Election 2024: We Are the Ones We've Been Waiting For

Today’s episode is a Shabbat Replay of our November 2nd Saturday Morning Shabbat service. The news has been a nonstop torrent of stories of depravity and demagoguery. It’s enough to make ya wonder — are people fundamentally evil? Selfish? Beyond saving? Rabbi Lizzi shared some sagely commentary on the first two parshiot, Bereshit and Noach, teachings which paint a more nuanced picture of human nature and our capacity to create real change.

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

Judaism is nothing if not the longest running book club in world history. We come together every week to open up and dissect this ancient book, this scroll, and make sense of it. Sam did a beautiful job of helping us do that earlier, and I wanted to follow the path he began to take us down. These sections of the Torah we read at the beginning of the Jewish new year invite us into really important conversations about the fundamental purpose of religion and our tradition, conversations I know many of us want to have more of but we so rarely have time to dig into. 

So let’s start with a conversation that God– the character of God in the Torah– opens in the first chapter of Genesis last week. God says, “וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֔ים נַֽעֲשֶׂ֥ה אָדָ֛ם בְּצַלְמֵ֖נוּ כִּדְמוּתֵ֑נוּ – Let us make human beings in our image to rule the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky.” 

Who is this “us?”

Jewish thinkers over thousands of years have discussed this and debated– is it God’s many personalities– sort of a turn of phrase that doesn’t really refer to anyone in particular but just God talking to Godself like “Hmmm…. Let’s think about this”? Possible. Consensus among mefarshim/commentators seems to be that God was talking to the angels, like, “Shall we do this? Shall we make humankind in our image and likeness?”

And so in the Rabbinic imagination– not on the pages of the Torah but in the conversation those pages generated thousands of years ago– the rabbis imagined God consulting the angels on the question of whether or not to create humanity. 

Remember, God has already spent 5 days creating the ecological wonder that is planet earth, separating light from darkness, earth from water, the lower waters from the heavens, creating all the oceans, lakes, rivers, marshes, continents, islands, plantlife and vegetation, trees with fruits and nuts and crops, and then finally birds and fish and land creatures. And so God turns to the angels and says I’m thinking about creating a being called the homo sapien– it’s going to have a ridiculously large prefrontal cortex, bigger than any other creature and be capable of things other animals aren’t capable of, more similar to us as divine beings than any other creature… do you think I should do it?

Now, if you were an angel being consulted on this project: what would you say? 

[field comments!]

There is one record of this conversation as it turns out! In the Midrash, Bereshit Rabah, Rabbi Shimon said: “When the Holy Blessed One decided to make the first person, the ministering angels formed themselves into factions, some of them saying: “Let them be created!” and others saying, “Do not them be created!”  Chesed/Lovingkindness and Justice/Tzedek said: “Let them be created, because they will do acts of love and justice!” and Truth/Emet and Shalom/peace say, “Do not let them be created, because they are all lies and warmongers!” 

As the ministering angels were arguing with each other, God created humanity and said to them: “Why are you fighting? It’s already done. (8:5)

And so it was, the human being was created, in what seems like a manic explosion of divine excitement, throwing caution to the wind. You get the sense in this Midrash and from the Torah itself, that HaShem, God, had high hopes for this creation, that God was inclined to believe the angels who thought this was gonna be great. God gave this creature, the human, everything they would need to thrive on this planet and never imagined that the one thing God said not to do, they would do. And God, like a disappointed parent, reluctantly creates consequences for bad human behavior, which we see when God exiles Adam and Eve from the Garden after they eat the fruit of the forbidden tree; and when God forces Kayin to wander the earth with a mark on his head after he kills his brother Abel in a fit of jealousy; and of course, we see this when God sends a flood to wipe out all life and start over with Noah’s family when human depravity becomes too egregious to deal with by futzing around the edges. In these first two parshiot in the Torah– Beresheet and Noah– we get this really deep look both into the mind of God and it’s so hopeful at the beginning and then it is just heartbreaking after only a few chapters,, as we get this stark confrontation with the true nature of humanity.

Which set of angels is right? The answer is, YES.  The Torah resists characterizing human beings as one thing or the other, putting us into boxes, whether fundamentally good and worth keeping around anticipating all the good we’ll do… or fundamentally bad and worth destroying anticipating all the evil we’ll do. No, instead the Torah is very clear eyed about us human beings. We’re all of it. Just like God holds the potential for immense creativity, love, justice, generosity and destruction, impulsiveness, insecurity, jealousy and pain– all of it– so do we. We are made in the divine image, after all.

