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The Eye Inside the Eye

This was my D'var Torah for Parashat Re'eh last Shabbat, August 12, 2023.

Two friends encounter each other late at night near the town square. It’s a classic small New England town, gazebo in the center, and it’s a particularly clear night, the new moon. The one finds the other kneeling down next to a street light looking around at the sidewalk.

“Hi! What are you doing?”

“I was here earlier and I lost my ring, so I’m looking for it.”

“Where do you think you lost it?”

“I’m pretty sure over there by the gazebo,” says the first one, pointing across the street at the village green.

“So why are you looking over here?”

“Oh! Because the light is better.”

This is what it’s like for us often, when we’re looking for something we need or we’ve lost. It’s hard to get ourselves to look in certain places, hard or scary, and often it’s easier to stay where we already know how to see the things we’ve learned how to see.

Which is why the opening to our parasha is so surprising. Re’eh Look -- I am giving in front of you today a blessing and curse. Re’eh, anochi notayn lifnaychem hayom b’rachah uk’lalah.

When the Torah wants to get our attention, it almost never says Re’eh, “see” -- it says:  Sh’ma! Listen. It’s not “Look O Israel Adonai is your God...”; it’s Sh’ma Yisrael.

Seeing and hearing are two very different metaphors, and I think the metaphors are meaningful even for those of us whose physical sight or hearing is not perfect.

Seeing is the most problematic of our senses. We can only look in one direction at a time, and even those of us with good peripheral vision miss things a bit to the side. When we’re looking for something particular, we miss other things even right in front of us -- like the study where the subjects were asked to watch a video of a basketball game and count passes between players, and completely missed the gorilla walking across the court.

We have eyelids that we can deliberately close. We “see with our own lens.” We talk about “looking the other way”, in order to avoid seeing a person who needs us or a wrong we know is being done. We can use our mind to override the inputs that our eyes might want to give us. And some of the al-chets on Yom Kippur, the list of wrongs, are about our eyes -- sikkur ayin, leering at someone; aynaim ramot, looking down on someone.

And seeing is different from hearing because what we perceive through our eyes alone is always on the surface. Seeing often stands for judging a book by its cover.

Or looking in a certain direction is just hard, or painful. This week, it’s hard to look at certain places in this Sanctuary where someone is so palpably missing.

So seeing is imperfect and it’s difficult -- and it’s easier just to look in the light.

Hearing is a different metaphor. Our ears hear a voice from deep within someone trying to say something real, or a cry from the heart. We can try to plug our ears, but we can’t close them at all the way we can with our eyes. There’s no real way to turn your head in a direction so you don’t hear. 

Sounds force us to pay attention even when we try not to -- if the gorilla made a sound, you couldn’t help yourself from noticing that it’s different from the dribble of a basketball.

So it’s not surprising that in the Sh’ma itself -- the prayer that opens with “Hear O Israel”-- the Torah tells us to look at our tzitzit so our eyes have something mitzvah-centered to focus on, v’lo tatura acharei l’vavchem, v’acharei eineichem asher atem zonim achareihem -- and don’t go straying after your mind, and after your eyes which you go lusting after!

Moshe in our parasha talks about doing the right thing in the future as the opposite of the desert, where “everyone does anything that seems right in their own eyes” -- ish kol hayashar b’einav. Maybe it goes all the way back to Gan Eden, to Chava taking a look at that fruit.

Sh’ma is a spiritual paradigm for us -- for being responsive to others, letting ourselves be drawn out toward them even when we’re not prepared, getting to what’s beneath the surface in the people around us. And it’s a paradigm for responding even to our own inner voice, our own prayers and our cries. Sh’ma is all over this parasha, it’s one of the most important words in the whole book of D’varim.

So why does our parasha say: Re’eh. See this important thing I want you to have, a blessing as well as a curse to stay away from. And by the way just for good measure, Moshe messes with the people: See what I am putting in front of you today, which is that in a few weeks I’m going to show it to you on some mountains across the river which you literally can’t see from where you are now.

Rabbi Josh Feigelson teaches: Nonetheless, Moshe uses the language of Re’eh instead of Sh’ma here, because we don’t have the option to replace seeing with hearing. What we can do is to make our seeing more like our hearing.

