Rabbi's Notes - December 1997

by Rabbi Margaret Holub

Mickey's and my guy, Dan Bern, (whose concert you will hopefully all have etched in your memory by the time this Megillah comes your way) sings a song in which he talks about the split within him between sunny California in the nineties and "the black and white two-dimensional ghosts of Lithuania..." Somewhere in the long rant he cries out, "I sometimes want to dance on Hitler's grave, and shout out, 'Groucho Marx, Lenny Bruce, Leonard Cohen, Philip Roth, Bob Dylan, Albert Einstein, Woody Allen, Abbie Hoffman, Leonard Bernstein, Harry Houdini, Sandy Koufax!'"

I like that list a lot, and I thought about it last night when in the midst of the first meeting of this year's Family Class. Often I plan talks, classes and so on based on some intuitive sense that something hasn't been addressed in awhile. Lately it seems like I'm involved in a lot of discussions about explicitly religious matters -- about God, prayer, mysticism and so on. Sensing a need for some balance, I decided to run this year's series of Family Classes around the theme of "goodness and greatness" -- ideas about what it means to live a good (or great) life. I began with a question I used to contemplate back when I was in graduate school, thinking about getting a PhD in ethics. I used to ask myself and the folks around me, "Who is the best person in the world?" So last night I asked our group the same question. Knowing how hard it is to narrow the field, I said, Okay, give me two... As people moaned and groaned about how hard it was, I said, just give me the names of two people that you think lead especially great lives, people who are a pinnacle of what you think it is to be a good person. Something like that.

The nominations came in on my ubiquitous index cards, and they were sweet to read. Lots of people named their own parents or grandparents. One or two cards named people who were sitting at our table. Then there were three Mother Theresas, one Martin Luther King and one Robert Kennedy. Mahatma Gandhi was mentioned, as were the "righteous gentiles" who aided Jews during the holocaust. Someone wrote the name of Yitzhak Rabin. Out of 38 names, only about eight were of public figures. I surmise that six or seven of the eight public figures were noted by adults.

Interesting, hey? We talked about the balance between personal virtue and public achievement. Most people in our group seemed to think that it was more important to be kind, understanding and balanced than it was to tackle the great wounds of our world. Everybody agreed that good deeds are important, and just about everybody also seemed to agree that doing good deeds in your own household and community is just as important as in any bigger arena.

I tend to agree too, but I was left uneasy at the end of this conversation. It's that need for balancing what hasn't been addressed in awhile. When I think about the ten or so kids around that table last night and their aspirations for the future, I certainly want for them to be kind, helpful, honest and emotionally stable. But I guess I want more too. I hope that half of them are thinking about how to alleviate poverty and inequality in our community, nation and world, while the another half are already girding up to protect the natural world in which we dwell. Even as I wrote this last sentence, I felt myself avoiding words like "fight," struggle," "attack," "battle..." And I probably shouldn't. I hope that Jewish kids from the Mendocino Coast will, in large numbers, be fighting on the frontlines in the battle against corporate greed, starvation, homelessness, environmental rapacity, war, violence and racism. And I hope they'll win.

So why wasn't Judi Bari on that list? Nelson Mandela? Rigoberta Menchu? Where were the feminist leaders? The gay activists? The people seeking a cure for AIDS? The people struggling for peace in Israel, in Northern Ireland, in our inner cities, between loggers and environmentalists on the North Coast? Where were the activists in the political arena like (name your favorites -- okay, I'll give you mine:) Maxine Waters? Dan Hamburg? The artistic activists -- Amos Oz, Adrienne Rich, Tony Kushner, Mina Cohen?

It's possible that we, especially if we're younger, don't even know about some of these great individuals. Conversely, it is possible that we know too much. Maybe we know, or think we know, that some of these people are, or were, difficult, personally unpleasant, power-mongering, sexually rampant. Maybe we know, or assume, that to be great in the public arena means to be lacking up-close, like it's some kind of macchiavellian trade-off. And maybe it is. Maybe there is some necessary sacrifice of personal virtue in order to be a warrior.

But then, maybe cultivating personal decency, equanimity and pleasantness is a kind of withdrawal from the fray. Maybe that 30/8 ratio (or whatever it was -- I'm sure I've forgotten a few of the names on those cards) of personal to public heroes in the Family Class reflects that retreat into privatism that has been bandied about in the newsrags ever since the decline of the sixties. Maybe even the flowering of our haimisch little Jewish community reflects that inward-turning trend -- people leaving the great struggles of their youth and trying to get spiritual "instead."

I don't buy this polarity entirely (like all of us, I know people who struggle valiantly for justice and are still kind and menschedich -- and also people who do nothing for the world and aren't very nice either!) But it raises some questions for me about the directions in which we point our lives, and especially the way we model and teach possibilities for younger people.

I just remembered as I was writing this that I had saved another stack of index cards from some other class. I don't remember the occasion, but from the handwriting it looks like kids and adults had both responded to some question about peacemaking. I liked the responses enough to stick them in a drawer and to actually remember where they are. Here's one, in what I guess to be a young person's script: "I've seen the little kids that my mom takes care of fight so I helped make peace by telling the person who hurt the other one not to hurt people, and I held the one that was hurt until they stopped crying, and I made that person feel better." Another: "I saw a white boy putting down and African American, so I stopped it and told him why it was wrong."

What stands out in these is not only the kindness in both writers but also the willingness to confront, to take a stand and to take a risk. These young people not only comforted the victims but stood up to the agressors. They used their power as well as their kindness. The one who was told to stop hurting people, the one who was told to stop putting down and African American classmate -- they may not have ended up liking the people who confronted them. Someday they might give interviews about how insensitive and aggressive and prickly and arrogant and opinionated and manipulative these people were -- even when they were kids!

All this is a reminder to me to cultivate strength as well as kindness (gevurah as well as hesed, for the kabbalists among us) in myself and in the people I teach and serve. I believe that, while it is never right to use violence, it is at times right to fight. We need to tell and retell the stories of people who got that balance right, so that we can turn around and try to do it ourselves. I came of age in an era of remarkable stories of ethical strength. One that I especially love: within the first week of my freshman year at UC Santa Cruz, I heard a talk by Daniel Ellsburg. Ellsburg told of being a policy wonk at the Rand Corporation, analyzing data that increasingly persuaded him of the wrongnesss of the Vietnam war. Yet he felt paralyzed, unable to figure out any way to speak his mind, until one morning, he said, he woke up and said to his wife, "I wonder what I could do if I were willing to go to jail?" Once he had considered this option, a path opened up to him, and he copied the Pentagon Papers and turned them over to a New York Times reporter. Ellsburg did go to jail, and he got out and has been a committed peace activist ever since.

"Groucho Marx, Lenny Bruce, Leonard Cohen, Philip Roth, Bob Dylan, Albert Einstein, Woody Allen, Abbie Hoffman, Leonard Bernstein, Harry Houdini, Sandy Koufax!'" Adrienne Rich, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Cynthia Ozick, Laura Geller, Helen Suzman, Evely Laser Shlensky, Myriam Mendilow, Judi Bari! Do you know about all of these great folks? Have you talked about them with your kids lately? Better get to it -- here's the quiz! Pick your favorite eight modern Maccabees. Introduce one each night as you light the Hanukkah candles and remember that there have always been Jews struggling and, yes, fighting against enormous injustice. And occasionally, for at least a moment in history, they prevailed. So to for us, in our day and in the days of our children -- may we make a more peaceful world. Happy Hanukkah.

Copyright 1997 Rabbi Margaret Holub

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