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A Year Later, Back to Moshe's Final Words of Blessing -- Rosh Hashanah 5785 (2024) Day 1

On Simchat Torah morning, after we parade with the Torah scrolls, we gather around to read the very last words of Moshe Rabbenu, Moses our teacher. The man who could hardly speak departs with an original song – his words, not God’s. And his last sentence in life begins: Ashreicha Yisrael, Mi Chamocha. Happy are you, O Israel. Fortunate are You, O Jewish people. Who is like you. (Deuteronomy 33:29)

Ashreicha Yisrael. You might recognize the word Ashrei. Fortunate are you, O Jewish people. What must it have been like for Moshe to make those his final words. Moshe, who was born at a time and place when it was against the law for him to live. Whose first recorded words were “Why are you beating your neighbor?” Who faced down Pharaoh, led his people into freedom, brought them to Mt. Sinai. All the desert crises of food and faith Moshe had gone through with them. After all that, Moshe sees his people endure, finally get their act together, and now, they are sitting still one last time. Knowing that what’s just ahead for them is a future and a fight – Moshe sings: Ashreicha Yisrael. Fortunate are you, O Israel. Mi chamocha – there is no people quite like you.

Last Simchat Torah, October 8, knowing what we knew, we had to decide how we would sing those words. Should we just hurry through and get out of here? And what about our children? Most years our kid-friendly Simchat Torah is a quick early evening on a school day. But last year it was a Sunday morning, with no rush, so we had bigger plans. Would parents even bring their kids here on October 8, knowing what we knew?

We decided to stick to our plan. With our broken hearts, and overwhelmed, we would dance with the Torah for our kids, and for Israelis who already were begging us not to let anyone reach across the ocean and take this too away. Amazingly, parents brought their kids. And after dancing, right down there in this aisle we rolled out the Torah on a table all the way to the back. As the kids were gathered next to the Torah, I got to the chanting of Moshe’s final sentence: Ashreicha Yisrael. Fortunate are you, O Israel. I so wanted to sing it; to promise it to our kids as Moshe promised the generation he was about to launch. I was overcome with tears, and only thanks to the kids could I sing the words at all.

As hard as it was to sing Ashreicha Yisrael, Moshe’s final sentence has more words. I don’t emphasize them generally because they are not as inspirational. Am nosha b’Adonai, magen ezrecha asher cherev ga’avatecha… ”Fortunate are you, O Israel, who is like you, a nation saved by the Divine, your helping shield, whose sword is your pride. Your enemies shall recant themselves to you, and you on their high places will tread.”

But as I croaked out those words too, I had this terrible thought: not a single part of this Torah verse was true. Not fortunate. Not saved; no helping shield. An enemy far from recanting, far from going back on its essence -- and who was treading on whom that day.

Was the Torah itself being kidnapped and used to mock us? How could we go just minutes later and begin the Torah again, and with rockets in the sky declare that God created the heavens, and that in the deepest darkness God said “Let there be light”?

Yet, with all the unrelenting loss and pain of the past exhausting year – and even with the escalations of the war this past week and the attack from Iran these past days – I say to you that the critical spiritual thing for us in this new year is to get back Moshe’s final words: Ashreicha Yisrael, mi chamocha. Fortunate are you, O Jewish people, who is like you. We need to believe that this is as true as ever, and true even as never before. Our future here depends on it.

Obviously atrocities and war are in no way fortunate. And I do not mean it is easy to be Jewish just this moment. Only that we are profoundly fortunate to be the Jews of this moment, of this era in Jewish history.

Now believe me, part of me wonders if I’m crazy to say this today. I really just want to reach out and envelop you all in a hug, and allow us to cry together among people who know the many layers of our weeping. Our congregation has many Israelis, and we are closely connected to several families who have lost people on or after October 7, and to at least five people who were taken hostage. Last fall two Beth Abraham families had their Israeli kids here in town taking refuge. We have college students too. My own daughter is a student at Barnard College of Columbia University, so we know painfully what it’s like for a child to live within an institution and a community ripped apart over the past year. Some of our tears are for the loss of dreams of peace, delayed at least for now.

Yet I keep coming back to this thought: we need Ashreicha Yisrael, mi chamocha. Fortunate we are to be this unique Jewish generation, the Jews of America of this era. 

