Rabbi Sarah Wolf

Asilomar 2008 - July 25, 2008

Creating a Culture of Tzedek

When I first saw a Toyota Prius, I thought, that is the ugliest car I have ever seen. 

Why would anyone want to buy one?  Little did I know that it is supposed to look that way.  It is supposed to be instantly identifiable on the road.  It isn’t just a car.  It’s a reminder of high gas prices, dependence on foreign oil, the climate crisis, and probably a few more things.  It is as if instead of putting a bumper sticker on your car, your car is the bumper sticker.  Eight years ago, a single Prius on the road was the symbol of a crazy environmentalist.  But now, the Prius is ubiquitous, especially here in northern California ; just look at the Beth Am parking lot.  Somehow, driving an ugly, earth-friendly car has become accepted and even valued by the wider community.  The popularity of the Prius marks a shifting, if you’ll pardon the pun, culture.  This transformation of culture, our most basic values and norms, has the possibility of making real change in the world.

In this week’s Torah portion, Moses, angry at the Gadites and Reubenites for asking to stay on the east side of the Jordan River rather than settle in the land of Israel, calls them “tarbut anashim chata’im,” a brood of sinners (Lev. 32:14).  It is an unusual phrase: the word “tarbut” does not appear anywhere else in the Tanakh.  Here it seems to come from the word “rav,” meaning “great” or “many,” hence the translation “brood.” 

But in Modern Hebrew, “tarbut” means “culture.”  Ironically, Moses calls them a “sinning brood” or “culture of sinners” because he thinks they are shirking their responsibilities to their people; if anything, Gad and Reuben are the anti-tarbut, the counterculture, the individualists who do not share the values of their community.

On the other hand, Moses is also pointing out something subtler with his word choice.  He sees that not only are the tribes of Gad and Reuben spurning God’s gift of the land, but they have the ability to negatively influence their brethren.  Moses says, “Why will you turn the minds of the Israelites away from crossing into the land that Adonai has given to them?” (Lev. 32:7).  The Gadites’ and Reubenites’ culture of transgression could very well spread to the other tribes.  The two tribes’ request and Moses’ response highlight both the virtues and the dangers of a strong communal identity.

In stark contrast, our haftarah this Shabbat describes the very lonely and difficult pursuit of justice.  God commissions Jeremiah, who is, like Moses before him, reluctant to take on the responsibility of being God’s spokesman.  God tells him that he will be like an iron pillar standing “al kol ha’aretz” against the whole land, from the kings to the citizens of Judah .  God tries to reassure Jeremiah, saying, “They will attack you, but will not overcome you” (Jer 1:19). 

No wonder Jeremiah is so unenthusiastic about his mission.

Taken together, our parashah and haftarah show us the power of the collective:

Moses is afraid that the actions of two of the tribes will discourage the rest of the Israelites from entering the Land of Israel , and Jeremiah is given the nearly impossible task of being the lone voice for justice in a wicked and dangerous society.  But what if Jeremiah had had some back-up?  What if the brood of sinners, the tarbut anashim chata’im, had instead been a group of righteous people, a tarbut anashim tzaddikim?  What would it take to create a culture of tzedek?      

That is one of the questions that we at Beth Am are struggling to answer.  We recognize that having a social action committee of a few people or having a mitzvah day once a year is not enough.  Tikkun olam should not be the night different from all other nights; it should be an integral part of everything we as individuals and as a community do.  To have a culture of tzedek, or a culture of anything for that matter, we have to reevaluate our assumptions, our norms, and our values.  A shift in culture means to make the pursuit of our highest ideals seem ordinary and attainable.  And, most importantly, it must be widespread; the majority must accept and continue to transmit these cultural changes. 

This week, New York Times columnist David Brooks describes how America has acquired a “culture of debt.”  He writes, “Individuals don’t build their lives from scratch.

They absorb the patterns and norms of the world around them….  We absorb a way of perceiving the world from parents and neighbors.  We mimic the behavior around us.” 

In other words, we have an enormous influence over each other, which we can put to good use.

In the article many of us read to prepare for this weekend, Rabbi Mordecai Liebling talks about the importance of making the invisible poor visible through organizing direct actions like soup kitchens or through hearing people’s personal stories of fighting injustice.  Truly, awareness is the first step in addressing the problems we face, and sometimes, raising awareness actually affects the way people live.  I once had a roommate who collected every scrap of paper to recycle.  If I threw away a receipt, he would take it out of the trash and put it in the proper bin.  If I left my bedroom without turning out the light, he would very politely say, “Sarah, do you mind if I turn out your light?”  I’ll be honest; I was irritated. 

But today, I recycle all of my paper and automatically turn out the light when I leave a room (sometimes, unfortunately, when other people are still in there).  My roommate made sure I was conscious of things I had never given much thought to, and as a result, I’ve made those acts a natural part of my day.  If enough people are like my roommate, relentlessly committed to reminding us of a particular issue, whether it be taking care of our planet or taking care of the hungry, we might all develop habits that would result in the integration of tikkun olam into our daily lives.  Repetition and consistency are key. 

Even so, it can be difficult to overcome our complacency and feelings of powerlessness when faced with all of the world’s problems.  Merely knowing about a problem, particularly a big, abstract one, is not enough to compel action.  We also need an urgency and an immediacy to motivate us.  Emmanuel Levinas, a twentieth-century French philosopher, offers some insight into this urgency.  He argues that the very encounter with an Other makes a claim on us, an urgent claim, a responsibility on which the fate of humanity hangs.  Some of us have experienced this dramatic sort of encounter and the response it requires.  There are those who have gone to developing countries or met a sick child and decide to do more for the people they have met.  But what about those who do not have such a keen sense of the demands of the Other, or have never gone to East Palo Alto, much less Darfur?   How can we uncover the awareness of this weighty responsibility we have if we do not automatically feel it? 

To Levinas, moral consciousness comes from staring straight into the Other’s eyes.  In other words, to create a culture of tzedek, we have to look each other in the face. 

We have to go to East Palo Alto and to Darfur .  We have to create more opportunities for face-to-face encounters with the people whose lives we are responsible for, making the invisible poor and suffering visible.  And then, like my old roommate, we have to keep at it, continually reminding each other to see the invisible and respond to their needs until it becomes second nature for all of us.  Jeremiah, the consummate nagger, would certainly approve.  He’d also probably drive a Prius.