Enlarging Your Heart

The most remarkable, most provocative and most self-evident premise of Biblical theology is the assertion that God cares at all about human beings. Mah enosh, “What is man, that you should take note of him?” The pointed question of the Psalmist goes to the heart of the matter: The humbling realization that relative to the grand scheme of the universe, each one of us, and all of us collectively, are miniscule – hardly deserving of divine attention. What an extravagant and counterintuitive claim it is to think that the same creator who set the moon and stars into motion, present at creation and throughout eternity, is at all mindful of our brief and insignificant existence!

Yet, we know, here in this sanctuary, that our entire system of belief rests upon this first principle. As we learned in last week’s story of creation, not only were we the final and crowning achievement of the six days of creation, but we were created in the very image of God, each one of us, in all our individuality, a reflection of our Creator, infused with the divine spark. Our actions – our mitzvot – are thus expressive of our relationship with God. Our prayers, we believe, are worthy of God’s attention, and the world in which we live operates in the sphere of divine concern. God may not walk in the Garden with us as with Adam and Eve, but if the Torah teaches us anything, it teaches that our God is involved and invested in our lives. God cares – deeply – about each and every one of us.

And when we mess up – Oh boy, does God get upset! That, I believe, is the most unexpected part of this week’s Torah reading. It is not the least bit surprising that mankind is corrupt and lawless. It is also statistically plausible that despite the base condition of humanity at large, an ethical outlier named Noah, a man of great righteousness, could emerge. But what is surprising, what is downright startling, is that God gets really, really upset about it. “And the Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on earth, and how every plan of man’s heart is evil … And the Lord regretted that He had made man on earth and his heart was saddened. The Lord said, “I will blot out from the earth the humanity I created.” (Genesis 6:5-8) OK, so we were bad, maybe even really bad, maybe even a whole bunch of us. But really? Are we really to think that an omnipotent, omniscient, and presumably rather busy God lets the little things get him down? Are the failings of humanity really worthy of God’s fury?

It is a good question, but it is a question whose answer lies not in the stars, but in ourselves. Remember, each one of us is created in God’s image. Can any of us dare claim not to have done exactly the same? How very easy it is to allow a hurt, a slight, a disappointment – even those, especially those, that are so trivial as to not even merit our concern – to grow to absorb the entirety of our being. A call isn’t returned, an unkind word hits us roughly, a situation is fumbled, an appointment is missed. I am not talking about big hurts; in fact my very point is the inverted relationship between the minor nature of the hurt and the overblown size of our concern. The garden variety, petty, inevitable and daily kind, that instead of shrugging off as the unavoidable consequence of being a card-carrying member a flawed humanity, instead of admitting that we ourselves have been late, insensitive or forgetful too, instead of choosing to transcend or move beyond the circumstances of a less than perfect exchange, we do just the opposite. Not only do we linger unnecessarily in the hurt, but we stew in it and insist on finding a hidden motive or ill intent. Minimally, we convince ourselves that whatever the hurt, from that moment forth, it eclipses the entirety of a relationship. We do not do what we know we would ask others to do if the tables were turned; we do not “get over it.”

How is it that God becomes so exasperated with a flawed humanity? It would seem, at least in these early Biblical stories, God lacked the one ingredient that makes life livable: perspective. Don’t get me wrong, anger has its place, but I think misplaced anger can usually be traced back to those moments when we lack or lose perspective on the bigger picture, where our circle of concern really lies, and our entire field of vision becomes blocked by some infraction beneath the dignity of our attention. Our hearts constrict, our mood tightens and not surprisingly, we respond with the one and only arrow left in our depleted emotional quiver: anger. Were there other remedies at the God’s disposal? Presumably so. Did the punishment fit the crime? Probably not. But none of that mattered. In the absence of perspective, reason melted away, to be replaced by an all-consuming anger, and thus, as we know, the terrible flood began.

All of which, I think, helps us understand how the story ends. The fascinating thing about this Torah reading, what we often miss, is that there is absolutely no change in the human condition, no moral development, between the time before the flood and the time after it. In fact, when the waters have subsided, God makes pretty much the same observation about the hard wiring of human beings as before the flood: “Every plan of man’s heart is evil.” And because there is no lesson learned for Noah or humanity as a whole, we know this story is really about the other main character – God. It is in God’s personality that character development takes place. God knows that humanity will sin again, but as the sky clears, God sets the rainbow in the heavens, declaring, “When the rainbow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all creatures.” (9:16) In other words, the rainbow was and would remain the self-help tool by which God could gain the perspective that God was lacking at the beginning of the story. Knowing humanity’s endless capacity for wickedness, and knowing that disengaging was not an option, God needed to establish a reminder as long as a rainbow, in order that God’s anger would never again overwhelm, that God’s love and kindness would always win out. In other words, God enlarged the divine heart. Never again would humanity’s shortcomings consume the entirety of the divine being.

It has been exactly this way ever since. One of my favorite midrashim, rabbinic legends, tells of God’s time management skills. For a third of the day, not surprisingly, God takes out the Torah and studies. Another third of the day, God serves as the cosmic matchmaker, bringing couples together. And in the final third, God serves as cosmic judge and administrator. The text goes on to explain that upon entering the courtroom, knowing the challenge ahead, God recites the following prayer: “May it be My will that My love for humanity overcomes My exasperation with them!” It seems that the struggle never ends. Every single day God prays for a heart capable of stretching, filled with a hesed, a kindness, that will offset the daily frustrations humanity provides.

This is, I believe, what each and every one of us must aspire towards ourselves. The Talmud (Babylonian Talmud, Eruvin 65) teaches that a person is known by three things: b’koso, b’kiso, b’ka’aso, by the way one drinks, by the way one spends money, and by the way one manages anger. The first two are worthy of a sermon for another day and make sense intuitively. Though perhaps unexpected, the third measure – how one does or doesn’t get angry – is, I believe, the most sensitive window into what makes a person tick. As is taught in Pirkei Avot, the ethics of our fathers, the highest rung of character is reserved for the person who is slow to anger and easy to pacify – that is the hasid. No matter what other qualities we may possess, it is our ability to have emotional and relational perspective that determines how far we will go in our lives. We need look no further than the greatest of all our leaders, Moses; were it not for his anger – in striking the rock – he would have entered the Promised Land. Ultimately, the sages explain, an angry person has nothing other than his anger (Babylonian Talmud, Kiddushin 40b); or to put it slightly more colloquially, each one of us must learn how to expand our hearts, fill them with kindness, and not let the things we can’t control, control us.

With every passing day, I find myself drawn more and more to Abraham Joshua Heschel’s remark: “When I was young I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.” Some people are born with brains, others with looks, others with beautiful voices and others with great outside jump shots. Some people, over the course of their lives work hard to arrive at circumstances that determine a successful path in life. But being kind – that is also hard. Being kind takes a lot of work, it takes a lot of patience, it takes a lot of deep breathing and most of all, it means an endless reservoir of perspective. To be kind is a commitment that has to be renewed every single day, if not every single minute, with every single person we meet. It is a mental discipline whereby we learn to not only to remove anger from our hearts, but to possess hearts large enough to endure the wear and tear of what it is to be human. It is something that even God has to work on daily. How much more so, as Heschel understood, it is a quality that we ourselves should not only admire, but as creatures created in God’s image, aspire towards in our own lives.