We need to say those words to ourselves. We need to carry ourselves that way outwardly in the world. I thought about talking today about any of particular things on people’s minds right now: the immediate war itself, or questions about our relations with other people here in America and anti-Semitism around us, or concerns about the ethics of the military actions we are connected to, or about Israeli policy toward Palestinians. But before we can talk about or work on any of these, we have to think first about seeing ourselves once again in the light of Ashreicha Yisrael, mi chamocha. 

Look what we have built so far. In less than 150 years, Jews have gone from a tiny presence in the United States, having gotten here in flight just like from every other place we have been in exile, to a flourishing community. Here we have not just carved out a corner for ourselves for a while. We have been essential to making our host country into a home, for us and for everyone. From Justice Brandeis to Justice Kagan, American law has been infused with our commitment to law and justice. From Philip Roth to Dara Horn, American literature has been infused with our creativity and our concerns. Healing, science. Comedy. The equality and freedom of people is infused with our ideas and achieved partly with our legwork. The best of America’s story and the best of the American Jewish story are completely intertwined. Yehuda Kurtzer of the Shalom Hartman Institute said this summer that even though we have always been a small percentage of the population, the bigness of America drew out the bigness of Judaism. 

In this year’s election, the candidates are a former president whose daughter is a committed Jew, and a sitting vice-president whose husband is a committed Jew. There has never been a diaspora Jewish community like this in all of Jewish history. 

That litany used to be my Ashreicha Yisrael. But in March, Franklin Foer wrote an article in The Atlantic called “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending.” His main evidence is the year at many universities, the turning against many Jews as well as against all these aspects of America that Jews have helped build, by many people who will be tomorrow’s American leaders. Foer argues that the conditions that made us happy and fortunate here seem to be going away.

Well he is right that the conditions are not the same. But that is not the determining story. In the past, in other places, it might have been. But there are new seeds of new strengths we have, and they too have been uniquely visible actually in this past year. I’m just going to talk about a couple.

Many of us experienced the year through the words and leadership of the Goldberg-Polins in Jerusalem, Rachel and Jon, parents of Hersh, zichrono livracha. Hersh was kidnapped from the Nova music festival after saving some lives in the attack, and his parents have urged us to advocate for their son and all the hostages every single day in every way possible. His murder a month ago along with five others was crushing.

But how Jon and Rachel have advocated is so dramatically different from what Jews like us have been used to. They hardly talk about Hamas – even in their eulogies for Hersh, they didn’t name the group. They talk about us, and what it means to value and rejoice in human life. 

In July, the Goldberg-Polins and their close circle decided that alongside their political advocacy, it was important to spend a week flooding the world with Torah and mitzvot.

So they organized a study of the whole Hebrew Bible around the clock and around the world, and a concluding international study event. They dedicated a new Torah scroll. They organized an evening of song and music at Tachana Rishona, a hip outdoor venue in Jerusalem. They declared two days of service, invited people to make food packages in Jerusalem, and if you weren’t nearby to post on their web page acts of chesed you would be doing all week anywhere. Right away you could see some 200 things, from challah making to opening up one’s swimming pool, to cultivating patience, to driving Palestinian children to and from medical appointments in Israel. It was like they were forcing the World to Come onto this world, and forcing us all to force it.

The Goldberg-Polins speak and act in this personal and international crisis as though the primary center of our destiny is in our own hands, and in the hands of any Jew with power. Of course there is a context. But for Jon and Rachel even hard-core advocacy for the hostages is about what is inside us, no matter the context. 

All year every day they have used the language of this season –  teshuvah, accountability, and forgiveness. At Hersh’s funeral they begged his forgiveness for what they did not do to save his life, though what more could they possibly have done. They have asked us directly as they have asked themselves over and over: What have you not done yet. Who are you, they have asked world leaders and Israeli leaders, and all of us Jews and all Americans.

They described Hersh at his graveside as someone who forced them to open their eyes and their hearts wider than they had known how to. 

In the past, even in the Golden Age, at difficult times we would mainly point our fingers outward. The Goldberg-Polins have showed us that we as Jews are strong enough to make ourselves the moral center of any story, even the most difficult story, even one where other people are also wrong and wronging us.

To have leaders and teachers like this in the Jewish crisis of a generation – Ashreicha Yisrael, how fortunate we are. That we have become a Jewish people strong enough at a time like this to respond to Jon and Rachel, to ground ourselves in both advocacy and mitzvah at the same time, to ask something both from the world and from ourselves – Ashreicha Yisrael, mi chamocha. This is what Zionism was supposed to do – in the era of Jewish self-determination, we take responsibility on ourselves as makers of history, even though we are small.

