Rabbis For Human Rights - North America

Divrei Torah

“A certain non-Jew came before Shammai and said to him, ‘I will convert to Judaism, on the condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.’ Shammai chased him away... He came before Hillel and said to him, ‘Convert me.’ Hillel said to him, ‘What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary; go and learn it.” (Shabbat 31A)

Jonah & Eleh Ezkarah: A Yom Kippur Sermon on Empathy and Compassion

 

By Ed Feld

 

As the setting sun begins to change the very nature of the light that allows us to see the world and as the skies threaten to become blood red, at that moment, when fear and awe and joy commingle with tiredness and hunger, we are asked to read the book of Jonah. Dusk is that between time, when our hearts and minds intermingle the rationalism of daylight with the emotion and imaginings of the night. It is at the moment when rationality can be tempered by the promptings of the heart that we are taught the lesson of compassion.

 

Jonah, the prophet, has been sent to Nineveh to call those people to repent. Nineveh is the capital of Babylonia, the kingdom that will destroy Israel, but Jonah, the Jewish prophet, is called to speak to these Gentiles, to call them to repentance. He is physically forced to overcome his reluctance to do so, and even after having accomplished his task, regrets what he has done. And so God teaches him the lesson of compassion – Jonah sees the carob tree that has shaded him dry up. He cries for protection. God says, “You cry for a carob tree, can you not cry for the rest for the creation?” Jonah cries for himself, for his own loss of that which shaded him, that which gave him comfort, and he is made to see that the pain he feels is a pain that permeates the world, and that he, and we, like him, are called upon to alleviate pain.

 

The Yom Kippur liturgy is shot through with images of martyrdom, with remembrances of the sufferings of our people. Scholars tell us that for the last thousand years, the traditional selihah, the prayer of forgiveness, has always included an akedah, a form of poetry which rehearses the martyrdom of our people. But aside from these individual poems, at the height of the day, we storm heaven with the tale of the cruel deaths of the rabbis of the generation of Rabbi Akiva who were martyred by the Romans. Among them were Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus who was wrapped in a Torah scroll and burnt at the stake, and Rabbi Akiva himself whose flesh was torn from his body and sold in the marketplace.

 

Jews often tell the story of Rabbi Amnon of Mayence, the legendary author of the beloved u'netanah tokef prayer, who had his hands and feet cut off by the local bishop, but refused to abjure his faith. Unable to use any of his limbs, he was carried to the lectern, recited this prayer he had composed, which declares that it is God who decides who shall live and who shall die, whereupon he breathed his last breath.

 

We are a people who can catalogue the forms of human mistreatment. We have been victims of torture and abuse. We know what it means to be accused of all sorts of sins and have no defense. We know what it is to be captured, imprisoned, forced to confess to sins we have not committed. We know what it is to submit to arbitrary authority. In its place we have preached the rule of law – and have been accused by our enemies of being legalistic; we have preached the dignity of every human being, and have been persecuted for it.

 

And on Yom Kippur after having recalled our own suffering, after having said, "These I remember…," we are asked to adopt the lesson of compassion: to learn that our own fate is not all that matters, but the fate of the people of Nineveh, the people who would be our enemies.

 

What we experience on Yom Kippur is what it means to be deprived of water and food, of the daily requirements of nourishment and cleanliness. How frail we find our own bodies. How easy it is to bring us down. How easy it is at this moment to imagine the fear of being locked in a cold jail cell, alone. How deprivations of water or food can seem excruciating. And there are the indignities and sufferings we do not experience ourselves on Yom Kippur but which in this hour we can easily imagine: How lowly we are brought when we soil ourselves, perhaps daily. What it means to be beaten, to feel the loss of the use of a limb. How hard it is to live with pain. What it means to lose one's dignity, to be made sport of.

 

So what do we do this Yom Kippur, a Yom Kippur in which we have learned that we belong to a country that has engaged in these activities? What do we do having learned that in our name, people in our custody have been beaten, humiliated, physically and spiritually harmed, and some even killed?

 

Jonah doesn't get it. He does not want to deal with the people of Nineveh, he wants to run away. The last thing in the world he wants to do is be a prophet.

 

And that's probably us as well. We don't want to take this one on. We don't want to believe that our country has soiled itself, that we need to collectively engage in an act of repentance, that we must do all we can to insure that we treat every human being, even our enemy, with dignity. Nineveh gets it. The king and all his countrymen, upon hearing Jonah's words, immediately and without any prevarication admit to their wrongdoing. But Jonah has to be taught, has to be instructed.

 

Many here might say the situation is too complicated to put forth easy answers. These horrors may have been committed but they were done to for the sake of a good: extracting information, critical information needed to defeat terrorism. Some mistakes could have been made. Some people who oughtn't to have been were arrested, some of our people went too far. But we, who sit in the pews, ought not to be directing the war effort. The decisions at the front are always complicated and the people in charge are not evil, but instead are democratic leaders.

 

Jonah can seem like a simple story, something out of a storybook for children: the story of the man in the belly of the whale. But sometimes it takes simple truths to instruct us. And those simple truths are not easily held on to, because as adults we've learned to see the world as a complicated place; we celebrate our ability to see two sides of every issue.

 

And yet today we've been instructed in some simple truths. We've been instructed about the frailty of the human body, of how we can feel sorry for ourselves, less so for our neighbor and perhaps not sorry at all for those supposed to be our enemies. We've been reminded how each of us sins, personally and collectively.

 

But today we've been instructed with the teaching of compassion. We've been taught that the reason we experience the sufferings of Yom Kippur, the sufferings of today, is to be able to understand what we do to our enemies. We've been taught that our own experience of suffering should rouse us to the consciousness of the suffering of others, of the suffering we inflict on others, of the humanity of Nineveh.

 

We Jews know what it means to be the object of collective hatred. We know what it means to be suspected of being a third column, of being imprisoned and tortured simply because we are Jews, or because some government wants to extract something, material goods, information from Jews who will report on the Jewish community. We know what it means to be tortured by the Inquisition so that the church could discover other Jews who had betrayed their new Christian faith. We know what it means to be suspected and accused without trial and with no possibility of defense. We know what it means to suffer under the whim of governments – governments who are always self-justifying.

 

Jonah calls us back – from our defensiveness, from our building up of walls to separate ourselves off, from our failure to see that everyone is created in the image of God, even our enemy, and that therefore there are fundamental human rights which apply to everyone.

 

Jonah is sent to Nineveh to call them to repentance. Ultimately, it is he who is asked to repent.