Universalist Thought

Rabbi's Notes - September 2006

by Rabbi Margaret Holub

As I write tonight, in the middle of August, the moon is smaller than it was last night, dwindling towards dark and then the new moon of Ellul. I can hardly believe that this year 5766 is coming to an end -- a wonderful year in my personal world, a year of war upon war in the big world we share. It's also a couple of days before our annual women's retreat, and I've been in that pleasurable immersion I am given each year, a month or so of pretty focused study and reflection on some topic that matters to me.

Ellul is that month given over to looking backwards through the year, seeing where we find ourselves, where we did well, where we fell short. And somehow I find it hard to think about my little life this year, when the world is multiply at war. So what if I was short with someone; if I didn't look in on someone else when they were ill; if I'm too pushy in meetings; if I bought too much junk. What does all this little stuff matter when the United States and Israel are fighting two wars apiece, when genocide continues and seems even to be spreading in and around Darfur? Somehow trying to be a slightly better person seems like a hobby in these times -- something to tune into if I have time… Hardly the serious stuff of life.

Of course our personal lives matter, and our families matter, and our friends matter, and our community matters. One might even say that the evil hand of war has won an additional small victory if it succeeds in throwing us off the track of having the sweetest and most loving possible relationships and the openest possible hearts right where we live.

Still and all, this isn’t just any Ellul. This is a wartime Ellul. And in such an Ellul, our personal accounting must take into account our place in the world and the directions in which our small, personal deeds move the world.

War makes us ask: are we living where we should be living?
War makes us ask: are we spending our time as we best could?
War makes us ask: are we spending our money as we best could?
War makes us ask: are we living what we believe?

War makes us ask: what are the consequences of how we live our lives?
War makes us ask: what does the world ask of each of us?

In the course of preparing for the retreat, I recently pulled down a book that had been languishing on my shelf for a year or more. The book -- After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust, by Eva Hoffman -- turns out to be remarkable in many ways. But here I really want to reflect on just one sentence.

Hoffman was born in 1945, in a DP camp in Poland. Her parents had just survived the holocaust under the standard unimaginable conditions. She lived with them in Poland until they emigrated as a family to Canada in 1959. She traces her experience of her parents' experiences -- the way she (and many other children of survivors) first learned about them as a child, the way those second-hand experiences affected her emotionally, morally and intellectually as she grew into an adult. She also traces the way the cultures of Europe and North America encountered the aftermath of the holocaust. She describes the initial incredulity and polite disinterest of her new classmates and neighbors in Canada and the later fascination and even obsession with making memorials and museums about the holocaust in the United States. All along the way Hoffman makes one point: that it is fine, even inescapable, to feel passionately about such a traumatic set of events (though she is at pains to make clear that those experiences were not her own, nor are they most of ours, unless we ourselves are survivors.) But at some point one must think as well as emote. And thinking, in contrast to emoting, can take in global claims of justice. "Possibly none of us have [sic] a capacity for universalized emotion, though we should have the ability for universalist thought."

I read that sentence in the climate of the nearly unbearable pull of my own conscience, and that of so many of us, as Israel fights. I have been amazed, fascinated even, at how it is that under stress of war there is an almost irresistible pull to move from a large view to a small one. It seems almost impossible to imagine what most of us imagine most of the time about conflicts: that all parties can have both noble and venal motivations. Something about war makes all of us take sides.

Possibly none of us has a capacity for universalist emotion -- perhaps our homing instinct is so deep that we cannot help identifying totally with one side, feeling their fear, their rage, their victimization, despising the ones who would so hurt our side. I suspect that this Ellul many of us may be living in that tidal pull of emotion and identification with respect to one or another of the wars we care so passionately about. And how could we not?

But we should have the ability for universalist thought. We should be able to tell the difference between our feelings and our thoughts. However passionately our feelings are engaged with the drama of one side of a conflict, we should be able to think -- as most of us do most of the time -- that war erupts out of conflicting narratives that are almost always filled with mad extremes on all sides, that no one in his or her right mind drops (or lobs or plants) a bomb or shoots a stranger, that war is a terrible, evil, shameful transgression. We know in our minds that solutions come from compromise, by retreating from extreme positions, however much the fever of our passions lives in those extremes. We know that justice by definition sees the humanity of every party to a conflict.

War should also make us ask: are we thinking clearly?

War should also make us ask: even as our hearts pull to one side of the battle or the other, do we remain aware of the humanity of every person involved?

War should also make us ask: in the positions we advocate, the buttons we wear, the petitions we sign and letters we write, is there concern evident for every person and every place involved?

And as on the world front, so too in our little worlds -- in our personal conflicts and stuck places and closed hearts -- we may not be able to resist the emotional pull to take sides, but we can try to think more clearly and bigger than we feel.

Happy Ellul, my dear community.

© 2006 Rabbi Margaret Holub

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