It’s only in this generation that we are starting to learn how to do that. For the first time, our bigger Jewish response has been much more than Never Again.

Some would say like Franklin Foer that this year the strains between Jews and our allies finally broke. But I saw something different up close here in Southern New Hampshire, specifically with my colleagues in the clergy.

My mission for sixteen years in the Nashua Area Interfaith Council has been to press beyond the simple sentiment of “there are many roads to God.” So that when push comes to shove, we’ll know whether we are really there for each other. This year was a big test. 

In October when I heard from almost none of my cherished colleagues, I began to write to them, to tell them what it was like to be a Jew now and also my worries about what would happen to Judaism if they gave us reason to close in on ourselves. Each one of them responded. I have been president of that group for almost a third of my time in Nashua and I was disoriented for a while. At first I just asked them to listen to me, and to pray for us, for the people we’re connected to, as they were praying for the Palestinian people their churches are connected to. They all said yes, of course.

I said at a meeting in the fall that I think the biggest difference between me and most of them is not Jesus but Zionism. A few days later, one of my colleagues reached out to ask me what I meant, and this opened up an amazing conversation about our seminaries and what we each know about the Holy Land. 

I bought about 25 copies of Yossi Klein Halevi’s Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, which includes Palestinian responses back and I have given it to many colleagues. They have read it; some have shared it in their congregations. Some have opened up to me about their reflections about the role the Christian world has played in pitting Jews and Muslims against each other. Most of our Christian friends have brought more nuance to their words and their discussions in church about Israel-Palestine.

I have done this work not from supplication but from strength, from a foundation many of you have built over decades in Nashua, and immodestly I will say I myself have built. Ashreicha Yisrael – it is fortunate right now to be a Jew in the interfaith community of Greater Nashua. 

And it is good for us to be in the middle of the difficult moral conversations that serious people are having. Because I pushed to see if my colleagues and I could talk this way, I could open my ears more too. So I also can and must say that we here are connected to at least one Palestinian family in New Hampshire who lost many people in Gaza very early in the war. 

It’s not easy, at all. But we can handle it; we are maturing as a Jewish community within America. Our friendships, alliances and our power are still robust, even though the conditions don’t make it as easy. Ashreicha Yisrael, Mi chamocha – we are a unique generation.

And part of Ashreicha Yisrael is simply us here now. Doing what we do. Here sustaining one another, singing and thinking and crying together. Gathering as a moral community. Not because we have to, not because it’s as joyful as other years, but because this is who we are.

So Simchat Torah this year will be different, no question. We will have to honor what happened last year. But at some point we will dance and we will finally arrive again at Moshe’s last sentence.

And we will have a choice. All of us, whether what grips you most right now is anger or sadness or fear about the fighting, or the broader future of Jews and anti-Semitism, or the ethics of the conflicts. We are all like Moshe, looking out at a future that has both purpose and war.

We can say that things for Jews in America are going to be like they have been everywhere else for us in exile. And then that will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Or we can say Ashreicha Yisrael, mi chamocha. We are fortunate to be the Jews of this era. Whose future is not determined; who have the possibility through our choices and efforts to define who we are. And rise to the occasion like no other generation of Jews has ever before.

When Moshe composed his final words, he reached back to the first song he taught the people along with his sister Miryam. You might know the words Mi Chamocha from the prayers, and it got there from the Torah’s Song of the Crossing of the Sea (Exodus 15:11). Back then, Miryam and Moshe asked us to look to the heavens and say: Mi chamocha ba’elim, Adonai? Who is like you among the powerful, O God? Now in his final words, Moshe looks up at us and says: Who is like you, O Jewish people. You are powerful, finally, among all the powerful. You are blessed and a blessing. 

In this time of war and heartbreak, may we find a way to hold each other up and see all of our power and all of our blessing. Ashreicha Yisrael, Mi Chamocha – how fortunate are you, O Jewish people, there is no one like you.

Shana Tova.

Patience and Impatience -- Rosh Hashanah 5785 (2024) Day 2

The number of stop signs between my home and the synagogue has more than doubled in the past ten years. And I know why the new ones were put there: because of me.

