Parshat Shoftim in NYC

One of the first gifts our daughter, Ayelet, ever received was a Tzedaka Box.  It was one of the first gifts because it was given to us long before we were ever pregnant.  It was a gift from the manager of the Judaica store from the AJU before we graduated.  Since Ayelet was an infant we began to give her change and have her put money into the Tzedaka box to teach her the value of giving.  Last Thanksgiving we had a Young Family program here at MJC and we made Tzedaka boxes that looked like bagels, this was based on the wonderful book Bagels from Benny. Since she made that one she has wanted to use it every shabbat.  I realized around that time that we needed to teach her more about what this means.  Here was the problem, WE gave her OUR money and SHE placed it into some container that did not affect her at all.  She did not give anything up and she did not see where the money was going or who it was helping.  I began to bring her piggy bank down with us to the dining room and began to give her some money.  I would explain to her: “Ayelet, here is some change.  It is now yours and you can do with it as you want.  You can put it in your piggy bank and save it for you to buy something, or you can put it in the Tzedaka box and give it to somebody who needs help.  You may also choose to save some for you and give some to other people.” I was so impressed that she chose to keep some, because it meant that she understood the principle and that she still gave some away.  The thing about Tzedaka Boxes is that they are often too removed from the actual giving.  We are obligated to give, not because we are good people but because God commands us to do so.  Quite often we have these beautiful boxes that cost an enormous amount of money and we fill them up but we do not realize when we do so that ultimately that money will be given to a needy person or an organization.  It is too divorced from its reason, and we often do not actually play a role in the act of Tzedaka.  Tzedaka is not about charity, it is not about being a charitable person. It is about correcting the wrongs of this world not out of choice but out of obligation to God and to humankind.  That is why it is called Tzedaka/justice and not charity/choice. 

So last Sunday we were in NYC.  We were on 5th avenue, and in case you are not familiar with the types of stores on 5th avenue, they are very expensive ones and very busy ones as well.  Regardless, as in all places in the world poverty is still present and impoverished homeless people are there in large numbers.  As I was walking to meet Carrie and Ayelet I saw a homeless person and I was about to give him money and then I stopped and thought it would be better to have Ayelet do it, and so I waited.  When I found them it appears I was too late, Carrie had already done the same thing.  We had food with us for Ayelet and she was given the choice of keeping it or sharing it with the homeless people.  She asked if they were hungry and we said yes, and she said give them the food.  We had her give them them food as that was what we were trying to teach her.  She brightened their day and she provided them with some much needed food to get them through the day as well.  We also gave her some money to hand to them.  When we were on Madison heading to dinner we happened upon another homeless man.  We offered food and he said he did not want chicken or meat, and we told him we had yogurt and cheese, and he was so happy.  Then we realized we also had animal crackers left as well, and we handed those to him.  He refused them, and said “those are your daughter’s,” and she smiled at him and said she wanted to share them with him.  He was near tears and we were as well.

Here is the issue: we have made it a little to easy to dehumanize the homeless amongst us. We have demonized them, and turned them into pariahs.  Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel writes about the prophets and how they would decry a civilization that condoned one homeless person, what would they say today?  Are there homeless drug addicts? yes.  Are there homeless people with mental issues? yes.  Are there homeless people who have made bad decisions? yes. And if helping these types of people is wrong then I accept being wrong.  But who could argue helping a person with none of the above is wrong.  We must help the homeless reclaim their own humanity that our society has robbed them of, and in return we will regain a portion of our own humanity.

In this week’s Torah portion we learn the famous phrase: צדק צדק תרדוף, Justice… Justice you shall pursue.  Many wiser scholars have written on this verse: why the double of justice and why the pursuing?  The traditional answer is that the double use of justice is that justice must be carried out in a just way.  Robin Hood would not pass this test.  And the pursuing question is traditionally understood to mean that we must go out and make this happen, we cannot wait for the opportunity to perform this commandment to present itself to us, we must make it happen.

I believe these are both correct.  It is a non-religious idea that the ends justifies the means, and we must not allow ourselves to become complacent and to fall into the trap of doing bad because it results in good.  Likewise we must not sit idly by waiting for the opportunity to observe the mitzvah of tzedaka, we must go out and make it happen.  But how about another way of looking at it.  We are commanded to do it ourselves and we are commanded to lead our children to do the same.  Perhaps we could say the doubling of justice is to teach us to go out and double it through doing tzedaka ourselves but also by raising children who will do the same.  And with regards to pursuing, I think we might also be able to say that even if this act of giving could cause me to live without a little, and thus need to pursue more, or worse; leave myself feeling pursued… we must still do it.

Lets make a world worthy of our prophets and through doing so we will make a world worthy of God as well.

Who is to blame?

