Tipping the Balance

This year, many children, my own included, will be reading The Diary of Anne Frank – seventy years since her first diary entry in 1942, sixty years since the diary first appeared in English. Not everyone has read it, and for many of us who have, we have not done so for years, but I suspect most of us are well familiar with the entry from July 15, 1944 when Anne writes, “Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart.” It is the most quoted passage from the diary, if not all of Holocaust literature, and as the diary went from print to Broadway to film, this passage and the sentiment it embodies came to serve, problematically so, as the diary’s take home message – a message of hope and faith in the ultimate goodness of humanity. As many cultural critics have noted, whether owing to the sensibilities of Hollywood, or simply to our own discomfort with confronting the horrors of the Holocaust head on, we tend to focus on this one line in order to transform an unspeakably painful narrative into an optimistic, upbeat message.

So it may come as a surprise to you when I tell you that when I stop to think or talk about Anne Frank, I too linger on this one passage, but for a very different reason. Because this passage, in the context that gave it expression, forces one to ask whether people at their core, in their heart, are really are good … or bad. I can’t help but wonder how it was, given her circumstances, given the evil encircling her, that Anne judged humanity so generously. The Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt, among others, has pointed out that Anne penned that famous line before her experiences in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Her last entry, August 1, 1944, was written three days before her family’s arrest. Would she, the thought experiment goes, have been inclined to write such uplifting comments following her betrayal? Would she, in the midst of Bergen-Belsen, having watched her beloved sister die of starvation, disease and exposure to the elements, have maintained such an outlook? Had young Anne been given the chance to record her thoughts right up to the day she herself succumbed to typhus, would she – one wonders – have maintained such a positive view of humanity?

The answer, of course, is that we will never know, but one suspects it is altogether doubtful. I believe that were we to be given a glimpse into her thoughts as she was engulfed in the heart of darkness, her characterization of humanity would be very different. Anne Frank wrote what she wrote and believed what she believed about the goodness of people because for those years in the attic from 1942-1944, she was the recipient of a series of extraordinary acts of kindness given under the most adverse circumstances. No matter how dark the outside world, these acts of kindness collectively granted her a positive and hopeful view of the human capacity for goodness. In other words, she did not judge humanity by judging the moral condition of Europe’s population. Rather, what determined Anne’s estimation of the whole was derived from the very smallest sample – one, two or three individuals upon whom her verdict for all of humanity rested.

Today is Yom Kippur. At its core, today is the day we stop to reflect on our own deeds and on the deeds of those around us, all the while knowing that all of humanity stands in judgment in God’s eyes. Today we confront our own shortcomings knowing that before God there are no secrets and all stands revealed. We have inflicted hurt upon others and others have hurt us; so many of our relationships are frayed and threadbare. As the tradition teaches, we use this time to turn inward, examine our souls and account for our deeds. Once again we have proven ourselves wanting, deficient in the eyes of our loved ones, our God and most painfully, having fallen short of what we know to be our God-given potential. And somewhere embedded in the sacred mystery of Yom Kippur also exists a promise, a promise waiting to be fulfilled: that despite everything, despite what we have proved time and again to be otherwise, people – you, me, all of us, all of humanity – are really good at heart. We can lift ourselves up, we can mend our relationships; each one of us can, through our own individual deeds, tip the balance, and be redeemed in our eyes and in the judgment of God.