I don’t mean that in an I’m-the-problem-it’s-me way. I have never caused an accident on Pine Hill Road or Courtland Street, tfft tfft.  I am sure at City Hall there is some traffic data or some record of citizen input behind the decisions, but I know that four stop signs were placed in Nashua as a spiritual opportunity, perhaps even a test, for me.

You see, as my kids would point out even before they got their licenses, I can be a major practitioner of the rolling stop. It goes with something else Laurie says to me often, which is that at home, when I ask her or the kids something, I often don’t give them even a second to respond, before I’m prodding them more or repeating the question. 

So ten years ago on Rosh Hashanah I decided to speak about impatience. And as I was writing I decided that one way I would cultivate my own patience was to come to full stops at all stop signs, since there were at the time three close to where I work. I would be able to notice my heart rate increase as I slow the car down extra, as I feel the small kick back of the car as it halts, then I could stop, take a breath, slow my heart rate and settle down. Once, twice, three times, at Manchester, Webster, and Concord Streets.

Apparently, the universe regarded this as a vow on my part, and not one that could be annulled on Erev Yom Kippur. And so, on cue, up went two more stop signs on Courtland Street, and two on Pine Hill Road as well. As a challenge to my spiritual discipline.

You’ll have to ask Laurie and my kids how I am doing with this, though for most of my drives here the only witnesses are myself and God. I know I stop more than I used to. And I am much better about waiting an extra beat or more after I ask someone at home a question. But still I struggle with patience and impatience.

The world is impatient, maybe more and more. Take something like reading, which you’d think would be made for a patient approach. Articles online often tell you at the top how long they will take to read. That’s a new invention of the past ten years, and it seems to have originated with the website Medium. Which is according to itself “a place to read, write, and deepen your understanding” – but a couple engineers at Medium had become frustrated that when they would open up something to read or deepen your understanding, they had no idea how much time they might be getting themselves into. So they came up with this idea and algorithm.

And we often default to expecting others to be impatient with us. A lot of times I call someone and they pick up to tell me they can’t talk, and ask if we could talk later. As though if I got their voicemail I would be impatient with them for not being at my beckon call. Even my own parents did this the other day and I reassured them I could handle their being occupied with something other than me.

What’s this all about? In Hebrew one of the words for patience is savlanut. It is from a root that means “suffering.” To be patient is to be able in the moment to accept some suffering. But is it really suffering to give someone a few seconds to digest what you said to them, and is it really suffering to make a full stop at a stop sign?

So I think the word savlanut points at something else, what we really might be suffering when we feel impatient in daily life. It’s being out of rhythm with the person we’re with. You’re all set to hop in the car so we can go get together with friends, but I’m still putting on my jacket or finding my jacket, or deciding if I even need a jacket. That’s frustrating. And maybe it’s not about the five minutes late to a social engagement. It’s maybe a little piece of a bigger longing we all have to know what it’s like to be in sync with someone else, that our lives become that elusive waltz in perfect time together.

Being human is always moving in and out of sync with other people, which is why we need patience, savlanut, in our day to day lives. Patience is a virtue, and in Judaism it’s one of the most important Divine virtues. It’s one of the thirteen qualities associated with Divine compassion, the shlosh esreh middot we chant on Yom Kippur over and over and have already chanted today. Adonai Adonai El rachum v’chanun, erech apayim (Exodus 34:6). Erech apayim means “slow to anger.” That’s a physical metaphor in Hebrew. Apayim are the nostrils, the place we feel our breathing change and speed up when we are impatient. Being angry in biblical Hebrew is called charon af, “hot nose.” Like a fire-breathing dragon.

Erech apayim means disrupting that circuit, keeping the breathing slow, not getting hot. As Alan Morinis puts it, keeping the match away from the fuse. Patience means putting time between something that frustrates us and reacting to it.

In Pirkei Avot (5:2), the Talmud’s compilation of ethical maxims, it’s taught that the reason the Torah takes ten generations to get from Noach to Avraham, from the flood to monotheism, is to show us how much God is erech apayim, how much God is patient.

The world takes a long time to get where it’s in sync with the Divine, yes. Then again, you’d think: how hard is it to be patient when you are God and have all the time in the world?

One the most haunting midrashim I’ve ever seen wonders if God can actually get carried away and be too patient. Dr. Aviva Zornberg in her book on Exodus teaches a midrash that imagines God watching the slavery of the Jews in Mitzrayim, and the angels are pressing God: Aren’t you going to do something? How can you leave them there like this? And God says: You remember, I told Avraham that they would be in Mitzrayim for 400 years, and it’s been almost 400 years. Don’t worry, soon they will be freed. One of the angels goes down to earth and grabs a brick that a slave is making, and in that brick is trapped a baby. The angel flies up to heaven, shows the brick to God, and says: This is the result of your patience! And then God snaps into action, and the story of the redemption begins.