In our parasha, human eyes are generally not a good metaphor -- but Divine eyes are. Kira Sirote points out a unique phrase in the Bible that appears once in the Torah and a couple places in the prophets, and the phrase is ayin b'ayin, literally an eye in an eye.

It’s used once in the Torah for the most famous law about the eye, an eye for an eye (and there’s a nugget about that you can ask me later how it connects). But in the prophets, Kira notes, the phrase talks about a moment when the regular human eye becomes a prophet’s eye. “How beautiful on the mountains are the legs of the one who announces redemption, making sounds of peace... Your lookouts will raise their voices because eye in eye they will see the Divine returning, ayin b’ayin yir’u b’shuv Adonai"! (Isaiah 52:7-8)

Imagine seeing something as simple as another person’s leg, just a person walking, and immediately perceiving from somewhere deeper that redemption is almost here, that peace is possible within yourself or in the world -- that reunions are possible with people, and our own souls and dreams, and even I pray with loved ones across the boundary between this world and the next.

Imagine if there was an eye inside your eye, whose default was to wonder what depth or what feeling is beneath the surface of any person you see. 

A kind of spiritual infrared, an eye that perceives more wavelengths when it sees, that almost hears when it looks.

An eye looking at tzitzit not to avoid being distracted, but to follow them out past their ends in each of the four directions because there is too much here not to miss.

An eye that closes long enough to replenish itself to see more, or to leave time to see dreams.

An eye inside your eye that saw when another person was looking over here because it’s hard for them right now to look over there.

That I believe was Chava’s eye in Gan Eden, which saw that the fruit was good and nourishing, and beautiful, and worth thinking about more, before she took it and shared it.

Two friends encounter each other, and one of them has lost something. The other asks, “Why are you looking over here,” and the first one says, “Because here the light is better.”

And the friend says, “Maybe we can look there together.” Or: “Would it help if I stayed around here while you went over there.” Or: “I’ll be here again if you want to look tomorrow.”

As we look ahead to the moonless night later this week that marks the month of Elul, that leads us to the new year -- may our seeing be as good as our hearing. May we help each other make our way to the mountains we can’t yet see where announcers are calling us; help each other see the blessings in the places that are harder to search. And may we all see each other with the eye inside our eye.

Shabbat Shalom!

Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy -- A Map of Spring and Summer 2021

I've been wanting to get this down for weeks.... I’ve been very affected since March by Torah time – by how the cycle of reading the Torah in synagogue has mapped onto our experience of the pandemic since its one-year anniversary.

The first anniversary of the formal declaration of the pandemic and the massive shut-downs coincided with Jews’ reading the end of the book of Exodus and the start of the book of Leviticus. The Torah itself says that one year passed between the instructions Moshe received for the night of the Exodus, and the final assembly of the mishkan, the desert Sanctuary that would be a focal point for the Divine Presence. During that year in the Torah there had been war and thirst, a complete reorientation of the food distribution system to adjust to (i.e. manna), the new laws and covenant at Mt. Sinai, the in-fighting around the Golden Calf. Then finally a process of calming and reconciliation, and a collective project of building the “tabernacle.” Everyone gave something unique, with its own texture or color, from their life of that year – to be repurposed into a symbol of their unity. When the mishkan was finally assembled, the Divine Presence visibly infused it, with the cloud and fire that was going to lead the people ahead toward their new land and their new life.

That was what we read more or less on the first anniversary of the shut-down, as we were entering a new phase too – the ramping up of Covid-19 vaccination. I expected a turn toward dealing with the new ethical challenges of moving forward, the project of reconnecting and rebuilding a reality better than the one pre-pandemic.

But Leviticus opens with a cloud around the mishkan, and Moshe himself hesitating to approach it to hear these kinds of teachings. The cloud and fire do not in fact move forward. Something is not – was not ready.

Leviticus, the book that was the backdrop of our spring, is not actually a book of moving forward in the desert. And it’s not directly a book of society and ethical teaching, at least not for the first eighty percent or so. Leviticus does open with travel – but it does open with movement. It’s the motion of individuals coming one by one mostly, in a process the Torah calls korban or coming-closer, with offerings. People coming in closer, walking into the center, toward the cloud, with their offerings. Toward the cloudy place, with offerings occasioned by basic emotions – wellbeing, gratitude, guilt. Getting out and coming toward, to eat a sacred meal with a Kohen, to cleanse themselves of something, to burn up something completely and leave it behind.