The great sage of our tradition Maimonides, about whom I spoke earlier in the holidays, made explicit the connection between individual deeds and the judgment of all of humanity. In the fourth section of the third chapter of his Hilchot Teshuvah, Laws of Repentance, he makes three claims. The first two you may already know or could intuit; the third is somewhat dramatic and unexpected. First, Maimonides explains that throughout the year, every person should consider him- or herself as equally balanced between merit and sin. In other words, despite what other faith traditions or Lady Gaga may say, as Jews we do not believe that we are born this way or that way. Human beings are not inherently good or bad; we are both and we are neither. Second, and also to be expected, Maimonides explains that given the neutrality of our ethical condition, any one of our deeds has the potential to tip the balance of how we are judged one way or another. Today is the day that we know we have the gift and the curse of free will; the choices are ours to make, we will determine our fate. So far, so good. But then Maimonides says something unexpected. He suggests that our deeds have implications extending beyond ourselves, beyond our own immediate circle of relationships. The person who commits a sin tips the balance of the judgment not just of his or her own life but of the entire world – literally tips it to the side of destruction. And so too, the performance of a mitzvah, a good deed, bears the potential to tip the entire world towards redemption.

It is, when you pause to think about it, a stunning theological thought. One deed, good or bad, can save or destroy the world. At first glance, it appears that Maimonides is stating the ethical correlate to the notion that saving one life saves an entire world. But I think there is both more – and less – to the statement. It is a little more psychological and a little less theological, with significant bearing on our task today. It is a recognition of the close and inextricable connection between the deeds of the individual and how all of humanity is judged. Simply stated, I think that the medieval Maimonides was sensitive to what cognitive therapists will tell you today. That for better and for worse, human beings have a tendency to generalize from limited individual interactions towards far-reaching conclusions about the human condition. When a person wrongs us, it is not only that person whom we judge, but that action somehow becomes a referendum on everyone. Or alternatively, a kindness that someone performs, as in the case of Anne Frank’s protectors, has the capacity to change our perception of the world. It happens all the time, to us and others; individual actions tip the balance of how we characterize humanity as a whole.

Two small stories to illustrate the point. This past summer, when our family went on our annual road trip, as I unpacked at our final stop at Niagara Falls, I discovered that our camera had been lost somewhere along the way. We had purchased the camera less than a year ago, and aside from the financial loss, and Debbie’s insistence that I was the one responsible for losing it, we were all saddened that every picture we had taken up until that point was lost forever. So you can imagine how delighted I was two weeks ago when I received a cryptic email from the assistant manager of a Midwest convenience store asking if by chance, I had left something there. I instantly replied yes, thanking him profusely, and in the flurry of emails that followed, inquired as to how he tracked me down; after all, there was no name on the camera. He explained that he flipped through the pictures and saw a photo of a child’s art project labeled Cosgrove and then another photograph with a Park Avenue street sign in the background. He googled “Cosgrove” and “Park Avenue,” found me, and the rest, as they say, is history. In all my joy over the retrieved camera, the found pictures, the integrity of this individual, the fact that Debbie was no longer on my case, what I remember being most awed about was the feeling that because of this one act, humanity itself had been redeemed in my eyes. Not only was this assistant manager a mensch, but “Wow! Gosh darnit – menschen do exist in this world!” His kind act became a comment on the potential kindness within us all.

And we know that the same holds true on the other end of the spectrum. One of my daughters, whenever she perceives herself to be wronged, verbalizes what all of us think whenever something bad happens to us. Refusing to limit her grievance to just the one act, she cries out, “Nobody loves me, everybody hates me.” It is a natural thing to do, to cast judgment on the universe from a single wrongdoing. It is a reaction that was made slightly more humorous the other week, when, in response to one such “Everybody hates me” outburst, my seven-year-old son lifted his head, turned to her and said, “There are like millions of people in this world who don’t even know you. How can they all possibly hate you?” What my son voiced, in all his rationality, was irrelevant to my emotionally distraught daughter who was simply verbalizing what we all feel when we believe ourselves to be wronged. We distort or catastrophize our hurt well beyond its objective reality. A single wrong impels us to write off not just the entire person, but in many cases, the entire world.

