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May 21, 2022
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parshat Behar
May 21, 2022 — 20 Iyyar 5782
Never Better
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
If you ever asked Barry Shrage, the long-time former head of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies, how he was doing, he always answered in an utterly unique way. In all my life, I have never heard anyone else answer this way. He would always answer: Never better.
Never better. What a great response. It is unique. It rhymes. Never better. It is short and to the point. It radiates positive and hopeful energy.
There is only one problem. Does it ring true? I have been thinking about Barry’s signature phrase this week given the events of the world. With Buffalo, and Santa Ana, and all the other dreadful news that you do not need me to remind you of, is it possible to say and mean : never better? We could engage the world as it is, but that might make us depressed. We could ignore the world as it is and focus on the Eastern Conference Finals between the Celtics and the Heat. But can we engage the world as it is, and still radiate positivity?
This question leads us to a curious line near the end of birkat hamazon, grace after meals. During the latter part of birkat hamazon, we say: “Harachaman huh yishlach lanu et Eliyahu hanavih zachur latov, vivaser lanu besorot tovot, yeshuot v’nechamot.” May God, the Merciful One, send us the prophet Elijah, of blessed memory, who will bring us good news of deliverance and consolation.” Besorot tovot means good tidings. Elijah is the good tidings guy. May he come to tell us that all is going to be well.
I have been singing this line for sixty years without ever even thinking about what it means. But I have been reading the book Becoming Elijah by Daniel Matt, and he explains this line in a way that makes it land.
It would not have been easy for Elijah to be the bearer of good news. Good tidings were not the nature of his time either. To the contrary, Elijah, as imagined by the rabbis of the Talmud, lived after the Temple had been destroyed and the Jewish people had been exiled, and there was poverty, disease, hunger, mental illness and suicidal ideation. It was a dark and desperate time. How could he possibly deliver good tidings?
Daniel Matt answers this question by showing that Elijah has a certain move. He looks for transitions, for things that are changing, and that space allows him to see a glimmer of hope, a glimmer of possibility. Yes, it has been dark lately, but things are getting lighter. Yes, it has been cold lately, but things are getting warmer. Yes, there has been brokenness lately, but a healing is happening.
Which means that if we want to engage the world as it is and be able to say our own version of never better, our work is to look for pivot points, for liminal moments, for transitions where we can sense and work towards creating a healthier, happier reality on the other end of the transition.
Let me tell you a story about a person who embodies this legitimate optimism of Elijah: the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
In his biography of the Rebbe, Joseph Telushkin observed that the Rebbe lost a lot of his own family in the Shoah: his brother, his sister, his brother in law, his grandmother, his cousins.
How, after the enormity of all this loss, would life go on? One of the Rebbe’s fundamental teachings was not only to be optimistic, but to use optimistic language. The Rebbe was incredibly insistent on this point. The language we use is self-fulfilling. Negative language creates negative energy which results in a negative reality. Positive language creates positive energy which results in a positive reality. He would not call a hospital in Hebrew beit cholim, a house for the sick; he would call it beit refuah, a house of healing. He would not call something “evil,” even if were “evil.” He would call it hefech ha-tov, the opposite of good. He would never use the word deadline for something that was due. He would use the word due date, connoting life, not death. And he did not want to talk about the Holocaust. He wanted to talk about simcha shel mitzvah, the joy of doing a mitzvah.
After the war, after the Shoah, after all this loss, the Rebbe pulls an Elijah. He delivers good tidings by seeing a new world, a changed reality, where there is legitimate hope on the other side. It was after the Shoah, in the 1950s, that the Rebbe sent emissaries to thousands of communities all over the world to spread Torah and mitzvah. Positive language led to positive energy which led to the biggest seders in the world in unlikely locations like India, Thailand and Cambodia.
What does all of this mean to us? We are not Elijah. We are not the Rebbe. But like Elijah and the Rebbe we inhabit a hard world where good tidings don’t come easy. Where good tidings are not obvious. Where never better sounds like a stretch. And like Elijah and the Rebbe, we can transform our world by using positive language to frame it, to describe it, and to inspire action to repair it. I want to leave you with a question: What is your own version of the Shirley Chisolm story?
As Joseph Telushkin tells the story, Shirley Chisolm was the first black woman elected to Congress in 1968. She had wanted to work on education and labor, but was assigned instead Agriculture, a curious appointment for a representative from Brooklyn. She lacked the seniority or colleagues to stop southern Democratic congressmen from assigning her to the Agriculture Committee, intended and received as a diss. There was press coverage in Brooklyn that spoke of her anger at the appointment. Not good tidings. But anger. She got a call from the Rebbe. The Rebbe would like to meet with you. So this freshman congresswoman, Shirley Chisolm, visits the Rebbe at his home, 770 Ocean Parkway. She tells the Rebbe she is furious at this diss, and asks what should she do?
The Rebbe suggests that she might reframe. And I quote the Rebbe: “What a blessing God has given you. This country has so much surplus food and there are so many hungry people and you can use this gift that God has given you to feed hungry people. Find a creative way to do it.” p. 14.
Shortly after this meeting with the Rebbe, a man named Robert Dole is elected to the Senate from Kansas. Senator Dole tells Congresswoman Chisolm that midwestern farmers were producing more food than they could sell and were losing money on their crops. The two newly elected leaders partnered to take this surplus food and get it into the kitchens of millions of poor people who had gone hungry before. Reflecting on her meeting with the Rebbe, Shirley Chisolm observed: “A rabbi who is an optimist taught me that what you think is a challenge is a gift from God. If poor babies have milk and poor children have food, it’s because this rabbi in Crown Heights had vision.” p. 14.
Next time somebody asks you how you are doing, how about trying out a new response?
Never better.
Now go out and make it so. Shabbat shalom.