When I was six or so, my mother said me, “being a good Jew means being a good person.” I was a dutiful son, so I believed her. And I still am, so I still do. Since that moment, I’ve been trying to figure out how to be good.
Of course, I think she meant something more grand than good, but you know, she said it to a six-year-old, so “good” will have to suffice. I’ll have to check with her after services, but I am pretty sure she meant something like working to save the world!
I won’t give you a laundry list of the world’s problems, however – not now, anyway. It’s 11am and you’ve checked the Times, Ha’aretz, or Facebook at least once. It’s enough to say that for me – and probably for you – being “good” requires becoming a part of resolving these problems.
But I need help learning how. I want an example. I want a person I can follow around, learn from, and emulate. I want someone who exemplifies the goodness I aspire to. I want what I think my mother really wanted me to be: not just “good” but a tzaddik.
Oy. A tzaddik. Sounds impossible, but maybe it isn’t.
Our sacred text names one person and one person only as a tzaddik.
נֹחַ אִישׁ צַדִּיק \\ תָּמִים הָיָה בְּדֹֽרֹתָיו (Gen 6:9)
Noah was a tzaddik, blameless in his generation.
We tend to read this as two separate ideas. He was tzaddik, AND tamim in his generation. But tamim can mean “whole” or perfect” so perhaps, following Ibn Ezra, we should attach tamim to tzaddik and read it not as two separate claims, but rather: “Noah was the perfect tzaddik for his generation.”
Every generation has its own perfect form of being a tzaddik. Yes, the Rabbis compare Noah unfavorably to Abraham dismissing him as only righteous for his generation. But I’ll take it. What else can we ask for? You can only be complete in your own time, and I’ll settle for finding a tzaddik who is as complete as possible for now.
Thankfully, we don’t get just one tzaddik. Crack open a Talmud and there Abaye asserts that every generation gets 36 of them, the so-called lamed-vavniks, who merit the redemption of the world (Sanhedrin 97b, Sukkah 45b).
But 36 is still so few. My tzaddik search might as well be a hunt for the abominable snowman. However, the Talmud follows with Rava, who contends: “The actual number is 18,000.” Move over lamed vavniks, the shmonah-asar-elef-niks are coming to town. My chances of meeting a tzaddik just increased 500-fold! And with so many tzaddikim running around the planet, isn’t there a chance that I can find some right here in this room? To say that among us is one of the 36 would be hubris. But, one of the 18,000? Maybe. Maybe we have a few of them. Maybe even more.
Who are these 18,000? How might we notice them?
Art Green helps here with his concept of the “momentary tzaddik;” the tzaddik who shines forth in those “moments of giving, caring, or somehow showing a generosity of spirit” and who “brightens the light that glows within” others (Seek My Face, pp. 152-3).
In a time like Noah’s – in a time like our own – even complete tzaddikim need not be tzaddik-like all the time. Some of the time will do. Only some of the time do we expect flashes of goodness, sure signs of compassion; moments when God’s presence shines through in the deeds of those around us.
So, what if? What if those moments happen here, but we don’t notice them? What if we are among the 18,000? What if we are a community of momentary tzaddikim? What if HUC-JIR wasn’t a rabbinical, cantorial, education, and masters-in-Jewish-stuff institution? What if it was a tzaddik training school? And on the application, prospective students, like our guests sitting right here, had to affirm: I *insert name here* am a tzaddik in the making. And your essay was about how you are becoming a tzaddik? How would it feel to learn in that place? How could our College-Institute become that trains each of us, like Noah, to be צדיק תמים ברורותיו?
It’s not so much about finding tzaddikim; it's about making them. And here’s how: When we treat each other as if we are the 18,000, we are more likely to become them. When we hold ourselves to the highest standards, those standards are more likely to be realized. We actually CAN become tzaddikim – if we actively acknowledge each other as tzaddikim in the making.
Let’s be honest. I’m exhausted from the holidays. And now, at the end of our first full week back, I’m totally wiped. I trade in High Holy day sermons, cue sheets, and iyyunim, for Shulchan Aruch, reflection papers, and Sperling. I’m ready for December.
At this point, I expect you’re thinking: It’s hard to turn every corner with a smile or to exit the elevator with pep in every step. And now this crazy darshan wants me to see myself and the people in the building as potential tzaddikim? I can imagine how a tzaddik might act or feel and it most definitely is not the way I felt coming back after the holiday break.
But it doesn’t have to be that difficult. We choose how we look at ourselves and how we look at each other.
Let’s start with how we look at ourselves. During the 2008 presidential campaign, I bought an Obama t-shirt, and found that every time I wore it, I became a much kinder person. I held the door open at Chipotle. I didn’t scowl at poor subway etiquette. I offered directions to tourists. I wanted people to see my shirt, see a nice person, and translate those positive feelings to the candidate. Am I a crazy person? Maybe. Call it “self-imposed symbolic exemplarhood”…I am positive that the label I wore changed the way I felt and the way I acted.
But what about how we see each other? Harvard researchers in 1964 studied teacher interactions with elementary school students. They found that the higher the expectations of a teacher, the higher the performance of the students. The way the teacher sees the students impacts how the students act and the success they can achieve.