I would love nothing more than to think that people in this world are basically good, that they have a proclivity for the good and that they are, deep down, good at heart. But I also know that this is a rebuttable presumption. You and I both know that for every camera returned, there are many that are never returned, and for that matter, many that are stolen outright. The Talmud explains that when a child is conceived, an angel brings the fetus before God. The angel asks, “Will this child be tall or short? God decrees its height. “Will this child be smart or not smart?” God decrees its intellectual capacity. Then the angel asks, “Will this child be good or bad?” And God is silent. Why? Because moral volition is not hardwired or pre-determined. This is why Maimonides hedged. He knew the argument could be made either way and embraced that sobering thought about all of us. We are neither good nor bad; we teeter between the two, with the demonstrated capacity for both.

And if this is the case, if there is no default position to the human condition, and it is for us to arrive at our characterizations of humanity, then we are left with a critical question, the critical question for Yom Kippur. Given the choice of living in a world where people are fundamentally good or in a world where people are fundamentally bad, which is the world that you choose to be a citizen of? Because I will tell you that there is not one of us in this room who does not feel that someone has let us down in the past year. We have all been wronged, hurt, offended or slighted. I would dare say that it is impossible to get from one Yom Kippur to the next without being reminded of human shortcoming. Brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, parents and children, colleagues and friends, rabbis and congregants – we have all been disappointed. And we could, if we so chose, do what would be altogether understandable, what would be human nature to let happen, to let any single misdeed engulf our entire being and eclipse our estimation of humanity, to walk around this world believing that because of that one wrong, that person, that relationship, this entire world is a wrong waiting to happen. I see it all the time, people for whom one hurt has, pathologically, shaped their perception of reality. They have a perpetually wounded sensibility – just waiting for the other shoe to drop. It is not that I don’t understand the temptation to think this way, I do – it is human nature. But remember, it is also a choice.

And if it is a choice, then also remember, you could choose otherwise. Living in the exact same world filled with rights and wrongs, good and bad, kindness and hurt, you could allow for the possibility that that one wrong need not be a referendum on an entire person. You could, if you wanted to, choose to be a citizen of a world filled with people who, like yourself, while capable of mistakes and misdeeds, are not fundamentally bad and are deserving of forgiveness. It is a somewhat awkward realization to discover that we impose standards on other people that we could never live up to if those standards were turned on ourselves. Nobody says to themselves, “I made a single mistake so I must be fundamentally flawed and beyond hope.” And yet we do it to others all the time! Certainly on a day like today, when we pray that God see beyond our particular shortcomings, see that despite what we did we are good at heart, we can concede that this would be a reasonable baseline for us as we are asked to grant forgiveness to others.

Today is Yom Kippur. Today is the day we get to decide in which world we want to live. This is the exact question that God puts to the prophet of the day, Jonah, at the conclusion of his tale. The city of Nineveh has repented, God has forgiven, the city is saved and Jonah sits on the hill – beside himself, distraught at the thought that God could be so forgiving to a people who had so recently been judged wicked. Today, it is on that very hill, as it were, that we all sit – staring at our relationships, staring at our lives, asking that very same question of a humanity that has provided us with more than our fair share of hurt, disappointment and anguish. We must do the very thing that Jonah could not do. We must summon that Godlike strength to forgive, to use this day to allow for the possibility that despite it all, people are good at heart.

But there is one more step, one more task of today that must be considered, and it is the grandest of them all. Because if we are neither good nor bad, and how the world will be judged is a reflection of the choices we make, then the question today is not merely of which world do you want to be a citizen, but which world do you want to create? The message of Yom Kippur is that it is not only perceptions that we are shaping today, but reality itself. As the Hasidic masters taught, all of our deeds, small and large, contribute to the character of the world. The regrets I carry from the past year, are, by and large, based on an awareness that I have the capacity to be kinder, more compassionate, more forgiving or more thoughtful than I was, and – be it due to ego, inertia or otherwise – I chose not to be. My choice rendered my world and the world of those around me a lesser world than it could have been. So I ask you:

When you had that clash with your colleague this past year, you could have reached out to mend the relationship before it frayed and became personal. You didn’t. Why not?