I want to begin with some beautiful words from Jack Johnson:

"Cookie Jar"

i would turn on the tv, but it’s so embarrassing
to see all the other people, i don’t know what they mean
it was magic at first, when they spoke without sound
but now this world is gonna hurt, you better turn that thing down
turn it around

“it wasn’t me,” says the boy with the gun
“sure i pulled the trigger, but it needed to be done
because life’s been killing me ever since it begun
you can’t blame me because i’m too young”

“you can’t blame me, sure the killer was my son
but i didn’t teach him to pull the trigger of the gun
it’s the killing on his tv screen
you can’t blame me, it’s those images he seen”

“you can’t blame me,” says the media man
“i wasn’t the one who came up with the plan
i just point my camera at what the people want to see
it’s a two way mirror and you can’t blame me”

“you can’t blame me,” says the singer of the song
or the maker of the movie which he based his life on
“it’s only entertainment, as anyone can see
it’s smoke machines and makeup, you can’t fool me”

it was you, it was me, it was every man
we’ve all got the blood on our hands
we only receive what we demand
and if we want hell then hell’s what we’ll have

i would turn on the tv, but it’s so embarrassing
to see all the other people, don’t know what they mean
it was magic at first, but let everyone down
and now this world is gonna hurt, you better turn it around
turn it around

 

Every time we have an instance of grotesque gun violence in our midst we hear the same refrains from all sides.  The left demands stricter gun laws and the right demands that safety is obtained when all can defend themselves in the same way.  We then enter the discussion of the violence in the media and media outlets bring in great psychologists to argue that there is no evidence that violent media leads to any of this… The other side really has no argument because, well that pesky lack of evidence.  In the words of Jack Johnson, “It’s so embarrassing.”  You know what is embarrassing is that Huey Long’s words of so many years ago, “violence is as american as apple pie,” still are all too true.  You know what is embarrassing is that instead of bridging the divide between the two sides we refuse any common sense legislation that could help. You know what is embarrassing. on the same day that families were being notified that their loved ones would never come home again, that while people were at the bedsides of their loved ones holding on for dear life… people in the media dared to ask: “what does this mean for the movie?”  And then the question of violence in video games came up and I could not stand it any longer.  I watched expert after expert explain how violent video games are simply an outlet… That they do not correlate with an increased likely hood of homicide, except for when they do.  But here is the question which they ignore: if we are what we eat, then are we what we consume? And if we are what we consume, then what does our massive consumption of violence in the media say about us.  I while back I co-authored a paper on this subject with Rabbi Elliot Dorff, here is the link to it. In that paper we laid out an argument as to why violent and misogynistic video games should be banned from the Conservative Movement and should be reconsidered on the whole. We understood that they are protected by the 1st amendment as has been upheld time and again.  However, that makes no difference.  You know what isn’t protected by the 1st amendment, yelling fire in a crowded movie theatre.  Very interesting that that is the paradigmatic example of the limits on the freedom of speech.  When the speech places people in danger we have a limit. 

We continue to pass the buck.  We continue to blame everyone but ourselves, and now we have done it again.  Lets be clear on one thing, the guilty person is in custody.  But lets also recognize that the guilt does not end with him, it begins with him.  Nobody can diminish his guilt we can only recognize our own as well.   We have allowed for a culture that glorifies violence to become the norm.  We have allowed for our children to be desensitized to violence and have somehow made it okay to see violence.  In researching the above mentioned paper I was shocked at the gross double standards that existed in the families of America.  Sex was bad, violence was either good or more likely: acceptable.  Nudity was off the table, guns and bombs were the table.  We have basically created an environment where the first wish of God, that we be fruitful and multiply, has become viewed with such bitter disdain while the antithesis of all human life has become a simple expression of free speech. There are rules of war in our world today and many people scoff at this because war is inherently the absence of all rules.  And yet there are rules.  The Torah also had rules regarding war and interestingly enough these can be seen as perhaps a desire to temper our violence in the world.  If God could not do away with all violence, then at least He could assure that there would be parameters.  But I think the issue goes back further.  God saw the world was falling apart at the seams and He needed to repair it.  His decision was that He would restart it by means of a flood. The evil that was in the world prior to the world is described after the flood through the new allowance that we could eat meat.  God gave us permission to eat meat because our bloodlust was so strong it was the only thing He could do to curb it. The definition of a Hasid is someone who goes beyond the bare minimum of the law.  We need to become hasids in our view of violence.  We must not just sit and watch as our society continues to glorify the destruction of God’s creations.  We must not allow ourselves to be conned into believing that it is okay to harm other people.  And this brings me back to the conversation of the media and violence.  When we think video games we need to recognize that a great deal of adults play them.  However, the primary audience has always been and will continue to be children.  When we look at the top selling video games we see the majority have both violence and misogyny in them. If we want to play innocent and act as if these games do not get used by children, then go ahead.  But in reality they are being played more and more often by younger and younger children.  If we are to teach our children that violence is bad and never allowed, then we must show them that violence is not only bad in real life… it is bad entertainment as well.   In the words of a report by the National Organization of Women quoted in a paper online: “…if the games are just an escape, what does that say about how we escape? Is this our definition of 'fun' now? Is this how we 'play'?”  I am concerned about what it means that we find degrading women and degrading human worth as entertaining.  I am worried about not so much the physical consequences but the spiritual and emotional ones.  There are mixed findings in the medical literature and there are valid arguments on both sides… But I would like to promote the argument that while the freedom of speech gives these companies the right to publish this material… the freedom of the market provides us with the freedom to buy something else. 

A gunman viciously murdered innocent people watching a movie about a man who puts his own life on the line to see to it that justice exists in this world.  That gunman is alone the guilty person to be punished for the crimes he committed.  We as a society have some important work to do as well.  We are not guilty but innocent we are not either.  We must work to make a society where entertainment is something that works with our values and not against them, where murder and maiming are not acceptable and where a better world could be created because of the art that is being produced in it.  It is up to us to fight violence not just in the streets but in our entire existence.  May the souls of the 12 victims rest in peace, and may those who were injured begin the long road back to physical and emotional well being.