This is what Rev. King called “the fierce urgency of now.” There are times when patience is not a virtue. When a kind of impatience is warranted. A higher impatience. A holy impatience.

Our prayers have so many words to express this impatience, some we’ve used this morning: b’karov b’yameinu, bim’heira, hash’ta ba’agala uviz’man kariv. Not just Hebrew, but Aramaic!

The hardest impatience is when we care about someone, and we feel that they aren't living right now as well as they could be.

We might be impatient with someone who is struggling to find a direction in life.

We might be impatient about someone who is just not well – not impatient with them, but for them. Impatient with their caregivers, for not being attentive enough or responsive enough or clever enough or miraculous enough.

We are impatient with the world right now. We want an end to war in and around Israel, we want our hostages home now. We want other wars to end, we want the paralyzing polarization of our country to be gone. 

We are, perhaps, impatient with God for all the suffering that isn't going away fast enough.

We might be impatient, most of all, with ourselves. If we’re not well, we blame ourselves unreasonably for not getting better faster. Maybe we’re not as caring as we know we should be. Maybe as we think back on what we resolved here one year ago, we can just be frustrated at our own slow pace of teshuvah. 

I wonder if somewhere also deep down impatience comes from a sense that time is precious and fleeting for each of us. It’s Naomi Shemer’s song Od Lo Ahavti Dai – “I Have Not Loved Enough.” She begins: With these two hands of mine, I’ve not yet built a town/In the middle of the desert, the water I’ve not found/I haven’t drawn a flower, nor quite discovered how/the way is going lead me, or where I’m going now. And the refrain: I have not loved enough, the wind and the sun are on my face; I have not said enough, and if not, if not now, when.

A lot of our impatience at what’s out there, with others, might really come from within our own soul.

Even our little impatience about getting out of the door might have something of this higher impatience. You want to be on time, out of respect for someone who is being generous by making time for us. We want to make the most of our time together; there are never enough moments with our friends or our potential friends, to get beyond chit-chat and really talk.

So if patience is a virtue, and if there is also a holy impatience, how do we get it right?

There is another biblical phrase that’s a twist on erech apayim, the hot nose or breathing nostril metaphor. The prophet Micah (7:18) describes God’s patience as lo hechezik la’ad apo. Who does not hold onto anger forever. Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, a medieval teacher of Kabbalah, says that unlike the metaphor of erech apayim, which is about not letting frustration begin and spiral, lo hechezik la’ad apo recognizes that impatience is a real thing. Even God has impatience, metaphorically speaking, because for all of God’s infinite time, God does not really have infinite power to change us or the world. So lo hechezik la’ad apo – the suffering, the anger, you can’t stop them from appearing. The key is to hold onto impatience long enough to understand it, and to understand ourselves, but only that long, and then to decide what to do with it, and release it.

So the momentary impatiences, like getting stuck in lines or traffic, those we have to let go of quickly. But even then the impatient feeling is a reminder to open our eyes to what is actually around, because even when you’re delayed somewhere that’s not all that’s happening. Rabbi Zelig Pliskin says that when you’re stuck in the waiting room at the doctor, look around at who else is there. Perhaps there is someone who needs help with something, whether it’s filling out a form, or walking when they are called. Or perhaps there is someone in the room who needs consoling or who seems alone.

What about when our impatience is about the sufferings of someone we care about, or the sufferings and injustices in the world?

We have to be aware of that impatience. If it just exists as anger, we know that makes it harder to act, and that cycle leads to resignation, to despair, to disconnecting from the person or the cause we actually care about.

And sometimes we try to relieve this type of impatience by rushing toward unrealistic expectations or simplistic solutions. I think this is the impatience of our country right now. Too many of us think that being impatient about the right things is the whole story. So vibes and feels attract all the energy, and we go in circles if not backward, and we have neither solutions nor an end to the impatience.

Sometimes we need to turn from impatience just to presence, to be with the person or the people whose suffering matters to us.

Sometimes what we need is not so much patience as perseverance. There is a Jewish word for this too – netzach. It means both endurance and triumph, because for the things that matter one triumph is never the last. 