In our morning minyan this week we read these verses and for some people this was really depressing– they were hoping the Torah might have a more optimistic read on the human condition, give us reason to have hope that despite what may sometimes seem like our human propensity to screw everything up, that our goodness, our creativity and our healing power, will ultimately prevail over the forces of darkness and destruction around us, like the angels of chesed and tzedek believed. But it’s not that simple.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out two really interesting differences between the first Creation story in Genesis, and the second creation Story after the Flood. The first difference is that in both accounts a key word appears seven times so as to flag it as significant– but it is a different word. In Genesis 1 the word is “tov–good.” In Genesis 9 it is “brit–covenant.” 

Genesis 1 is about nature and biology. We are made in the image of God and so we can think, speak, plan, choose, dominate, destroy or build– these are all powers of the amazing neocortex that defines our species. We wield so much power, Genesis 1 reminds us. But by Genesis 9, we see that a successful human society has to be about more than power, more than survival at all costs, more than building tall towers to build a name for one’s self. As God recreates the world anew after the Flood, the Torah shows a learning curve, for God and for us: we can’t just rely on the assumption of human goodness, of the “tov” of Genesis 1. We’re going have to codify it in a covenant– a brit, a bond between human beings that places us in a relationship of mutual obligation and respect in which we owe each other the rights that come with basic human dignity. 

The second difference he observes is how the notion of humanity being made in God’s image, is presented. In Genesis 1 we read, “God created humanity in His own image, in the image of God He created them, male and female He created them.” (Gen. 1:27) In Genesis 9 we read, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God has God made humanity” (Gen. 9:6). In other words, the first creation story tells me that “I” am in the image of God. The second creation story tells me that “You,” my potential victim, my enemy, the object of my jealousy or rage or fear, you are made in the image of God, too. Genesis 1 tells us about human power. Genesis 9 tells us about the moral limits of power. Sure, we can kill but we should not.

Something striking, as Jews reading this story about the creation of this covenant, is that Abraham has not yet come on the scene, the specific covenant between God and the Jewish people at Mt Sinai is many hundreds of years away. This covenant between God and humanity, obligating care of one another by simple virtue of our humanity being shared, is universal and has nothing to do with who our tribe is. It is staggering for a document as old as the Torah is, to assert that a covenant of mutual care and responsibility precedes our religious differences. Think of all of the violence throughout history– in this very moment– that people justify with religion, people asserting that God loves this group but hates or is ok with us killing, that other group. This is moment in the Torah where God God’s self, says that is blasphemy, in the original sense of the word. That is not what My covenant with humanity is about, says God. We see here in this book shared by every major monotheistic tradition, that there is one Creator sovereign over all life, who has a particular incomprehensible love for humanity, all humanity, who created us from love and this second time around, with a covenant, with moral universals, that will guide our interactions with all people and tribes– hopefully drawing on the best of what those angels were hoping for humanity, that we would operate with chesed, tzedek, emet and shalom, lovingkindness, justice, truth and peace. And none of these values are Jewish, per se– they’re as universal as the symbol of the rainbow. And in fact, when we Jews see a rainbow in the sky the blessing we say over it comes from this story, from the moment God sends a rainbow after the flood and promises never to send a flood to wipe humanity out again. That blessing is, Baruch atah Adonai zokher hab'rit (you remember the covenant) v'ne'eman bivrito (and you are faithful in upholding the covenant) v'kayam b'ma'amaro (and you keep your word). We remember, when we see a rainbow, that we are in a mutual covenant of care with all other creatures and with God. We affirm that God is holding up their end of the covenant… will we?

I think with the anxiety about the election next week people were hoping for Torah to be a Magic 8 Ball, predicting a better future, where when we ask, “Are we going be OK?” the Magic 8 Ball says, “It is certain.” But it’s not Torah’s job is not to give us false hope. That would be spiritual malpractice. Rather, if the Torah gives us hope it’s because it’s a mirror, and shows us a version of ourselves that rises to the level it knows we are capable of, even if we’re not sure we are.  It also shows us a version of ourselves that we could descend into, that we also don’t believe is possible but happens every day Who would you be in the story we read this morning– Noah? Or would you be one of the thousands of people who God didn’t ask to build an ark, because they all were too busy with their own needs to do anything on anyone else’s behalf. Noah might not have done everything, but he did something, and that alone makes him worthy of being called “righteous in his generation”. No one, not Torah and not God, can guarantee that we will in fact rise to the moment we have been placed in and be righteous in our generation… only we know that. 