Something got my attention in March, when I looked at the Torah and realized that it was telling me not to expect people to be ready to plunge ahead. Especially I shouldn’t expect people to be ready to engage in discussion about ethics and society fully just yet.

For a while, the Torah says n Leviticus, moving is just getting used to back and forth. It’s not one direction, from alone to together, from isolated to the Divine. It’s back and forth. Leviticus doesn’t command offerings from everyone on the same schedule. Yes, there’s some paying attention to right and wrong, sometimes you have to bring something in because of that. But mostly, we’re guided by ourselves, we know when to try moving. Closer and back out. The cloud and the fire are in the center and draw our eyes even when we’re still alone, to help us remember that there is something common even on the days we don’t bring anything. Do it like this for a while, move in your own directions, says the Torah for eighteen chapters, and then we’ll get back to ethics, and then we’ll try moving on together.

The commentaries on the opening verse of Leviticus focus on the last letter of its first word Vayikra. In the Torah scroll, the last letter alef is written as a small superscript. That alef has two dimensions. Its presence or absence changes the word from calling to happenstance. The letter alef signifies ani or anochi, “I” – which can stand for the ego in a strong sense or the Divine, “I am Adonai your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” Leviticus opens with a cloud around the tabernacle and a spiritual teetering between calling and being just tossed around, between a sense of our own “I” and not having it. Reclaiming what “I” feel like, who “I” am, is what a lot of us were doing as the pandemic hit its first year and we contemplated the next phase ahead. We were, and surely still are, disoriented. Leviticus gives that spiritual state a name and a picture and a pacing.

That was most of Leviticus, and it turned out to be not just accurate but for me soothing.

By the time the book of Leviticus turned to its code of ethics in chapter 19, and its social vision in chapter 25, things had in fact changed around us quite profoundly. The accelerating progress of vaccination in many places led just at this time to the CDC’s revision of its mask guidelines for fully vaccinated people. It was time to open the book of Numbers – the book of the march forward, the organization of people toward the battle for the new land, and the conflicts and delays along the way. But at least it’s the book of moving together, even if together is starting and stopping, and quarreling among ourselves.

Leviticus and Numbers share the perception that not everyone is spiritually ready to move in the same direction at the same time. But at some point, there is something you could call movement of the group, catalyzed by leaders or critical mass. Numbers acknowledges that deciding to move is hardly all there is. You’ve got plenty of opportunities to grind to a halt. In the Torah, these include questioning leaders and their motivations; people getting focused on immediate ease vs. longer-term goals; issues of justice and inclusion; people defining the end of the road in different ways. This last particularly struck me when we read about the tribes of Reuven and Gad who wanted not to go all the way to the new land with the other tribes, but settle where they were. To declare the journey and the fight were over. They and Moshe had it out, and eventually figured out a way for the tribes to work on setting up the common future together, even though tribe by tribe they would separate and live differently both economically and culturally. We should be so fortunate. In Numbers, some 38 years pass and if you read the book you can’t see where they went.

That’s more or less where we got in the Torah by early/mid-July. Now it’s time for Deuteronomy. What’s coming is preparation for the new year – the Jewish new year which starts this year in early September, as does the new school year. The new Torah year starts a few weeks later. Deuteronomy is about getting to the cusp of the new land, the future. It is a book of review of the teachings, going over them for the first time in a long time. At long last, Moshe gets to focus on the ethics and laws and teachings. He gets to talk about them, and also to remind people to continue to learn and study and talk about them from the moment they enter the new land. The time for putting that off – for delaying our ethical conversations, or pushing them to the side or to a small group of interested people – we’re being asked to consider that time over. To be fully human, ready to live, is also to be accountable ethically and intellectually and spiritually. That is what the Jewish new year is all about, and the intellectual explorations in Deuteronomy coincide in the Jewish year with weeks of spiritual introspection. And since this is hard any year, and especially this year, the rabbis of our tradition long ago paired Deuteronomy with (Second) Isaiah, with words of comfort and encouragement, with a welcome of people back to the Divine, back from exile toward home and each other.

I’m waiting to see how Deuteronomy maps onto the end of the summer. But I wanted to get this spiritual journal of the Torah cycle down now, because I am so grateful I had the Torah in this way these past few months. I’ve had more than the Torah’s specific teachings, each verse or each week – I’ve had this structure. It has helped pace me, and see the moment I’m in and some weeks ahead. I have always paid attention to the seasonal flow of the Torah readings, but this year I have seen in the Torah’s pacing through the desert so much I hadn’t seen before. I am grateful, and hope I’ll be attentive to the same things in the weeks and months ahead.