Netzach, perseverance, is figuring out what you can actually do. When it comes to the big things in the world, it’s deciding when to be the doer and when to be the donor. It’s noticing when people are actually working on something, with the care and skill its complexity deserves, even when it’s taking time. It’s offering yourself to the people who are leading, knowing how to encourage them and get them what they need. This is one of the best antidotes to the impatience we experience when the wider world seems out of sync.

When we are impatient with ourselves, it helps to find someone to talk it out with – to help us balance expectations of ourselves with grace.

Impatience on its own is not a virtue. But it is not just patience we should learn from the Divine example. It’s lo hechezik la’ad apo – it’s reading our impatience. Impatience teaches us who are, reminds us what we value and who we love. 

So in this new year, we should definitely come to a full stop at stop signs, no matter how many there are. We should let the phone ring when we can’t talk, and trust the other person to trust that we’ll call them later when we can really talk.

And then we’ll have room for holy impatience. Instead of fiery vapors, over and over, our breath will be long shofar blasts, ever more in sync, turning from brokenness into wholeness and redemption.

Shana Tova.

A Prayer For All of Us Who Are Mourning A Year After October 7

A year of mourning has a rhythm, supposedly
A bass line laid down by Sages
To help the heart re-pace itself
So the heart can help the body
Metabolize absence
Let go the face, the name,
The vocal signature
Let them travel the neuron network pathways
For 7 days, for 30; 11 months, a year
Find their way to the assembly point
At the node of peaceful memory

That’s the rhythm, more or less
So the body can metabolize its absences
So the soul
Which loves to climb the Babel Tower every day
Stalking truth and peace to the heavens
Can crumple
Can fold up neatly like a fan
For a time
And still remain a soul

7 days and 30, 11 months, a year
From: There are no words, ein milim
To words that are approximate and fumbly, but mostly they will do
To when it’s finally fine to sort of say: How are you
To someone who could answer on some days
Or not yet quite.

That’s the rhythm we require.

So how do we uncrumple
When the soul so capacious is not so much folded
Crumpled
As: scrunched
Like the draft of a Shana Tova card, too sappy or superficial, tossed in the can

How when yahrzeit and shiva are scrambled
When after Shmay Rabbah, the critics overpower
The comforters’ Amen
When you’re mourning and still searching for survivors

When you can’t tell about the New Year challah if it’s raisins in there, or if it’s stones

The heart was not meant to beat this fast
To meet our distant cousins at all once
To learn the names of all those new places and all the new vocabulary, the nuance
   of ne’edarim shvuyim and chatufim
Or in the age of the first flowering of redemption, to repurpose a prayer
   for captives in the hands of medieval bandits

It is difficult for the heart, kasheh m’od la-lev
For the heart – for the body --
To mourn so many people and so many dreams
All at the same time

One heart can’t do this by itself
It takes our many hearts.

Our souls are rolled up like the priestly blessing
Inscribed 2500 years ago and hidden
In a crypt on the hill ignoring the Valley of Gehenna below
Staring rather toward Zion
Waiting for the bored youth who will discover it on a field trip
And bring it to the place where the delicate foil
Can be unfurled
Will be restored
Will call out once again:

And grant, you, peace.
V’yasem l’cha shalom.

*****

Some of the references:
yahrzeit -- Yiddish word for the anniversary of someone's death
shiva -- Hebrew for seven, the traditional mourning period after a funeral
shmay rabba -- "God's great name", a phrase in Kaddish, the prayer said by mourners
Shana Tova -- "A Good New Year", a greeting for Rosh Hashanah
The new vocabulary mentions words used for people who are captive or missing
The last part refers to the actual discovery of a scroll/amulet containing words similar to the Torah's priestly blessing of peace 

Back to College: Critiquing Utilitarianism

"Today" in Justice (Moral Reasoning 22), it was both a lecture and the first section! In the big lecture, the focus was on critiquing Bentham's utilitarianism, from the outside and the inside. I remember Professor Sandel's funny thing about how a research attempting to measure comparative utilities by survey found that living in Kansas was less desirable than having a tooth pulled. So obviously, practical issues with applying the principles of Bentham. Even John Stuart Mill, whose father attempted to apply Bentham to his education, ended up claiming that certain pleasures should factor higher in the utilitarian calculations.

