September 14, 2024
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parashat Ki Teitzei
Love and Complexity
September 14, 2024 — 11 Elul 5784
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
Last Sunday evening Shira and I were in Lakewood, New Jersey for a wedding. Lakewood is the capital of the charedi, or ultra-Orthodox, world in America. Lakewood boasts a world-famous charedi yeshiva called Beth Medrash Govoha which is the second largest yeshiva in the world, second only to the Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem. The wedding was charedi. Men and women sat separately during the wedding. Men and women danced separately after the wedding. There was a thick wall separating the men and women dancing. And a strong majority of the men wore black hats. It was the first black hat wedding we had ever attended.
Being at this wedding called to mind, for me, a famous story about Dr. Paul Farmer in Tracy Kidder’s biography called Mountains Beyond Mountains. Paul Farmer would go to impoverished third world nations and provide modern health care to people who otherwise did not have access to modern medicine. One day Paul Farmer is in Haiti where there had been a tuberculosis outbreak. Many locals believed that tuberculosis is caused by sorcery, by an enemy casting a spell upon them, the response to which was to ask a Voodoo priest to cast a curse upon your enemy in retaliation for causing your illness. Paul Farmer tries to make the case that tuberculosis is a disease caused by germs, not an illness caused by curses; and that the most helpful response is antibiotics, not mobilizing a Voodoo priest to cast a counter curse. Paul Farmer meets a woman afflicted by tuberculosis who is persuaded to take medication. She recovers. Afterwards she tells Paul Farmer, “I know TB is caused by germs.” And she also says I know which enemy cursed me so I asked my Voodoo priest to get revenge. Paul Farmer responded, if you believe it was an enemy that cast a curse upon you, why then did you take the antibiotics? To which this Haitian woman responded: “Honey, are you incapable of complexity?”
“Honey, are you incapable of complexity?” In context this is a rhetorical question. The Haitian woman is saying: Yeah, I know it’s about germs and antibiotics, and I am also holding onto a non-medical, non-modern truth system that also resonates for me. I contain multitudes, why is it so hard for you, the great Paul Farmer, not to get that?
This story appeared 21 years ago, in 2003. Yet it has an urgent resonance today.
Honey, are you incapable of complexity is no longer a rhetorical question, but a real question for many of us as we think about sitting down to a Rosh Hashanah meal with our loved ones who have very different thoughts on the complex questions of the day.
The charedi wedding in Lakewood modeled one answer that is not only helpful but beautiful for how to hold complexity.
On the one hand, the wedding was charedi. The bride, Shaindi, is the tenth of thirteen children. The wedding procession, which featured all thirteen children, and many grandchildren, was a rich cavalcade of love—and not brief.
On the other hand, the groom whom Shaindi married is Joshua Leifer, the author of Tablets Shattered, who is coming to Temple Emanuel this coming Wednesday night, September 18, to talk about his new book. Josh embodies so much complexity. One of the deepest loves of his life is Israel. He went to a Solomon Schechter Day School in New Jersey and went to Israel many times growing up. After college he lived in Israel for a lengthy period. He speaks Hebrew fluently. He met his wife Shaindi in Israel. They dated and fell in love in Israel. Later this month, they are moving to Israel, where they will live their first year of married life together.
And, Joshua Leifer is extremely critical of what he calls the occupation. He is extremely critical of the government of Prime Minister Netanyahu. He was an early member and leader of If Not Now, an organization which protests Israel’s occupation. When he was a senior at Princeton, trying to write his senior thesis, he spent most of his time writing position papers for If Not Now against Israel’s occupation. He was arrested—proudly so—for attending an anti-Israel protest. He spent a night in jail.
He loves Israel. And he is critical of Israel. How does that work?
I learned something both poignant and powerful from attending Josh and Shaindi’s wedding. What I learned is how to do complexity when complexity is hard to do. And the answer, the secret sauce, is love.
Josh can live in Israel, speak Hebrew, write about Israel, and critique Israel’s government and occupation, because there is enough love in his heart to do all that.
I felt the power of love cutting through complexity myself, personally. I had never before talked to If Not Now activists. But Josh’s mother Laurie and Shira were college roommates and have literally been best friends ever since. We love Josh’s family. We love Josh. We were at his Bar Mitzvah. Love allows us to hold complexity.
In fact, loving our way through complexity makes our love even stronger. Kathryn Schulz, a staff writer for The New Yorker, wrote a beautiful book called Lost & Found in which she tells the story of losing her father and, 18 months before he passed away, falling in love with the woman whom she would go on to marry whose name is Casey. While they were immediately drawn towards one another, and while they remain deeply in love years later, they had a lot of complexity to work their way through.
Kathryn is Jewish. Casey is Lutheran. But Kathryn calls their difference a double difference. Kathryn describes herself as an atheist. She does not believe in God. She does not attend services. She feels culturally Jewish, but prayer and faith and religious observance are not her thing. By contrast, Casey is a woman of deep faith. She loves, believes in, and prays to God. She goes to Church, by herself, without Kathryn, every week.
Kathryn’s cultural family background is that she is a child of survivors. Much of their family perished in the Shoah. By contrast, Casey grew up in a southern, rural, Confederate flag waiving part of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, amongst people whose ancestors were slave-owners.
Kathryn was a city girl, growing up in a Jewish suburb of Cleveland. Casey “grew up on a farm and could drive a tractor before she drove a car.”
How to make sense of all this difference? Kathryn writes:
We are called on over and over to remember that the person we love
does not always have the same thoughts, feelings, frames of reference, reactions,
needs, fears, and desires that we do. But overall, the trajectory of a happy
relationship, which begins with cherishing similarity, ends in cherishing difference…
I am most often moved to gratitude and tenderness and awe by those parts of her
that are least like me—because it is in them that I see her most clearly, and because
it is thanks to them that my own world has grown so much larger.
Complexity can deepen love. It is not easy. It is not automatic. It takes work. But seeing charedis and progressives dancing together at a wedding in Lakewood taught me that when we love our way through our complexity, respecting each other’s point of view, not changing their point of view, that is a love worth fighting for.
Which means that our answer to the Haitian women’s question, even now, even and especially in these troubled times, is: Honey, we are totally capable of complexity because we are totally capable of love. Shabbat shalom.