Building Mountains After Charlottesville

This was the sermon I gave on Saturday, August 19, 2017.

There is a sweet little film from about twenty years ago starring Hugh Grant, called “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain.” The story is that two government cartographers come to the small Welsh town of Ffynnon Garw, to measure the height of the mountain just outside the town. The cartographers determine that in fact it is not a mountain, but a hill, because it is slightly short of the 1000 feet required for classification as a mountain.

The villagers are of course dismayed, because they have always lived by a mountain. Their first response is just to assert to the surveyors that Ffynnon Garw is in fact a mountain village. But failing that, they develop a plan. They conspire to keep the cartographers from leaving town with their official measurement and their verdict. And while they are occupied, the townspeople begin to bring sacks of dirt to the hill, to dump there one on top of the other, in order to raise the height. They are going to make a hill into a mountain.

Of course they battle rain, which washes down their pile as it grows, but they keep going. Eventually, just before they have to leave town, the cartographers are brought back. And sure enough, by a small margin, Ffynnon Garw has its mountain.

This week the Torah portion talks about two mountains:

רְאֵ֗ה אָנֹכִ֛י נֹתֵ֥ן לִפְנֵיכֶ֖ם הַיּ֑וֹם בְּרָכָ֖ה וּקְלָלָֽה׃

See, this day I give before you blessing and curse:

וְהָיָ֗ה כִּ֤י יְבִֽיאֲךָ֙ יְהוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ אֶל־הָאָ֕רֶץ אֲשֶׁר־אַתָּ֥ה בָא־שָׁ֖מָּה לְרִשְׁתָּ֑הּ

וְנָתַתָּ֤ה אֶת־הַבְּרָכָה֙ עַל־הַ֣ר גְּרִזִ֔ים וְאֶת־הַקְּלָלָ֖ה עַל־הַ֥ר עֵיבָֽל׃

It will happen, when Adonai your God bring you to the land that you are coming there to possess it, you shall put the blessing on Mount Gerizim and the curse on Mount Eival. (Deuteronomy 11:26, 29)

Later on, Moshe instructs that half the people should stand on the top of one mountain and half on the top of the other. As Rashi describes it, from the valley the Levites would face Mount Gerizim and shout out what blessing is, and then face Mount Eival and shout out what curse is.

Blessing and curse. Clear as the tops of two mountains. Clear as an echoing voice.

There are things in the world that you have to strain to see. Where goodness, where harm, is in the shadows or in a small corner. But there are times when good and evil are in clear view and clear sound.

Last weekend – last Shabbat – was one of those times. We got a look at blessing and curse in Charlottesville. The mountaintop of blessing, of good, in the people who put their bodies and their lives on the line, to stand up for unity, to block hate from moving forward. To show an understanding of what African-Americans experience when they see icons of the era of slavery in public places.

The mountaintop of curse, of evil, in the neo-Nazis, the white supremacists, who came with terror, hoping to hurt, armed to the teeth. Not to speak but to beat.

If you’re not sure – or if you don’t know what the answer is to the president’s analysis of good people and violent people in roughly equal measure – there is a documentary of about 20 minutes that I linked the other day and can send again. It has the whole story, the supremacists and the peaceful counterprotestors and the antifa, and you can see the relative numbers and the relative force. You can see Christopher Cantwell – he’s a prominent white supremacist who lives in Keene. He said he’s holding out for a president who doesn’t “give his daughter to a Jew”, someone like Trump but a lot more racist. I can’t imagine why the president of the United States wouldn’t stand up for the honor of his own family, why that wouldn’t engage him in standing up for us and the others who were targets of the demonstrators’ hate.

Blessing and good are a mountain, and curse and evil are a mountain.

What are the real sizes of those mountains? Which mountain should be looking at now? How long should we stand and face Har Eival, probing the details of the curse? And when is it time to turn around, to face Har Gerizim and shout, urging ourselves along in blessing?

