. It’s been an interesting experience so far, and I find my own understanding—not so much of the conflict, but of human nature and community nature—deepening in unexpected ways. Here’s my little update and a bit of reflection.
First of all, I received a LOT of offers from potential listeners. I had initially reached out to about a dozen people that I thought might find this listening role inviting. Almost all of them said yes. Meanwhile, I sent out an e-mail to the whole community announcing the listening program, schedule and protocol. It included a sentence buried in there somewhere saying, “If you’re interested in being a listener, let Margaret know.” From that one sentence many more people contacted me offering to be listeners. I am very touched to have a long list of community listeners. I hope we will have occasions in the future to take many of you up on your generous offers.
At the same time, four people asked for a listening session. (A few more have since.) That didn’t seem like very many. I figured that we hadn’t quite put forward what people were needing, except that I began to hear about many less formal listening moments: people reaching out to share their thoughts and feelings with me or with Paige, friends exchanging the same kind of quiet, witnessing listening that we were offering at the shul, small circles of friends meeting to talk in settings where they felt safe to express themselves fully. I decided maybe the value of listening in this way is catching on, even if the structure we devised wasn’t quite spot-on.
In my own several experiences sitting with someone and listening as they spoke, I was struck every time by how intimate and personal people’s views are of this public catastrophe. I don’t want to share any details, but I think I can say that every person spoke about their families, their upbringing, messages they received about Israel as a child, world events in their lifetimes that had made deep impressions on them, their experiences with anti-Semitism, their other political commitments and issues that they care about.
The people I listened to had different sympathies, different fears, but nothing as simple as a “side.”
(Something else I heard expressed by people I listened to was a fear of offending or alienating others in our community who feel and think differently about the current conflict than they do. And, since everyone is different in how they think and feel about it, there is some concern about not fitting in on account of their views.)
This reminds me that so much of our individual politics, our outlooks on public life, our outlooks on life in general, are very personal, shaped by many individual experiences. We all see the world differently, because we have all lived different lives. We do not fall across a spectrum from one position to the other, but in a matrix, a galaxy of idiosyncratic concerns, memories, beliefs and references that influence how we relate to the current moment. I realize as I listen in our community that this is a good thing, “a feature and not a bug.”
There is a safe feeling in knowing that the people around us are like-minded. Conversely, it is scary to think that our neighbors might want a very different kind of world than we do. In times of threat, it is reassuring to think that those around us have similar loyalties, similar principles. It can be hard to trust the goodness of people who have different politics. We ask ourselves, “Would they stand up for me if I were threatened?” We wonder, “If things got intense, would they hurt me themselves?”
Maybe it’s worth examining that question for a minute. I just read an interesting article by Joshua Rottman, a psychologist who studies moral decisionmaking (“Moral Righteousness Can Worsen Conflict” in Scientific American, November 20, 2023). Rottman contends that strongly held moral principles can actually make people more violent and more willing to hurt others. He writes, “We often consider violent behavior indicative of a person’s broken moral compass. However, most people who commit violence do so out of a sense of moral duty. When people are ideologically committed to values that they consider sacred, they become more and more willing to do anything necessary to preserve those values.” He goes on to say, “Tempering a moral mindset and adopting a pragmatic one will help us to focus on the future rather than the past, and on maximizing benefits rather than defending sacrosanct values.”
Rottman may be setting up a straw man here when he talks about “strong moral principles,” equating them with passionate commitment to one side in a conflict. It’s possible that, with a more pacific set of values, we might not be so inclined to do harm. But I am interested in what he raises: perhaps it is not a person’s, or a group’s, moral fierceness that makes them trustworthy, but rather their general kindness, reasonableness, willingness to help, steadiness in a pinch. I find myself attracted to the idea of a “pragmatic mindset.” Maybe we are actually safer around people who are not so ideological.
Our own safety is not the only thing that matters (though to our rat brains it is). We care deeply about the tremendous brutality that is going on in Israel and Palestine and elsewhere in the world. Here too we might want to consider a pragmatic mindset: what can we do that might actually be helpful in a way that we want to help? How can we bring some sustenance, some safety, some relief there? Just in the last day I have received (among others) an appeal to help fund home-cooked meals for Israeli soldiers and another for healthcare for refugees in Gaza. I might be more inclined to contribute to one than the other, and someone else might lean the opposite direction. But, even if we come to different answers, I feel safer with someone else who is asking, “How can I help?” rather than “Who should I fear and hate?”
I would like to thank our community’s listeners and our talkers, both of whom took steps to trust the generosity of others without regard for their position in the current conflict. I hope most of all that the carnage will end in Israel and Palestine and repair will begin—that hostages will be safely returned, that bombing and street combat will cease, and food, water and power will be restored. But in the microcosm of our little Jewish community on the edge of the world, I hope that we continue to cultivate values of listening and speaking with trust in each other’s generosity, respect for and curiosity about the ways we each see the world, and pragmatic efforts to offer what we each can to make life safer and more peaceful, locally and in the world.
PAIGE NOTES
We begin December this year right after the full moon of Kislev, feeling the darkness of our early sunsets and the climate in the Middle East, amidst the light of Hanukkah on the horizon. As the winter solstice draws near, the Hebrew month of Kislev focuses on dreaming. With longer nights, we might get into bed a little earlier, sleep a little longer, and dream a little deeper. Our Jewish tradition loves to explore the dreamworld- from Jacob dreaming of angels going up & down the ladder to Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dreams (which our community member Olivier Miclea will be speaking about at his Bar Mitzvah on December 16th; we hope to see you on Zoom or at the shul!). Now’s a good time to listen a little closer to the dreams that your subconscious crafts, hearing what message the Divine consciousness has for you.
Alternatively, there’s the less passive and more active version of dreams—our dreams for the future. Just as life is created in the darkness of the womb or of the soil, this dark season proves to be an effective time to delve into our own personal dreams. It’s not quite time to plant yet; it’s the time to dream about what we will plant in a time to come. With both these understandings of the dream theme in mind, some interpret the name Kislev to mean “heart pocket.” In Hebrew, lev means “heart” and kis means “pocket.” Sometimes when we wake up from a significant dream or are mulling over a lifelong dream, it’s like carrying a piece of our heart in our pockets. We feel the weight of it knocking against our thigh, both enhancing and distracting us from everything else we’re doing. Winter in general invites us to slow down and do less, maybe so we can dream more. May the dancing Hanukkah flames to come kindle new dreams and light up old ones. Even more importantly, may we light them together.
Blessings to both your conscious & subconscious dreamworlds,
rabbi paige