JSM's bigger revision was to base individual rights on utility, a bold move that seems to go against the principle of aggregation. In the lecture it was also noted that Bentham was a penal reformer, on the basis (so say my notes) of the excessive pain inflicted on prisoners. My notes say something about liberty being taken into account, but I have no idea what I actually heard. I am surprised that more of a point wasn't made to compare the imputed social "gains" from incarceration to this pain factor. It doesn't seem a slam dunk that Bentham would support penal reform, but that's his major public policy contribution I think.

Professor Sandel chose utilitarianism as the starting point for the dialectic of the class, rather than starting chronologically with Aristotle. No question he wanted to feature the critiques, which go in so many directions (come from so many directions). At the same time, he wanted to give the broad consequentialist intuition its due. Over time, it's been clear to me just how tenacious utilitarianism remains as a metaphor, if not a method. I mean I still think all the time about whether I am doing enough good, in some kind of measurable way. That's the positive part. The negative of course being the treatment everywhere of people as commodities. Which I think I only started to get the language in this class.

The section, with (now Professor) Benor, had such a different feel. He talked about wanting us to learn how to read philosophical texts. It looks like he had two methodological points. One being to track certain concepts and the debates over them through different texts, being careful to identify each thinker's take on a term that might seem common among philosophers. So Bentham did not hold by the concept of "community" as something other than the aggregate of its members. (Benor asked the clarifying question: If there is no community, how is the idea of "general utility" even relevant?) Benor also instructed us to read a philosopher as though their picture of the world is true, rather than critique as we go along. Later on, I learned from my co-teacher Leslie Bazer to call this "the believing game", from Peter Elbow. I forgot that I had heard it long before.

This move is incredibly hard. It's gotten easier for me, I think because I have the time to do it when I am preparing to teach, and because I know there will be a time for the believing game and a time for critical reading. My students, even adults, have much more trouble doing this. It's really hard to hold a picture of someone else's thought when they seem wrong. And even more so when you feel strongly about a problem and the new idea you're being asked to consider seems not helpful or relevant even, and you want to talk to the merits of the issue. Just today in Torah class, we were talking about the idea of malchut, and my whole point was what are various approaches to making anything out of a problematic metaphor for the Divine. But a lot of the conversation was: Here's my solution, or here's why I don't even consider that metaphor worth considering.

Back to substance -- I don't know if I had thought much about what a "community" is before this discussion. I still wrestle with the concept, and even last week and this week have been back and forth with some people about it. Eager to see what I learned and thought later in the course. Bentham's position that you can't say the community is prior to the individual -- I don't like it at all as a normative proposition. I would like to believe it's not even descriptively correct. Do I have a refutation, at this point in my life? Not a universal one. I am working long-term on this idea of a podcast series called "I in We", which is about how the individual emerges as a distinct, sacred (if you will) entity out of prior groups and possibly communities.

Back to College #2: Utilitarianism; Gender and Psychological Theory

Looking at my notes from "Justice" and Psychology today -- it's neat for me to see where the terms consequentialism and utlitarianism first entered my mental landscape. Professor Sandel did a nice job (and I did a good job in my notes) capturing both the simplicity of Bentham's theory and the nuance of Mill's revisions of it, to bring it into conversation with some accepted moral principles ("do unto others"), the emerging liberal framework of rights, and the Aristotelian concept that some goods are more good than others. Interesting that I caught that without knowing much about Aristotle (until later in the course, but probably until much, much later in studies and probably long after my formal studies). In some ways it's a wonder utilitarianism sticks at all, in light of the discussion we had the way my notes reflect it and Professor Sandel's later critique of liberalism generally.

The psych lecture continued the overview of methods and types of theories, and my reading notes were about gender bias in contemporary psychological research. Professor Demick started very early to point out how gender affects conceptions of development, and the particular study we read about to take notes on (Broverman?) was about how when people were asked to rate traits as male or female, and as I guess mature or well-adjusted or not, or something like that, the male-associated traits were more likely to be rated as better-adjusted. This held true largely across ages, or between researchers and students, so it becomes a bias passed down within the field unless pushed back on, as well as a reflection of society generally. I don't remembering this seeming like some kind of radical thing to say back in 1985; Professor Demick presented it critically but rationally as a tool necessary for interpreting observations and studies. I also at some point noticed, maybe when this came up next or maybe right away, that despite my male-ness I myself seemed to track more of the "female" qualities than the average male in the study. I know some friends and I, or maybe just my friend Tova who was also in this class, talked about that in the dorm!