There was a time, some years
ago, when the High Holyday newsletter printed the titles of High Holyday
sermons. I would have liked to have this sermon title advertised 6-8
weeks ago if only to generate speculation on the meaning of the acronym.
I will provide a hint: the sermon is not about a new website or “weapons
of mass destruction”.
In the late 1990’s, the organization
that I founded, PANIM, sponsored a 3-week interfaith summer program
that explored religion, social justice and the common good. We called
it the E Pluribus Unum Project, “out of the many, one”. We had 60
entering college freshman equally divided between Protestants, Catholics
and Jews. In the last year we piloted a small contingent of Muslims
as well. It was during those summers when I spent considerable time
living with devout Christians that I first encountered t-shirts and
bracelets with the letters WWJD on them. It stood for “what would
Jesus do?” and the phrase was taken very seriously by these committed
Christians.
It was not just a slogan. Many
of our Christian participants, when confronted with an ethical dilemma,
would think long and hard about the right course of action that they
should pursue. Jesus was their role model. And while Jesus may not have
confronted every dilemma facing these 17-18 year olds, he represented
a standard of Christian virtue and ethics to which these young Christians
aspired. One need not agree with every action by one of these Christian
teens to be impressed with their desire to have their faith inform their
behavior.
Now I spend a lot of time with
Jewish teens. My life’s work has been about inspiring and training
Jewish teens to be agents for positive social change in the world. I
have seen hundreds of Jewish teens engage in remarkably creative initiatives
on issues like human rights, poverty, literacy, genocide and the like.
Still, I can hardly recall a time when a Jewish teen would stop to consider
a Jewish role model or a Jewish ethical guideline that might inform
their course of action.
It is for that reason that
we need to launch a WWMD campaign—it stands for: “What would Moses
Do?” We would be far better off if part of the ethic imparted by
synagogues and Jewish organizations was to get Jews to start asking
the question: What Would Moses Do? –a shorthanded way of getting Jews
to have their lives guided by 3,000 years of ethical wisdom enshrined
in the texts and stories handed down by the Jewish tradition.
Warning Signs: Making the Case
There is a huge ethics deficit
that besets American society and, as is so often the case, social trends—good,
bad and ugly—usually get manifested first and most obviously among
Jews. Social pathologies do not spring up from nowhere. There are
warning signs and for Jews, they came in triplicate since last Yom Kippur,
under the names of Rubashkin, Madoff and New Jersey.
Last October Sholom Rubashkin,
the CEO of Agriproccessors, the largest kosher slaughterhouse in North
America, was arrested for bank fraud, money laundering and over 9,000
violations of Iowa labor laws. This came after several years’ worth
of revelations regarding cruelty to animals, abuse of illegal immigrant
workers and identity theft. The company has since gone into bankruptcy
and has now been taken over by new owners.
In December Bernie Madoff became
a household name when he was arrested for engineering the largest Ponzi
scheme in history, reportedly over $50 billion. What was particularly
painful for the Jewish community was to discover that Madoff took full
advantage of his high profile in various Jewish charities and country
clubs so that the vast majority of the lost funds came from the endowments
of Jewish organizations and Jews whose philanthropy has helped to sustain
numerous charitable causes.
And then this July, five rabbis
were arrested along with three NJ mayors and two state legislators for
money laundering, primarily by using Jewish charities as a cover. In
the most outrageous charge, Rabbi Levy Yitzchak Rosenbaum was indicted
on charges of selling kidneys bought from poor Jews in Israel for $160K
(the kidney donors got $10K). (And I thought the worst thing about New
Jersey was the Turnpike!)
Now my parents generation would
react to this kind of news defensively—a shanda fer the goyim
would be the refrain. Loosely (and psychologically) translated it means:
we are guests in America; they have treated us well; and we are embarrassed
that gentiles should be aware that we are not the most upstanding citizens.
The Israeli version of this defensive posture came in the first line
of an op-ed I saw in the Jerusalem Post that appeared the week
Bernie Madoff was sentenced in early December. It read: “For anti-semites,
Christmas came early this year.”