You don’t need to look far to see the human instincts of greed, control, destruction and domination, alive and well in our world and doing their darndest to triumph over the better angels of our nature. So, Torah says, for those of you reading this book for wisdom, who want to do better… do not get lazy; do not get complacent. Work, every day, in every generation, do something to protect what is beautiful and sacred about your street, our communities, our city, our country, this planet and everyone on it. If there’s a redemption story, a happy ending, that’s it. As June Jordan wrote in the 1950s protesting apartheid in South Africa, We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. 

The great 12th Century philosopher and scientist Maimonides said we should think of the world as on a scale that is weighted equally between good and evil, and your next choice tips the scale for all of us toward one side. This moment feels like that… like we’re all on a scale and the individual choices made by a handful of people is going to determine which way the scale tips. I won’t lie– I’m nervous too. I desperately want the values of chesed, tzedek, emet and shalom– lovingkindness, justice, truth and peace– to prevail in our country, in our public discourse, in our legal system, in our justice system, in our foreign policy. And on this shabbes before the 2024 election, we don’t have a Magic 8 Ball. What we want to see happen out there starts in here. We have each other, and we have this covenant, binding us in a garment of mutual destiny with all other living beings. Regardless of what happens next week, may we rise in the morning to life, to lovingkindness, to justice, to truth and to peace, come what may, and pray for the better angels of our nature to prevail around us for the benefit of all living beings.

We now know the neuroscience behind this. Our brains contain a prefrontal cortex that evolved to allow humans to think and act reflectively, considering the consequences of their deeds. But this is slower and weaker than the amygdala (what Jewish mystics called the nefesh habehamit, the animal soul) which produces, even before we have had time to think, the fight-or-flight reactions without which humans before civilisation would simply not have survived.

The problem is that these rapid reactions can be deeply destructive. Often they lead to violence: not only the violence between species (predator and prey) that is part of nature, but also to the more gratuitous violence that is a feature of the life of most social animals. It is not that we only do evil. Empathy and compassion are as natural to us as are fear and aggression. The problem is that fear lies just beneath the surface of human interaction, and it can overwhelm all our other instincts.

Daniel Goleman calls this an amygdala hijack. “Emotions make us pay attention right now – this is urgent – and give us an immediate action plan without having to think twice. The emotional component evolved very early: Do I eat it, or does it eat me?”[10] Impulsive action is often destructive because it is undertaken without thought of consequences. That is why Maimonides argued that many of the laws of the Torah constitute a training in virtue by making us think before we act.[11]

So the Torah tells us that naturally we are neither good nor bad, but we have the capacity for both. We have a natural inclination to empathy and sympathy, but we have an even stronger instinct for fear which can lead to violence. That is why, in the move from Adam to Noah, the Torah shifts from nature to covenant, from tov to brit, from power to the moral limits of power. Genes are not enough. We also need the moral law.

It seems that in the first story, God was really hopeful that human beings would naturally choose the right and the good, to care for one another and the planet. God trusted the angels who believed in the triumph of human goodness. But it took less than a generation for it to become clear that human beings– brilliant tho we may be– are susceptible to temptation, jealously, fear, insecurity, greed and so many other feelings that make it very hard to rise to our best selves. With the choice to send the flood, perhaps God changed God’s mind and decided that he angels who believed in the triumph of human depravity were actually right all along. 

But ultimately it becomes clear, there is not one characterization of humanity– we have the capacity for both blessing and harm. We have a natural inclination to empathy and sympathy, but we have an even stronger instinct for fear which can lead to violence. 

That is why, in the move from Adam to Noah, the Torah shifts from hope in human nature to the structures and expectations of covenant, from tov to brit, from power to the moral limits of power. Genes are not enough. We also need Brit, covenant, relationship. The idea that we owe something to one another, and to God. That no matter how bad things get, we exist in a web of relationship that obligates us to draw on our higher nature, the better angels of our nature, and choose wisely.