Rashi wrestles with this in his commentary on the Torah. The Torah says that first the Levi’im look at Har Eival and call out the curse, and then they look at Har Gerizim and call out the blessing. But Rashi says it’s the reverse – first we are to hear the words of blessing ring out. Only then are we to listen to the curse. Only then can we appreciate what is evil, what evil deprives us of. Only after the blessing can we summon what we need to hear the words of the curse as they echo all around, without being flattened in the process.

Rashi’s insight is that hearing the curse is both necessary and dangerous. That mountain is there, and we need to see it. But no amount of looking at it will make it smaller. We can overwhelm and demoralize ourselves by gazing too much at it, railing about the fact that it is there at all. But we cannot afford to be dragged into helplessness. Offensive monuments can be taken down, but the mountain of the curse will not fall into the sea so soon.

There are people who choose to stand on that mountain, and we can’t pull them off in a day. All we can do is to keep them there, and set up to prevent other people from going up there. That’s what the counterprotesters were doing in Charlottesville last Shabbat, and in Boston today.

It is not healthy to keep reading the same opinion summaries over and over, and to be stuck in rage about people who don’t understand. At some point, that is self-indulgent. At some point, the issue isn’t how bad we feel and how outraged we are, but the actual effects of institutionalized racism on African-Americans. I myself have made this mistake, even this week. As I spent time reading and writing and networking, it took me until Thursday to reach out to the local African-American leaders I actually know.

The shadow of Har Eival, the mountain of the curse, will still be there no matter what we are doing. We don’t have to stare at it directly all the time.

And it is good for us to look at Har Gerizim, the mountain of blessing – the mountains of blessing. Look at how many people, increasing all the time, are opening their minds and opening their hearts to people who are different, who suffer more because of their difference. More in every age group, not just young but old as well. More in every ethnic and religious group – those established in this country for centuries, and those that are newer. More people in both political parties. This is also part of the news, but it’s not always in the news. We have to make a conscious effort to stand on the mountain of blessing.

But it’s not just about where we look – how we center ourselves spiritually, in reflection. Sometimes it seems like the mountain of blessing isn’t quite as high as it needs to be. In geographical reality, in fact, the blessing mountain of Har Gerizim is just a bit shorter than Har Eival, the mountain of the curse. We are, then, exactly in the same position as the residents of Ffynnon Garw. Our mountain looks, this week, like it is not quite high enough.

I don’t believe that the mountain of the curse is truly higher. But there is no question that we need to make the mountain of blessing taller than it is.

That work is the work of passion, and of community, and of grit.

I don’t doubt that there is passion.

Community – I have been looking for that one place in Greater Nashua where you find all the leaders of different groups, communities of color and ethnicity and faith, civic and government and business leaders. There are only incomplete groups. The interfaith council does not have enough congregations. One Greater Nashua is perhaps the biggest table, and we are missing wide swaths. Within our congregation, the most developed relationships are between our Klezmer band and the Gospel choir. We need to build on that.

Community is crucial, because fighting back against public hate is only the surface level. To get beyond general proclamations, to change society, we need to be where we can talk – about what different groups have in common, and about the competitions and conflicts and jealousies between hated groups. About what we can learn from other groups’ experiences, and about what they can learn from ours.

It’s out of that talking and those challenges that a deeper e pluribus unum comes out. It’s more than what we aren’t, what we’re against – it’s what we build. And we have to know each other better to do that, and there’s no shortcut. It takes time.

And the gritty work is about finally building the society that the mountain of blessing is beckoning and promising. Taking down the monuments, standing off with hate – those will seem easy in comparison. Our passion, our community, and then our detail work are necessary, because the answers we need are in good housing, which has to be designed and built. In education that doesn’t give up on anyone and teaches young people to live together with difference through their many years together in school. In good law enforcement. And in an economic life that invests in the people of all backgrounds and all regions who have been left behind, who haven’t had something to believe in and who are at each other’s throats as a result.

That’s what the mountain of blessing will be built of. Those are the sacks of soil, passed from hand to hand, slipping sometimes and sliding down, but building up if we keep at it.

And when we do, we will see that the two mountains are in fact different. The mountain of evil may seem like a monolith sometimes. But the mountain of blessing will be a sight to see. It will have a mighty foundation, set in place by the God of the universe, and it will bear the mark of the human hands that have raised it, that have lifted it high above the other mountains.

