Menu
Menu
June 25, 2022
Author(s): Rav Hazzan Aliza Berger,
Parshat Sh’lach
June 25, 2022 — 26 Sivan 5782
Roe is me
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
On Thursday, the Supreme Court struck down a New York law which required citizens to demonstrate “proper cause” to carry a firearm in public. Yesterday the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. Next week, the Court will hear West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency and will almost certainly strike down the right of the EPA enact rules to limit greenhouse gas emissions and to fight climate change.
Whatever your political affiliation, whomever you voted for in these past elections, we should all be concerned about these decisions.
We should all be concerned because the Supreme Court has taken the position that their duty is to narrowly interpret the intention of the founding fathers and the authors of the constitution, without concern for our lived experience. In practice, that means that despite Uvalde, despite the 18 mass shootings that have happened since Uvalde, despite rampant violence on New York subways and in the streets of our nation, the Supreme Court has upheld the Constitutional right to bear arms without restriction. Justice Thomas went so far as to write that concern for public safety is not enough to justify any limitation on gun control. We would never imagine driving a vehicle by only looking only through the rearview mirror. We should all be concerned about a court that solely concerns itself with the task of interpreting past legislation without regard to our present situation.
We should also be concerned because our Supreme Court has become more political than ever before. Fifty years ago, Roe v Wade was decided in a 7-2 vote. Five of the justices who ruled in favor of Roe were appointed by republican presidents. In fact, if you look back at rulings from that period, there is a stark difference between that court and the court we see today. The difference was not in terms of the types of cases they faced or in the differences between ideologies on the court—they were facing equally prickly and challenging decisions and they certainly had ideological differences, but when decisions were handed down, it was much more difficult to predict how each Supreme Court Justice would vote. At the time, it seemed that Justices were really hearing cases, evaluating the cases on their merits and not based on the ideology of the president who appointed them. Today, in every decision we see coming out of the Supreme Court, we see our Supreme Court Justices voting along the ideological lines of the president who nominated them. There is no consensus building, there is no space for process or evolution of ideology. As a result, we have lost the illusion that our Supreme Court represents an ideal of judicial process which is above politics and see clearly now that the Supreme Court is just one more cog in the political machine, just like everything else.
And of course, we should be concerned, because unlike the leaked draft opinion that came out earlier in the summer which stated explicitly that the ruling in the case of Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization would be limited to reproductive rights alone and would not invite a review of other fundamental human rights that have been achieved on the basis of Roe v. Wade, when the decision was handed down yesterday to overturn Roe v. Wade, Justice Thomas said that the Supreme Court ought to reconsider all of the decisions that have been made on the basis of Roe v. Wade including those which affirm the right to contraception, the right to be intimate with the person you love in the way that you want, and the right to marry the person you love. We should all be afraid of a Court that is openly willing to endanger the lives of people we love.
What should we do about this? What is our responsibility as a spiritual community in the face of all this?
We could just focus on the Torah. We could ignore what is happening in the Supreme Court, ignore the real fear that is felt across our nation, we could say that politics belongs out there and in here we just connect with God. I’ll admit that position is tempting. I had a sermon written for this Shabbos that I really liked, a sermon that was just about Torah. When you teach and preach about Torah, no one sends angry emails. When you just teach and preach about Torah, you get to ignore the pain of the world and you can live in this bubble of holiness and happiness. In the world where church and state are separate, in the world where this is a spiritual place separate from the needs and demands of the world, we get to perpetuate the illusion that we are not tied to what happens out there. We get to abdicate responsibility. That can feel great.
Or we could take the opposite position. We could cancel services, we could say that spiritual work cannot be a priority when the sanctity of our country’s judicial system is at stake. We could say that to be a spiritual being, to be someone who takes seriously the Jewish value of pikuach nefesh, that every soul deserves to be protected and that the human life takes precedence over all else, we must devote every ounce of our energy and attention to organizing and advocating for the kind of justice which affirms our lived experience, and which upholds the rights of all humans in this country. This, of course, has the problem that we all do not agree on the right path forward for our country and, also, the work of activism can be exhausting and demoralizing. If we were solely to immerse ourselves in activism without an outlet for our hearts, without a place to be lifted, without a prayer to comfort, then our activism would be limited and our effectiveness curtailed.
Recently, I’ve been learning a new text with my hevruta, my study partner from rabbinical school. It’s an essay entitled “Bnei Machshava Tova,” often translated as “People of Good Thought” or “Conscious Community.” It was written sometime between 1917 and 1923 by the Piaseczno Rebbe, Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira. Before I share with you about this text, I want to set the stage a bit. 1917 was at the end of World War I, the most devastating war in our history up until that point. Nine million people died directly from the war, five million died because of food shortages and military occupation and disease, not to mention all of those who died during the pandemic of 1918. The Piaseczno Rebbe was writing a guide for how to live in one of the most challenging periods in history. And he writes a guide, not for changing the world, but a guide for changing our hearts within a challenging world. His piece opens as follows:
“Our community is not organized for the purpose of attaining power or intervening in the affairs of community or state, whether directly or indirectly. Quite the opposite: our goal is to gradually rise above the noise and tumult of the world, by steady incremental steps. It is not consistent with our goals to hand out awards as to who is advanced and who lags behind. The whole premise of our group is the vast human potential for both baseness and elevation. Our bodies and souls are currently quite unevolved, but our potential for holiness is very great.”
In his essay, the Piaseczno outlines the way we can engage with the challenge of our time. Our mission is not to avoid feeling the pain and the brokenness that exists around us—that, he teaches, is an essential ingredient which helps us to get closer to God and mobilizes us to do the necessary work of tikkun, of repair in the world. We cannot, however, allow ourselves to become so bogged down in the pain of the world that we forget the hope that is possible and the healing that lies around the corner. When we do our spiritual work in a way that is connected to the pain of the world, when we acknowledge what is and commit to doing what we can to bring about the world that should be, that is when we’ve achieved our goals, that is when we become a conscious community.
The Piaseczno Rebbe didn’t just write this book, he lived this Torah. He guided his community through the tumult and the challenge of the First World War, he helped his community to connect with God and with spirituality amidst rising Antisemitism and built the kind of community which supported each and every individual, and when he was offered the chance to leave, to escape with his life before the Holocaust, he chose to stay behind, to stay with his people and to support them through unimaginable challenge.
Thank God we are not living in the times that the Piasezcno Rebbe lived, but thank God we have his Torah to guide us. Our mission in this moment is three-fold:
- We must acknowledge our fear and our pain. We must acknowledge that this is manifesting for all of us in different ways, that we all have a sense of where our country should go and that may or may not align, but what does align is our general sense of brokenness, our pain that we are not all on the same page. It’s ok to feel this brokenness, it’s ok to feel this pain. We need to feel it in order to be able to address it.
- We must do the spiritual work that allows us to rise above the pain of our world. That means that we need Jewish tradition more than ever. We need Torah. We need prayer. We need our Jewish community. We must remember that our ancestors have endured worse, we must remember that there is possibility beyond what we see in front of us. Our souls need the healing and support of tradition which buoys our capacity to act.
- We must not allow ourselves to hide in the bubble of spirituality nor can we allow ourselves to wallow in self-pity or desperation. We must join together, we must begin to build a country in which we talk to one another and work together to craft solutions that are not just political, but are in service of the greatest good.
The Supreme Court will continue to issue judgements and decisions—that is their prerogative and their mission. We are not only beholden to their rulings, but also to the Court on High, to the ancestors who have gone before us and to the values that our tradition enshrines. This is our moment. How can we use it for good?