Looking in the Mirror
But guess what? Anti-semites
don’t need reasons to hate Jews. They can make it up since they have
few hang-ups about what is fact and what is fiction. I am not concerned
about anti-semites.
I am concerned about what
has happened to the ethical barometers of Jews. I know what you
are thinking: you have nothing to do with the kosher slaughterhouse
industry; you never invest more than a billion dollars in any one place
and you have never sold any kidneys, at least not in New Jersey.
But it is a copout to dismiss
these warning signs as not relating to us. An ethical deficit does
not start out on the front page of the
New York Times. It starts with minor behavioral patterns that
my mother would have simply called,
“being a mensch”, or, in other words, being a person of character.
Look at the Al Chet prayers which appear three times in the course
of Yom Kippur. It provides a checklist of close to 100 behaviors that
might need some attention. Here is a glimpse of just my personal scorecard:
“For the sin we have committed before you by gossiping and rumoring”;
Guilty. ….by empty promises; Guilty. …by refusing to compromise;
Guilty. …by avarice and greed; Guilty. And I thought I had a good
year! When we don’t use the opportunity that this day and its liturgy
gives us to tell ourselves the truth; when we
give ourselves a pass, refuse to confront these patterns of behavior
and assume they are OK, the behaviors can easily
grow into more serious ethical deficits. This is part of the
teshuva work we are called upon to do during these High Holydays.
Last month I was leading a
training program for executive directors of campus Hillels in Canada.
I was sharing some ideas of how to inspire a deeper commitment to Jewish
identity among marginally affiliated Jewish college students. One of
the directors raised his hand and said the following: I feel like I
am fighting a losing battle. My students associate being Jewish with
stereotypes that would make Shylock in the Merchant of Venice seem tame.
They think Bernie Madoff is simply one guy who got caught. Beneath him
are thousands of Jews who have created a culture where the only thing
that matters is how much money they can make. Jewish students are ashamed
of that behavior and many of them see it manifested in their own parents.
If young Jews today are distancing themselves from their religious identity,
we have no one to blame but ourselves.
A harsh indictment, to be
sure. But we need to take it in and take a quick look
in the mirror. That, after all, is the High Holyday drill. Honest personal
and communal self-assessment.
When I heard this indictment,
I initially got defensive. I started to point to a myriad of Jews and
Jewish organizations that were doing good work in the world. Having
written a book on Judaism and social justice, I was not at a loss for
examples. And then I saw the trap I had fallen into. Social justice
is not the same as personal ethics. I realized that I had given dozens
of talks here and elsewhere on social justice and hardly any on living
ethically. This city is filled with folks, many that I know, who are
doing great things in the world but who are not mensches; they
are not nice people, not people of character.
Many Jews are more likely to
march to end global hunger than to cook for a neighbor who is ill.
It is humbling to remember that we are descendants of Abraham who
brought monotheism into the world but who cast out one son into the
desert and was ready to slaughter the other one on an altar.
There is a serious American
ethical deficit, and Jews are not immune. Allow me to say a few words
about our cultural context and then focus on the Jewish dimension of
the issue. The Josephson Institute of Ethics conducts an annual survey
of 30,000 American high school students. Here are the 2008 results:
42% reported that they have resorted to lying to save money. 83% admitted
to lying to their parents about something significant. 64% reported
cheating on a test during the past year. 30% reported stealing something
from a store in the past year. 23% reported stealing something from
a parent or relative. Perhaps most troubling was that 93% of the students
surveyed reported that they were satisfied with their own personal ethics
and character and that they were more ethical than their friends.
Welcome to the age of moral relativism. This is what
“I’m OK, You’re OK” has wrought.
You can draw a direct link
between these survey results and the ethics deficit that has poisoned
our society. Our ethics deficit has devastated our economic well being;
our ethics deficit has undermined our trust in
corporations and in social, educational and religious
institutions; our ethics deficit has
eroded our confidence in our leaders and
threatened our democracy. Unless we find a way to address the ethical
deficit in our country, we will get more of the same and it will get
even worse.