This is about more than two Shabbatot, in Charlottesville and Boston. See, I set before you today a blessing and a curse. We will have to keep at this work, and return here to talk about it often. But I know that we will. We will keep climbing up this hill, no matter how steep it seems, no matter how rough the path to reach the blessing.

And we will find that we are, as we always thought we were, a mountain village.

What Baseball Can Teach Us About the High Holy Days

This was my Dvar Torah last Shabbat, Sept. 3, 2016.

On the final day of the 1949 baseball season, George Kell of Detroit edged out Ted Williams of the Red Sox for the American League batting title.  Both of them are credited in the records as batting .343, which means that for every ten times they appeared at bat officially that season, they reached safely on average 3.34 times.

Batting averages are usually computed to the third decimal place -- the one-one-thousandth.  This is ridiculous, actually, because no one comes up to bat one thousand times in a season.  I found the pages that first discuss the statistic of batting average in the year 1872 edition of Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player, an annual report about baseball.  It has the rules of baseball in it and a discussion of records.  The editor, Henry Chadwick, explained in 1872 why he was convinced of the importance of batting average, which was then a new rating statistic.  I hoped to see why batting average should be drawn out to the .001, but there was no explanation.  It was just there, right from the start.

Anyway, 1949 was one of the closest batting races in baseball history.  George Kell actually defeated Ted Williams by an average of .3439 to .3427 -- or one five-thousandth of a hit per time at bat.

Baseball, and most sports, are amazing symbols of the measurement of success and excellence.  It’s not only the wild precision of batting averages.  It's also the fact that everyone’s performance and value to the team, and their pursuit of excellence, takes place in public, with thousands of people watching live and many more listening in or watching in the media.  Imagine if there were such a thing in life as keeping-promises percentage, complete-honesty ratio, patience index, or perhaps "earned-hugs average."  What would our lives be like if we were that accountable morally on a real-time basis?  If those statistics were published in the daily paper for our friends and community?

Today is Rosh Chodesh Elul.  The moon is new, which means there is one month now leading up to Rosh Hashanah, our new year.  We are meant to take this month to get ready for the High Holy Days, to take stock of ourselves and our relationships and our lives.  To ask others for forgiveness for the things we have done wrong, and to give forgiveness to those who ask us.  One Hebrew term for this process is cheshbon ha-nefesh חשבון הנפש, which literally means record-keeping for the soul -- checking our ethical and spiritual statistics.

This is daunting stuff.  But maybe it could be easier to start if we drew on some lessons from sports statistics to get us going.

The greatest quarterbacks miss the receiver twice for every three times their passes are caught. In soccer or hockey, you play for an hour or more, and if the team scores five times it's unbelievable. The greatest hitters in baseball hit .333 -- they fail to get a hit twice as many times as they succeed. 

But statistics focus on success.  They don't publish how many times a hockey team has the puck and doesn't score or even shoot.  If you’re that .333 hitter, you are an all-time great.  If you open up the weekly summaries of the league, you see counts of hits and doubles and home runs, all manner of success.  Yes, you might see strikeouts, but for the most part it’s about counting success, even though failure is far more prevalent.

The Izhbitzer Rebbe taught that the Torah uses the Hebrew words for confession (vidui וידוי) and for looking very carefully (hashkafa השקפה) in a surprising way.  In the early part of the Torah, people confess their errors and God looks in hidden corners to see wrongs.  But later on, the Torah teaches people to confess what they do well, and to ask God to help us see in hidden corners the effects of our goodness. The lesson, says the rebbe, is that before we can describe what we need forgiveness for, we should be reveling in our ethical successes.  We should be counting goodness, the times we’ve been a blessing to others.  Every coach and every athlete knows that the way you improve is by understanding what you’re already doing well, and building out from there.

The 1872 issue of Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player presented batting average as part of a debate over the best way to measure a batter’s success.  The previous measure was hits per game.  But a reader named H.A. Dobson had written to the editor that the players on teams that scored more runs would get more chances to bat, and therefore get more hits per game.  You wouldn’t have an accurate measure of who was the superior ballplayer.  The player with more hits per game might just be on a better team.  Henry Chadwick was convinced, and for more than a century it was batting average alone by which hitters were judged.

If you are a serious sports fan, you know this debate continues about what statistics tell you the most about a player.  Some measure the synergy between a player and the team -- wins and losses for a pitcher, runs batted in.  Some isolate the individual’s successes, like batting average or earned run average.

