A Time to Embrace

On the question of when one should or should not sit down with an adversary, September 1938 is as good – or bad – a date as any to begin the conversation. It was eighty years ago, on this very day, that Winston Churchill recorded his realization that Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had “already decided in principle to accept Hitler’s demands . . . ,” a decision leading to the Munich Agreement, in which Hitler received the Sudetenland in exchange for a promise to put an end to his future territorial ambitions. While Chamberlain returned to 10 Downing Street with declarations of “peace with honor” and “peace in our time,” Churchill characterized Chamberlain’s appeasement as a “total and unmitigated disaster.” “This is only the beginning of the reckoning,” Churchill said. “This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year . . .” (M. Gilbert, Churchill: A Life, pp. 599–601) Churchill’s assessment, we know, would prove altogether prophetic of the catastrophic events of the weeks, months, and years that followed.

The decisions of September 1938 undoubtedly weighed heavily on Churchill’s mind when, soon enough, he was put to the test on the selfsame question of whether or not to engage with an adversary. In May 1940, the recently minted Prime Minister Churchill would enter into secret deliberations in his own cabinet as to whether or not to negotiate with the Nazis. Despite the counsel of members of his own party, including his foreign secretary Lord Halifax, Churchill famously drew a line against any negotiations. So determined was Churchill in his refusal to negotiate with Germany, that he was willing to risk all of Britain. In his own words: “If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.” (Gilbert, p. 651) In retrospect, it was Churchill’s refusal to make the same mistake as his predecessor Chamberlain that would determine the course of the war and twentieth-century history and would secure Churchill’s place in the annals of history.

We would, however, be doing a disservice to that history if we were to fail to note that Churchill’s political courage was not due solely to his principled refusal to sit down with an adversary. He also understood that the demands of leadership could call on him to do just the opposite. Almost exactly one year after the events of May 1940, Churchill was faced with the question of whether or not Britain should ally itself with Russia in their fight against the Nazis. In the eyes of the arch anti-Communist Churchill, Russia’s Stalin was a monster of unspeakable evil. Would not such an alliance, Churchill was asked, signal an unforgivable compromise of principle – a proverbial “bowing down in the House of Rimmon?” Famously, Churchill replied that he had but one and only one purpose: the destruction of Hitler. So committed was he to Hitler’s defeat that, in Churchill’s words, “If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” (Churchill, The Grand Alliance, p. 370) In this case, the case of the Anglo-Soviet alliance, it was Churchill’s willingness to sit down with an adversary, setting aside fundamental differences in service of a greater good, that would be the mark of his heroism.

“To everything,” wrote Ecclesiastes, “there is a season,” including a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing. There is a time when we should and perhaps must sit down with adversaries, and there are times when we must refuse, when the very act of sitting down with a foe signals a capitulation not just of our self-interest, but of our moral code. The blessing and curse of history, of course, is that it provides ample precedent for both paths. In all his years of imprisonment, Natan Sharansky held fast to his belief that one cannot negotiate with a dictator. Sharansky’s refusal to make any deal with the KGB despite enduring years of harsh conditions in Soviet prisons and labor camps was vindicated by his eventual release and subsequently, the release of all of Soviet Jewry. Precisely the opposite tack would be taken by no less a figure than Nelson Mandela; in engaging in protracted negotiations from jail with the leadership of South Africa’s apartheid state, he would achieve not just his own freedom but that of his people. The Churchill example is interesting because it highlights a single figure who, at different moments, employed both tactics. (Robert Mnookin, Bargaining with the Devil) Please God, the examples from our own lives are not of such geopolitical consequence where the stakes are so high and the evil so extreme. But the question remains one and the same, and it is one that we all face in some form or another. At what point should you enter into dialogue with someone with whom you hold differences? How, if at all, shall we engage with those people with whom we find fault, whom we find distasteful, and who, in the year gone by, have perhaps caused us hurt?

It is, of course, the question that brings us all here on Yom Kippur. We enter the room, and before we even chant Kol Nidrei, the Cantor declares:

“By the authority of the court on high and by the authority of this court below, with divine consent and with the consent of this congregation, we grant permission to pray with those who have transgressed.”

Scholars debate the meaning of the passage: Who are these transgressors and why do we need permission to pray with them? Some believe the passage refers to those people who, in medieval times, were coerced to convert to Christianity. Others argue that the passage refers to the lifting of local decrees of excommunication on reprobate members of the community. I choose to read it more simply. The declaration is an acknowledgement that everyone here is, to some degree, a transgressor – we are all imperfect! That is our starting point: a democratization or universalizing of human shortcoming. It is why we confess publicly, all together. You want to be part of this thing called Yom Kippur? Then let’s first acknowledge that none of our hands are clean and without blemish. Over and over again the mahzor reminds us that we should not be so arrogant as to think that we are righteous and have not sinned, for we have sinned. This is our ticket of admission: not just an acknowledgement that we are imperfect, but a recognition that it is this very fact of our imperfection that binds us together as human beings and as a community. It is the secret sauce or, more precisely, the magical elixir that makes Yom Kippur possible, by which the door for dialogue is pried open. We dare not hide behind the pretense of our own perfection. Today, we drop the charade that we possess superior moral standing, today the cracked playing field of our collective souls is leveled and laid bare. Today we take agency for our humanity and our missteps. We know we are imperfect, so we judge others more gently, and more generously, ready to take up the work at hand.

My fear, simply put, is that ours is an age where the inescapable fact of human difference has become an impediment rather than the prompt for dialogue and reconciliation. Our society has become akin to a gladiator’s arena, or, if you prefer, center court at the US Open, with everybody pointing out the missteps of others, but nobody taking agency for their role in the debacle, the unraveling of our social fabric. It goes by many names – tribalism, identity politics and otherwise – but its effects are one and the same. an appeal to group identity based on class, gender, race, politics, or other criteria; a decision to let that single aspect of our identity supersede every other aspect of our humanity, and the world then being divided into an “us” and a “them.” “They” become demonized, dehumanized, and identified as the agent of affliction. In our own self-righteousness and moral indignation, “they” become solely responsible for our problems; “we” take on none of the responsibility. Self-reflection is out of the question, and compromise becomes a dirty word. It is a Manichean vision, lacking in any subtlety, texture, or middle ground, a zero-sum world divided into good and evil. It is the moral brinksmanship that is the rot at the root of our societal discourse as Jews, as Americans, and even within our own families.

This past spring I was honored to attend the opening of two institutions both of which speak to my highest values and both of which reflect the essence of what it means to me to be a Jew. The first, about which I wrote publicly, was the opening of the American Embassy in Jerusalem. Over two decades after the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act, fifty-one years since the reunification of Jerusalem, and seventy years since President Truman recognized Israel, it was deeply moving, as a Zionist, as a Jew, and as rabbi of this community, to be present as this administration finally acknowledged what I have always believed to be the case, that Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish state. The second event, just a few weeks prior, was the opening of the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the nearby Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. As a Jew driven by the ethic that every human being is created in the divine image and thus to be accorded equal and infinite dignity, and as a Jew who seeks to know the heart of the stranger for we were once strangers in a strange land, I was deeply honored to be present, yarmulke on, not only honoring the humanity of those African Americans terrorized by slavery, lynching, segregation, Jim Crow, and continued mass incarceration, but also committing arm-in-arm to build a just future for all Americans.

Aside from the sermon-worthy fact that ours is an age where I would bet your Kol Nidrei pledge that I was the only congregational rabbi in attendance at both events, what hit me most about the two dedications was the manner in which my attendance at each event was received. How could I, colleagues and congregants asked me, in varying degrees of civility, attend the Embassy event in Jerusalem hosted by American and Israeli administrations whose stance on immigration, refugees, and the two-state solution, among other issues, appear to be so antithetical to the Jewish values and Jewish communal interests that I purport to hold dear? Similarly, I was asked, could not my attendance at the Montgomery Museum and Memorial opening be interpreted as tacit support for the anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic sentiment that is increasingly present on the political left? In both cases I believed myself to be serving a greater good; in both cases I was accused of bowing down, like Churchill, in the house of Rimmon. It is altogether discomfiting to think that in my efforts to honor the values at the very core of what it means to me to be a Jew, I had managed to rankle Jews at the far ends of the political spectrum. As Jews and as Americans, we are living through a time of ideological purity tests, where everyone to the right of you is a fanatic and everyone to the left of you is a heretic. Ours has become a sectarian society that rewards intolerance, punishes compromise, and chastises those who sit down in dialogue – in Jerusalem, Montgomery, New York, or anywhere – with anyone whose belief system is not wholly coterminous with all that you hold dear.

It is wrong, for reasons both pragmatic and principled, to hold that we can and should sit down only with individuals with whom we agree with the entirety of our being. If any community – all the more so a community as small as our Jewish community – chooses to sit down only with those people with whom we are in absolute lockstep, then we will quickly wake up to discover that we have nobody to talk to – not even ourselves. As I noted at the start, there may be cases of extreme and unbridled evil where one’s moral code precludes dialogue. But for the most part, communal agendas can only be achieved by means of working together with others, who, by dint of their humanity, hold some views at variance with our own. It is not for me to tell you which parties, personalities, and positions to support, but what I will say is that whoever you do support with your time, wisdom, or personal capital – should be those individuals who are willing to go against the absolutist spirit of our age, who are willing to reach across the aisle, who believe that compromise is not a dirty word and that political differences should never damn the dignity of another’s personhood.

More than the pragmatic considerations is the basic principle at hand. Namely, that whatever our differences may be, those differences should never outweigh the shared humanity which we hold in common. The Mishnah in Yevamot (1:4) famously describes the disputes between the two great rabbinic houses of the time – the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai. They had furious debates on everything from the mundane to the ritual to the theological to what kind of marriages were and were not permitted. Despite these differences, the Mishnah explains, members of the two houses dined together, used each other’s utensils, and, significantly, permitted their sons and daughters to marry each other – a model of communal leadership that allowed for debate without division, the precondition for communal cohesion. Jewish history, to be sure, does not lack for sectarian divisions. But those individuals who have conceded that they are not in possession of the whole truth, who have chosen the greater good over their differences, whatever they may be – it is they who are the builders of our future and practitioners of tikkun olam, menders of our world.

And what is true on a national and cross-communal level, is all the more so in the arena of our personal lives.

We have all entered this room carrying wounds – devastating and minor – from the year gone by and perhaps even from well before. In this room, at this very moment, there are siblings who no longer speak to one another, parents and children estranged from one another, lifelong friends and colleagues no longer on speaking terms. We have all been wronged in one way or another, none of us are alone in our hurt or estrangement. It is easy to nurse our righteous indignation; it feels good to drink from that bitter cup. But today is not the day to do so. Today is the day where we make a courageous leap to ask ourselves the questions that we avoid year-round but dare not avoid today: Really? Am I really going to let a twenty-five-year friendship fall to the wayside because of something that frankly nobody will ever fully understand or untangle? Really? Am I really going to let that relationship unravel over who did or didn’t show up, who was or wasn’t invited, whether we were or weren’t included in the gift, who did or didn’t call, and who said or didn’t say they were sorry? Is my ego so brittle that I am really going to push away the person who nursed me through infancy, toddlerhood, and adolescence, guiding me as best they could into adulthood? Is it really worth losing all that shared laughter and struggle? Am I really unable and unwilling to sit down and try, try as best as I can, to work it through?

It was Freud who famously coined the expression “narcissism of minor differences” to explain the manner by which our delicate egos tend to focus on our differences at the expense of the totality of the relationship hanging in the balance. The trick of memory is that when left unchecked, it can become an act of self-justification as the wrongs committed against us are blown out of proportion or, as it says in all our cars, “objects in the mirror appear larger than they actually are.”

Today is the day we widen our lens, the day we refuse to reduce the totality of a person’s being to a single misdeed – a misdeed, mind you, about which we have only our side of the story. Today is the day that we concede that there are always at least two sides and that the world is never just black and white. Today we allow for the possibility that in our repeated assertions of the rectitude of our position, in the magnitude of the wrong committed against us, maybe, just maybe, we too bear responsibility for what went wrong.

There is no magic to Yom Kippur, and cynical though it may sound coming from a rabbi, I actually don’t believe time heals all wounds. But time does provide us with perspective, and sometimes, I think, Yom Kippur is meant to serve as a signpost for us that it is time to move on. I lived in Chicago for ten years getting my doctorate, and let me tell you, synagogue politics is a cakewalk compared to the snake-pit of some corners of academia. The hurts and betrayals of those years – give me a bottle of single malt and a box of tissues, and I will tell you stories. But you know what, sometimes on the streets, at conferences, and elsewhere, I see those people who caused me hurt . And you know what I do? I smile at them. We shake hands, we ask after each other’s families. The warmth is not fake, it’s not phoned in; it is actually quite sincere. Because you know what I have learned along the way? I have learned that sometimes . . . you just have to move on. It is not just for the sake of the wrongdoer that we refuse to reduce a person to a single misdeed. It is for our own sake. There comes a time when we all just need to move on.

Finally, and at risk of stating the obvious, we need to sit down with each other, because today is predicated on the hope that our relationships can heal. Again, I am not sure every wrong can and maybe should be forgiven. Nobody, as the saying goes, ever forgets where they bury the hatchet. But here is the thing. Why not at least try? Aside from the vanity of ego and the self- indulgent joy of feeling indignant, what do you actually have to lose? That person might not be as bad as you think. That person might have changed. The human condition is full of surprises. None of us actually know what waits around the corner, so why not hope for the best? Why not make yourself a little bit vulnerable, judge people generously, and give them a chance? Everyone is more than the worst thing they have done. How great would it be if one of the outcomes of this Yom Kippur were to be that people in this room sent a text or an email, picked up a phone, or maybe even got up out of their seats over the course of this day to share a moment with someone with whom they have had a falling out, small or large. That, by itself, I think, would be worth the price of admission. Our faults, our missteps, our mistakes – they are what make us human; they should bring us together, not tear us apart.

Kol ha-ma’avir al midotav, ma’avirin lo al kol p’sha·av. “To whom is granted forgiveness?” asks the Talmud. “The one who forgives the sins of others.” (Babylonian Talumd, Megillah 28) More simply put: We need to grant forgiveness, because we ourselves need to be forgiven. “To do hurt,” wrote my predecessor Rabbi Milton Steinberg, “is as natural as to live.” Our world is cold enough. In our imperfect humanity, let’s huddle together for warmth, let go of the hurt, and take hold of each other’s blemished hands – now, while we still can, while we still have life to live and love to give. With malice toward none, with charity for all, let’s strive to finish the sacred work of Yom Kippur: Bind up our wounds and bring about peace in our nation, our community, and our families.