When you had the opportunity, at no expense to yourself other than a few minutes of your time, to help a junior colleague get a foot up, you could have. What stopped you?

When you knew that that one hospital visit, simple as it would have been to you, would have make a world of difference to another, you found some reason not to go. Why was that?

When you were making tough decisions with your sibling about caring for a parent, you could have kept the focus on the needs of the hour, not the he-said-she-said of yesteryear. Why didn’t you?

When you say, to this day, that you were put into a corner, with no other choice but to do what you did, I ask you, was that really the case? Or are you really just playing Monday morning quarterback to justify your own failings and ego?

And when you had the opportunity to forgive someone and lighten their burden, but refused to do so, you and only you know why you held you back from doing so.

The Rabbis counseled, "If you did a little harm to your neighbor, let it be in your eyes as if it were much. And if you did a great good to your neighbor, let it be in your eyes as if it were only a little.” (Avot d'Rabbi Natan 41:11) Our deeds, large and small, have the capacity to substantively change the lives of others and the world around us. The decision to be kind, to forgive, to perform an act of tzedakah, to pay a shiva call, to dance at a wedding, to conduct our business affairs with integrity. Today is driven by that audacious and empowering thought that it is within our reach to shape our world, to live a year overflowing with deeds of kindness and gentle humanity.

There are a million stories I could tell - I will leave you with one small one. In his essay “The Rabbi and the Professor,” Ari Kahn writes of one act of kindness, an exchange between one of the great rabbis of the twentieth century, Holocaust survivor Rabbi Yisroel Gustman, and the Israeli-American Economics Professor Robert Aumann, whom you may recall won a Nobel prize in 2005. As a young economics professor, Professor Aumann frequently attended Rabbi Gustmann’s lectures. Thirty years ago this year, in 1982, Professor Aumann’s young son Shlomo fell in battle in the first Lebanon war. Rabbi Gustman quickly mobilized his entire yeshiva to perform the mitzvah of burying the dead. Rabbi Gustman then went to visit Professor Aumann’s home as he sat shiva with his wife and other children, a gesture for which Aumann expressed his appreciation. After a short time, with the hour late and Aumann exhausted and inconsolable, Aumann understandably suggested that time had come for Rabbi Gustman to return to the yeshiva.

Kahn writes that at that point, Rabbi Gustman turned to the grieving professor and explained, “I am sure you don’t know this, but I had a son [in Europe] named Meir. He was a beautiful child. He was taken from my arms and executed. I escaped. I later bartered my child’s shoes so that we would have food, but was never able to eat the food – I gave it away to others. My Meir is a kadosh – he is holy – he and all the six million who perished are holy.”

Rabbi Gustman then continued, “I will tell you what is transpiring now in the World of Truth, in Gan Eden – in Heaven. My Meir is welcoming your Shlomo into the minyan and is now saying to him, ‘I died because I am a Jew, but I wasn’t able to save anyone else. But you, Shlomo, you died defending the Jewish People and the Land of Israel.’ My Meir is a kadosh – he is holy – but your Shlomo is a shaliach tzibur [congregational representative, leading the congregants in prayer] in that holy, heavenly minyan.”

Rabbi Gustman then turned to Professor Aumann: “I never had the opportunity to sit shiva for my Meir. Let me sit here with you just a little longer.”

To which Professor Aumann replied, “I thought I could never be comforted, but Rabbi, you have comforted me.”

Our world is filled with good and it is filled with bad. Small wrongs and large ones, some that should be forgiven and those that will never be forgotten. A well timed shiva call, or any small act of kindness for that matter, will not right the wrong, but it may just help lessen the pain, it may just help save someone’s world. Each of us has the choice to decide what we make of this world in which we live; each of us has the choice of what world we want to make. “Nobody,” wrote Anne Frank, “needs to wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” May we, beginning this very day, fill our world with small and large deeds of kindness, compassion and forgiveness, and in so doing, tip this world a little bit closer to redemption.