I believe that at the root
of this troubling ethics deficit is a culture that has honored individualism
and personal autonomy to its detriment. Jews have bought into this ethic
big time. The attitude is typified by the slogan: “don’t tell
me what to do.” Here is what it sounds like: How dare my children’s
school mandate what students wear! I resent that my employer pressures
me to give money to the United Way campaign! Can you believe that our
neighbor told us that our son was making trouble at the mall with his
friends! “Noone has the right to tell me how to live my life”.
This, my friends, is liberal values run amok.
Jewish First Principles
It is worth remembering
that Judaism is a religion of commandments. It is the meaning of the
term mitzvah. We are inclined to render mitzvah as
“good deed” because it takes the pressure off. But Judaism teaches
that our yetzer hara, our evil inclination, is stronger than
our yetzer tov, our good inclination, and without a sense of
obligation to a transcendent standard--some call that God--human beings
will cut ethical corners to meet their own needs.
Judaism’s pedagogic genius
is also reflected in the story told about the Jewish people’s faithfulness
at Mt. Sinai when our ancestors said: naaseh v’nishma, “we
will do and we will listen”. Get a child into the habit of putting
coins into a tzedakah box before Shabbat and the giving instinct
will endure. Get a child to say a prayer before or after a meal and
they will internalize the important character trait of gratitude. Instruct
your child to give up a seat on a bus or train to an older person and
they will be more inclined to respect their elders. A child does not
need a reason to do the right thing. They need a parental role model
who will mandate right behavior and the result is a child who grows
up with a strong sense of response-ability—(think about the
word) the ability to respond to what is required of you.
Judaism believes that there
is a right way and a wrong way to behave. The 10 commandments offer
5 “you shall” and 5 “you shall not”. But this language clashes
with our cultural conditioning to “do our own thing”. And
when middle class parents face a choice between laying down the law
to their children or compromising on a principle to keep their children
happy, all too often they choose the latter.
A story here will be instructive.
In both congregations that I served as rabbi, when I met with prospective
Bar/Bat Mitzvah families, I would exert moral suasion to get a tzedakah
contribution from both the student and their parents. I would say to
the students: “you will be getting a significant amount of money in
gifts for your celebration. Judaism teaches that one should give 10%
to charity. Wouldn’t you like to mark your becoming a “mitzvah man/mitzvah
woman” by performing this mitzvah? Then we would discuss issues they
cared about and organizations that helped advance those issues. I gently
steered the discussion so that the tzedakah would be divided
between a Jewish and a secular organization. I then never failed to
publicly praise the student during the shabbat service by announcing
their act of tzedakah and the organizations that would benefit.
I would then turn to the parents
and say something like this: you should be so proud of your daughter/son
for all that they are doing to prepare for their Bar-Mitzvah and the
fact that they will mark the occasion with an act of tzedakah.
Judaism teaches that we should mark major moments in our lives—holidays,
major milestones and certainly a simcha with an act of tzedakah
as a way to show gratitude and share our blessing with others. I am
sure you support many good causes. Most families choose to donate bibles
and prayer books here at Adat Shalom in honor of their children. Bibles
are $75 and prayer books are $45. How many would you like to donate?
Now I know that many parents
were taken aback at the boldness of my solicitation. A few might have
been offended. It is not considered polite to tell other adults what
they ought to do. But over the years the compliance rate was
near 100% and I know that it was among the most longstanding takeaway
lessons of the family bar-mitzvah experience. I’ve met bar-mitzvah
students decades later who told me that they remembered feeling really
good about giving their own money for the first time and it got them
into a lifelong habit of giving tzedakah regularly.
Most importantly, you cannot
teach ethics and righteous living unless you are willing to engage in
Jewish mitzvah language: this is the right thing to do; this
is the wrong thing to do. In the battle for our hearts and minds between
liberal American values that puts a priority on personal autonomy above
all else and the Jewish value of responsibility and obligation, Judaism
is losing. We must find a way to engage in the conversation: what
does it take to be a person of good character? What does it take to
be seen as kind and virtuous? How do I behave more like a
mensch? How might we raise consciousness about these behavioral
norms to friends and family?
Finding a Moral Compass
If we got into a WWMD mindset,
where would we turn? Perhaps to the 2nd century compendium
of wisdom nuggets called Pirke Avot, Ethics of our Ancestors. Or we
could explore the Mussar movement that was popular in Europe in the
19th century and which produced hundreds of volumes on spirituality
and ethical living. Or we could look at an innovative Jewish program
started by a Los Angeles Reconstructionist rabbi called Menschlekeit
Matters, a takeoff on a program called Character Counts which emphasizes
six pillars of good character. Among them are trusworthiness (emunah),
respect (kavod) and responsibility (achrayut).
The literature is so rich that
I will be offering a 3-session course in the month of October open to
all members of Adat Shalom that will explore these resources. I am using
the same title that I gave this sermon: WWMD: In Search of Character
and Ethics. I hope you will take advantage of the opportunity.
The Yom Kippur Connection
WWMD, just like, WWJD, is a
metaphor for the belief that someone you honor and respect is monitoring
your behavior and serving as your conscience. Kind of like the role
that Jiminy Cricket plays for Pinocchio. (BTW-I just discovered that
Jiminy Cricket was intended as the animated stand-in for another JC,
namely Jesus Christ.) The Jiminy Cricket is different for every person.
Maybe it was your mom or dad. Maybe a cherished grandparent? Maybe a
teacher? The question is, when you face a situation when you can
act in an honorable, ethical and virtuous way or act in a more self-serving,
convenient and ethically questionable way, whose face do you see in
your mind’s eye? For many Christians, that face is the face of
Jesus; we Jews need to come up with a suitable substitute. WWMD is
my metaphor for this standard that is so sorely lacking in the Jewish
world.
Let me close with a story that
will make the point. On the first AS trip to Israel that I led in the
early 1990’s we met with Yuli Edelstein. Yuli is now a member of the
Israeli Knesset but when I first met him in the 1980’s, he was one
of the heroes of the Soviet Jewry movement. Yuli was one of the leaders
of the refuseniks in the former Soviet Union who helped to create dozens
of Hebrew learning circles among young Jews who wanted to reclaim their
identity despite the prohibition against such activity from Soviet authorities.
In 1984 he was arrested and convicted on fabricated drug charges—a
favorite tactic of the Soviets-and sentenced to 3.5 years of hard labor.
He told us that on numerous occasions Soviet guards would come and try
to get him to confess his “crimes” and give the names of all his
friends who were part of the Jewish cultural underground that the Soviets
wanted to crush. In return, Yuli was promised his freedom. “Think
of it” they would say, “sign these papers, give us some names and
in a few days you will sit on a balcony in Tel Aviv sipping coffee with
your wife.” Yuli replied: “If I signed your trumped up confession
and betrayed my colleagues, my wife would not ever sip coffee with me
again.” Yuli Edelstein had his Jiminy Cricket. Who is yours?
Our service began with the
chanting of Kol Nidrei. The key theme was vows-- promises made and promises
broken. In the end, ethics is a matter of fidelity
or faithfulness to certain people, institutions and principles.
Each calls upon our loyalty to the covenants that define those respective
relationships. Some of those covenants are written and some are
implied. The covenant with my spouse is explicit and implies not only
sexual fidelity but also a level of emotional kinship and support that
supercedes all others.
But we also have implied
covenants with parents, children, friends and professional
colleagues. Have we been faithful to those covenants? We are part of
neighborhoods, our children’s schools, a synagogue community, the
Jewish people, America—each has expectations of us. Some of these
covenants we discharge with fidelity and faithfulness;
some we overlook or cheat.
The Hebrew word for fidelity
or faithfulness is emunah and its root is the same as the familiar
word, amen. When we say “amen” we affirm the prayers
that were just said. It means: “We heard it, we get it, we’ll do
it”. The highest ethical compliment that can be offered to someone
in Hebrew is that they are an ish neeman, a person who can be
relied upon to do what they say they will do.
We will have heard and said
a lot of prayers during these High Holydays. They include lofty sentiments—aspirations
for the most ethical person we have the capacity to be.
May we, in the New Year ahead
of us, live our lives in a way that becomes a resounding “amen”
to those prayers, a life that would make Moses, your personal Jiminy
Cricket, and maybe even your mother, proud.
And the congregation all said:
“Amen”