Judaism has two terms for forgiveness, and it’s the same distinction.  The words are selicha סליחה and mechila מחילה.  Selicha involves making things right -- it’s the synergy of a relationship between two people.  It’s figuring out what a wrong meant to the other person, or saying what a person did to hurt you, and trying to change the situation together.

Mechila מחילה is just about you.  It means being willing to give up your honor, to stand ashamed for a moment.  To have your own performance stand as it really was, to let another person help you see yourself clearly.

Traditionally, in the month of Elul we ask people for both, for slicha u'mechila סליחה ומחילה. We want to do better within our relationships and our groups, and as we look at ourselves alone in the mirror.

That process of forgiveness, selicha umechila, is one thing at a time.  And if it’s hard to do, take heart in the perspective of baseball statistics, where succeeding just one time in three is greatness.  Here’s a truth about reaching the major leagues of goodness, in this month of Elul and the new year to come.  It’s courtesy of lifelong minor leaguer Crash Davis from the movie Bull Durham (watch the clip through 2:05): 

You know what the difference is between hitting .250 and hitting .300?  1 got it figured out. Twenty-five hits a year in 500 at bats is 50 points. Okay?  There's 6 months in a season, that's about 25 weeks--you get one extra flare a week--just one--a gork, a ground ball with eyes, a dying quail-- just one more dying quail a week -- and you're in Yankee Stadium!

As you think about your keeping-promises percentage, as you work on your honesty ratio or your patience index, remember: just more success a week, and you’re in... Fenway Park.

Parashat Re'eh: Getting Ready for the Election

This week I write with a particular awareness of the time of year.  It's Rosh Chodesh Elul, the start of the month leading into Rosh Hashanah.  It's our annual time of introspection and self-analysis.  It's also a week since the presidential election choice has been clarified, with the selection of Rep. Paul Ryan as Gov. Mitt Romney's running mate.  In any election year, the choice of our leaders is a personal commitment we each make, a choice about the society we would like to see in the year ahead.  It's time to think about the election philosophically and spiritually.

Parashat Re'eh is the first of a set of three Torah readings that I consider to be political, at least in part.  Throughout the parashiyot (weekly readings) of Re'eh, Shoftim, and Ki Tetze, there are laws and lenses for society.  These do not translate easily or directly into modern America.  Rather, they frame certain issues and offer certain perspectives that help us stand back from our own assumptions about politics and government.

I believe that the first step in being a voting citizen is to have a political philosophy.  That means reflecting and clarifying our own assumptions and principles about what makes a good society and what makes society function well.

The first question a political philosophy in contemporary America asks is:  Is there such a thing as a good society?  If so, we think about how to achieve it.  Each person or facet of society has some responsibility for it that we have to work out.  If there is no such thing as a good society, then the ideal is a society that allows everyone to choose their own version of an ideal life.

The answer to the question about the good society gives you a defintion of individual liberty.  If there is no good society, then individual liberty should be expansive.  if there is such a thing as a good society, then individual liberty has a purpose and some boundaries.

The second issue is about the role of different institutions in our society.  It's common in America to talk about the individual versus the government, or business versus the government.  I think that these are the major forces in society

• the individual citizen
• businesses on a small or medium scale
• businesses that are part of everything we do -- finance, communications, medical care
• governments
• small scale organizations that are not about money -- civic groups, religious groups, etc.
  

A political philosophy asks:  In what ways are any of these contributing to, or working against, the good society or the liberty of the individual?  What should we do to boost the contributions or rein in the excesses?

I think this is a better set of questions than "more government or less government."  Your answers to these lead you to specific thoughts about specific issues.

So where is the Torah?  As I wrote in the bulletin at the beginning of summer, the Torah doesn't have a single answer on the issues.  But there are more perspectives than you might think.  True, the Torah doesn't speak about "big banks" -- but in Parashat Re'eh, for instance, the Torah speaks a good deal about lending and borrowing.  (And the Talmud is very knowledgeable about credit and even about financial innovations such as futures.)

Here are just a few principles in this week's parasha.

*Economic life and community life are interwoven.  The economy isn't a separate sphere.  Prosperity and the celebration of the holy days are discussed together.  Prosperity is funneled into bonds between the well-off and those without land to sustain them.  Prosperity even links Israelites and non-Israelites.

*Lending and giving.  The Torah talks about tithing, a giving of one-tenth of one's harvest each year.  In years 1, 2, 4, and 5 of every seven-year cycle, that tithe is used as part of a pilgrimmage to Jerusalem, to celebrate with the entire nation.  In years 3 and 6, the tithe stays in town.  It is shared with everyone who has no land to sustain them, whether Israelite or not.

According to the Mishnah, tithing is not really an "offering."  A person who does not tithe is "stealing from the poor."  (There are other tithes and required offerings than the one mentioned in this week's reading.)  Jewish scholars discuss whether the Torah's system is essentially a flat tax or not.

The Torah also talks about lending as a way of meeting the needs of a poor person in a sustainable way.  I believe the Torah is not only talking in economic terms.  Lending creates a certain kind of relationship -- a partnership over the long term, a horizon where someone can look forward to dignity down the road if not immediately.  Rabbi Moses Maimonides taught that lending to a poor person, or investing in their work, is the highest form of tzedakah.

*There is both hope and despair about ending poverty.  Helping those in need is not only about the outcome.  In this week's reading, the Torah says two things.  "There shall be no needy among you — since the Lord your God will bless you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you" (Deuteronomy 15:4).  And, famously, in the same chapter:  "For there will never cease to be needy ones in your land, which is why I command you: open your hand" (Deuteronomy 15:11).

Eradicating poverty is a goal, and it's reasonable to measure how well we do it.  At the same time, the Torah makes clear that the act and intention to fight poverty is important even when it doesn't meet that goal.

When I study these, I see a more complicated picture than "liberal" or "conservative."  I see questions about the nature of society and the role of money that the Torah would ask both liberals and conservatives.  To liberals the Torah might say, for instance:  Do the programs you advocate create relationships of mutuality and dignity?  To conservatives the Torah might say:  What proportion of one's wealth comes with an obligation to society?  The point isn't to play ping-pong, but to study and reflect.  To clarify one's political philosophy, then to critique and improve it.  And only then, to vote.  And then after that, to keep acting in society.

Parashat Re'eh: Learning from Lending

When it comes to questions of poverty and economic justice, the Torah has a way of speaking across the ages to the complexities of rich and poor.  In Parashat Re'eh, Moshe introduces an idea that even today seems unique:  free loans to poor people.

We usually idealize a form of giving that is pure generosity, not tainted by selfishness or hope of anything in return.  If we could achieve such generosity, it would indeed be ideal.  What happens when we don't?  Or worse, what happens when we think we are unselfish but actually aren't?

For instance, sometimes we give with an expectation of gratitude in return, or a hope that we will simply feel good about ourselves.  Perfectly normal!  But what if those hopes aren't satisfied?  We might pull back a little back from being so giving the next time, or become disillusioned.  Even giving can have that element of self-centeredness.

Worse, I think, is what might happen in a relationship of pure giving with nothing in return.  A one-way gift sets up an uncomfortable or embarrassing relationship.  Or an unequal one (when it was our intent to give because everyone is equal!).

The Torah's free loan idea is a remarkable cure for all of these potential pitfalls of giving.  A free loan is essentially two gifts.  Each party gets to give, and to receive.  No one gains or loses; it's an equal partnership.  When the loan is repaid, the embarrassment disappears and so does the inequality.

In fact, it might be that even when the loan is made -- as a true loan, not "if you don't repay me it's all right" -- the knowledge that it will be repaid eliminates the inequality at the start.  It's not a gift at all, but a contract, and a contract can only be made by equals.

God God's-self is the model here, according to the Talmud.  Each day, God grants us life and bounty to use, in a relationship of covenant.  Rather than feel only inferior to the Creator, this covenant enables us to be God's partners.

I learned this lesson from Jeffrey Dekro, founder of the Shefa Fund and creator of TZEDEC, the Tzedek/Justice Economic Development Campaign, now housed at the Jewish Funds for Justice.  (Read more here.)  I have seen this kind of lending take place today, and seen how much the borrower-who-will-repay has self-respect in the process.  And respect too, and admiration. in the eyes of the lender.  I've told one story in a previous sermon about this, which you can read here in my write-up of an interview with a street-cart entrepreneur I met in New York City several years ago.

In Parashat Re'eh, there is both lending and giving.  Today, we talk only the language of giving.  Even when we give, we should bear in mind the lessons we can apply from the idea of the free loan.