March 26, 2022
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Shabbat Parah
Parshat Shemini
March 26, 2022 — 23 Adar II 5782
In the Cosmic Battle Between Good and Evil, What Can I Do?
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
In 1986, Professor Ray Scheindlin of the Jewish Theological Seminary authored a book with an evocative title: Wine, Women, & Death: Medieval Hebrew Poems on the Good Life. The book featured the poetry of Jewish poets who lived during the Golden Age of Jewish Spain. They lived the good life, with rich homes with gardens and pools and fountains. They wrote poetry about their good life, about their gardens and pools and fountains. Most of these poets were secular. And they were rooted in Judaism. At home in Spain. At home in Judaism. The Golden Age.
But something happened to the Golden Age. It ended.
Ferdinand and Isabella’s Edict of Expulsion in 1492 did more than end one historical age and usher in another. It ruined lives, hundreds of thousands of lives. The premise of the Golden Age was that a Jew could be Jewish and Spanish at the same time. No more. Historians estimate that in 1492 there were about 300,000 Spanish Jews. As a result of the expulsion decree, 200,000 converted to Catholicism to remain in Spain. Something like 100,000 refused to convert were expelled. They became refugees. Historical forces that they did not understand and could not control meant that they lost not only their country, and their home, but also a sense that the universe was fair, just and orderly.
How do we understand a world where everything can get upturned? Like that.
It wasn’t just. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. It just was.
And there was nothing anybody could do to fix it. There was nothing anybody could do to change it.
Many of these Spanish Jewish refugees moved to Tzefat, that beautiful, mystical place in Northern Israel. They came with hard questions: How to understand what had just happened to them? How did they lose their home? How did they lose their country? Where was God in all of this? Where is justice? What could they do?
The Spanish Jewish refugees had a rabbi who would go on to change Jewish history. His name was Isaac Luria. He died young, at the age of 38. His dates are 1534 to 1572. Isaac Luria would go on to create a mode of distinctive thought that became known as Lurianic Kabbalah, and it would engage the deepest questions of these Jewish refugees.
Lurianic Kabbalah is filled with a lot of opaque symbols. But there are two essential points.
Luria taught that there is a perpetual, constant cosmic battle between good and evil. Luria could look at the Spanish refugees in Tzefat and say yes, there is evil. History has no happy trajectory. There is no moral arc that bends towards justice. What happened to you was evil.
But in response to this evil, he also taught, we are not hopeless and we are not helpless. Our work is to do a tikkun, literally to make better. Tikkun olam, make the world better, is a Lurianic idea that stresses the cosmic importance of what we do in our quiet, ordinary lives. When we do good, that good is multi-layered. We help the person before us. We also intervene in a cosmic battle to show that while there is evil in the world–clearly then and now–there is also good, and good can be ascendant.
Let me try to bring this down to earth. I want to tell you one story and leave you with one question.
The week that Russia invaded Ukraine, that very week Dr. Paul Farmer died at the age of 62 in rural Rwanda on the campus of a university that he helped build. Paul Farmer was so brilliant that, while a medical student at Harvard Medical School, he very often did not actually attend Harvard Medical School. Rather he was in the field, treating the poorest of the poor in Haiti, and would then fly back to school to take exams.
His whole life was devoted to a simple proposition that had powerful moral clarity: that all human beings deserve first-rate medical care It is not morally acceptable for people born in poor countries to have poorer health outcomes.
He taught and role modeled that a doctor’s job is not only to heal the person before them, but to heal the underlying social circumstances of poverty and neglect that lead to and exacerbate health challenges. He lived in Haiti, Rwanda, West Africa, famously walking miles to personally give life-saving medication to the poorest people in the world. He raised millions of dollars to build hospitals and universities in these poor regions to provide their citizens with first world medical care.
A student and disciple of Paul Farmer, Dr. Sriram Shamasunder, shared that Paul Farmer had originally been scheduled to not be in Rwanda this week; he had planned to travel to work at a hospital in Sierra Leone, but he delayed his travel plans because he was concerned about one patient in Rwanda. The patient was a young man in his mid-30s who had what seemed like end-stage AIDS. It seemed like he was soon to pass from this world. Paul Farmer was treating him, and the treatments started to work. This patient became responsive. He opened his eyes. He was able to communicate and to nod. All of this was progress. Paul Farmer stayed behind in Rwanda to see this patient through. At last this patient succumbed to his illness Dr. Shamasunder describes Paul Farmer’s reaction:
During the week I spent in Rwanda, the patient that Paul was following had
an unexpected complication and got sicker and sicker. On a WhatsApp thread
with many of us taking care of the patient, Paul turned over and over therapies
that might be given, interventions that should be done, possible transfers to other
facilities that would give this patient a fighting chance of living.
The patient died. Paul was devastated. He was heartbroken. I remember thinking
that this is why he is Paul Farmer. After 40 years, losing one patient was like losing
the whole world. Many of us felt the urge to console him.
I told him I could feel his anguish because he loved the patient in a way that we
doctors often don’t allow ourselves to. He replied that he had unabashedly loved
that dying man and had told him so every day.
That’s Paul Farmer.
We’re not Paul Farmer. But what is our version of that? What is our version of that kind of caring? What is our version of that kind of giving? What is our version of that kind of reaching beyond ourselves? Because one thing is clear. Evil there will always be. Whether there will also be good depends on us. Shabbat shalom.