Similarly, our expectations of our biblical characters determine the lessons we might draw from their stories. We have a choice about how we see Noah. We can see Noah skeptically: Sure, he was righteous in that generation, but who wouldn’t be? Or, we can say, as other commentators do, that if Noah was righteous then, how much more so would he be now.
So we choose to judge Noah לכף זכות, from the perspective of his merit, and, from there, learn to emulate his righteousness. And we can do the same for each other. See one another as if we are among the 18,000, and we are more likely to meet that expectation.
The best way to get visibility for a new idea is swag. All those great tchotchkies they give you at parties and conferences. Take the HUC-JIR kallah, for example. I use my kallah notebook and our go-green cutlery all the time. And… what if next year’s Kallah giveaway were a t-shirt that says, “Tzaddik in Training.” I would look in the mirror and remind myself that I can be a tzaddik. And I would look at my colleagues and reflect on what I can learn from them as they become tzaddikim themselves. We aren’t going to become the 18,000 unless we start seeing ourselves as potentially among them.
But this is only the first step to our 18,000-nik movement. Much as I love a good t-shirt, a comfy poly-cotton blend is only going to take us so far. We need something much deeper than that.
I’m talking about our superpower that we rarely appreciate: the power to name. Names really matter. In Jewish tradition names do not describe what already is so much as they determine what still might be. As Midrash Tanchuma says, a person’s name can influence its bearer for good or for bad (Ha'azinu 7). Just look at First Samuel, for example, where we meet the character Nabal, whose name means something to the effect of “doofus.” And, in describing him, his wife says: כִּשְׁמוֹ כֶּן-הוּא (I Sam 25:25), as is his name, so is he. In other words, his name means doofus…and he’s a doofus.
Kishmo kein hu…a person lives up to, or down to, his or her name.
And here’s the thing. Whenever we talk, we name the things we talk about. Consider the average conversation about HUC-JIR. I worry we might leave 1 West 4th street with a spiritual practice of the kvetch. We kvetch because of the natural temptation to name negatively: our classes, our classmates, our schedule. It’s a self-fulfilling prophesy. How we name is what we get. Kishmo kein hu.
But what if each day we arrived intent on naming goodness righteousness? We can name the inspiration in a professor’s lecture; the persistence of administrators negotiating a complex system of four disparate campuses; the patience of librarians who help us find book “HN 49 V6.4 F5.9 2008;” the dedication of a custodial staff who arrive before we do and stay long after we are gone; the devotion of a soup kitchen team who feeds the hungry; the passion and work of classmates striving to cure the world’s ills, to make Israel the place we can be proud of, to build synagogues that matter.
Aren’t these all instances of being, at least, momentary tzaddikim? As tamim b’doroteinu, complete for our time as Noah was for his? Absolutely, we strive for greater goodness, but naming how far we have come is the best way to go further still in our efforts.
And it is not just here that positive naming makes a difference. We can go out into the world with this spiritual practice of finding light, not darkness, righteousness, not frustration. By naming each other as tzaddikim in training in here, we put ourselves on a path to joining the 18,000 out there. Kishmo kein hu.
That path necessarily takes us out into the world, because even with Noah, God had the broader world in mind. Noah, our first tzaddik, was not even a Jew; he was “everyone,” humanity as a whole. When it comes to the tzaddikim, God has all along insisted on the universal.
So too is the sign of Noah’s covenant. Our אוֹת-הַבְּרִית (Gen 9:12), the rainbow, is distinct from every other ot habrit we see in Torah. Circumcision and Shabbat are particular to the Jewish people. The rainbow symbolizes a universal promise.
With the rainbow, Noah trusted God not to bring destruction -- while God entrusted Noah with the very same task. Noah, the first tzaddik, emerges as the progenitor of a global citizenry of potential tzaddikim charged with upholding the promise to protect and preserve the world.
To be tzaddik tamim b’doroteinu demands we take what we learn here and universalize it. By setting the example of naming the good and insisting on the better, we become an ot ha’brit ourselves – a model of what righteous people can bring about. Like a rainbow, the light from the tzaddik – from you and from me – can illuminate brokenness and darkness with the Technicolor brilliance of hope and goodness.
We most likely didn’t walk into HUC-JIR on day one as one of the 18,000 tzaddikim, but our task is nothing less than that.
How are we going to do it? Just follow the instructions from the Department of Homeland Security: If you see something, say something.
When you see momentary tzaddikim, notice them, find the words for what you saw and tell them. Whether it is a fellow student, a staff member, a professor, or the president himself, speak up and name the moments of goodness you see.
That goodness. The goodness my mother asked of me. The goodness we expect of and see in our community is how we uphold our part of the covenant. Each of us can be an ot habrit, one of 18,000 rainbows, brightening the light of those around us.
When we see a rainbow, we say: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יי אֶלוֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם זוֹכֵר הַבְּרִית וְנֶאֱמָן בִּבְרִיתוֹ וְקַיָם בְּמַאֲמָרוֹ Blessed are you God who remembers the covenant, is faithful to the covenant, and holds fast to promises. Let us, like God, remember the covenant, be faithful to it, and become examples of the 18,000 right here, and then, someday, out there. And may we be God’s partners and Noah’s heirs in sustaining and saving the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment