Don't Go It Alone

Rosh Hashanah Morning, NYU Bronfman Center for Student Jewish Life

Anyone who watched the sci-fi television drama Buffy, The Vampire Slayer knows that Buffy’s biggest challenge—the most pernicious demon she ever fought—was not a vampire or a monster or a giant snake or the incarnation of some primordial evil. No, the blonde former-cheerleader-turned-superhero fought an even mightier battle: A battle with her own inflated sense of responsibility.

You see, legend told Buffy that she alone stood between the ordinary and innocent people of her little California town and utter destruction. She had a noble mission to fight evil—and she had to fight it alone. Burdened with the weight of the world, she time and again averted literal apocalypse. Just one girl. Against all the evil in the world.

But, somewhere along the line, Buffy learned that she couldn’t go it alone. More and more, she came to rely on her friends and their individual talents to complement her strengths. They helped her investigate mysterious enemies, put her work into historical perspective, added humor and emotion, performed magical feats she could not accomplish, and plainly widened her individual perspective. If Buffy provided pure brawn and battle tactics, they provided other necessary components, and combined, they were Hand and Heart and Brain and Spirit—whole, and able to confront just about any enemy. In one episode, the group confidently sang out, “What can’t we face, if we’re together?”[1]

Cheesy as it may seem, this refrain—“What can’t we face if we’re together?”—relates to an important Jewish lesson, one I feel especially keenly during these Days of Awe, and one we might consider prioritizing this year, here at New York University, diversely talented as we are. We each bring different strengths to this community, but how often do we think of our strengths as linked? It is easy to get cordoned off into our own silos—pre-med, Steinhart, Gallatin; humanities majors, education experts; secular and all shades of religious. As students, as young professionals, as faculty and administrators, and as experts in our respective fields, we can get caught up in our own day-to-day responsibilities. Sometimes it can feel like the weight of the world rests on our individual shoulders. Such an overdetermined sense of our own role can be daunting and paralyzing; taken to the other extreme, it can turn us into callous megalomaniacs.

But what couldn’t we face, if we acted together?

We’re together during these Days of Awe: unlike the two most-celebrated Jewish holidays among a majority of American Jews—can anyone guess what those might be? [Hanukah and Passover]—we do not spend the Days of Awe secluded with our own families. On Hanukah and Passover, we gather in the privacy of our homes to mark the miracles our ancestors experienced. But on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur—the Day of Judgment and the Day of Atonement, respectively—we come together, in a public place, in a shared praying and learning community. Though we are tasked with taking an account of our own personal misdeeds and sins over the past year, these “High Holidays” bring us into community. We can neither retreat into ourselves nor inflate our sense of individual importance. We are in this process of taking account together. Even the confession we will utter on Yom Kippur will be a communal one, expressed in the first person plural: we have sinned, we have transgressed, we have missed the mark. Whether we have each committed every single sin on the laundry list we will together recite, we make communal confession.

How can this be, the Rabbis of the Talmud asked? Doesn’t the Torah teach that each person is responsible for his own sins alone? On the contrary, our Sages assert; each of our sins brings negative consequences upon the whole world! This comes to teach us, say the Rabbis, that כל ישראל עריבים זה לזה kol Yisrael areivim zeh la’zeh—“All Israel is responsible one for the other.”[2]

What does it mean to be “responsible”—to be עריבים areivim? What happens when we act as though we truly believe and understand that we are each עריבים זה לזה areivim zeh la’zeh—“responsible, one for the other”?

What does it mean to be עריבים? The word itself is tricky. עריבים comes from the word ערב erev—“evening.” Neither day nor night, but the border-time, the time in-between. And, in Modern Hebrew,מעורב m’urav means “combined,” “mixed.” To be עריבים means to be attentive to those places where we meet: where our needs and desires bump up against the needs and desires of our neighbors. To be עריבים means to be “mixed-up” in one another’s fate.

kol Yisrael areivim zeh la’zeh—“All Israel is responsible one for the other.” And it is this mutual responsibility that transforms us from a collective into a community.

The medieval Jewish community—the kahal—served not only religious and moral but also educational, political, and administrative needs. The kahal ran the Jewish courts that adjudicated certain matters of civil, criminal, and religious law. The kahal managed business relations and negotiated with the non-Jewish ruling authorities. Even in the time of the Rabbis, in the first centuries of the Common Era, a Jewish community concerned itself with collective responsibility. A person eager to live a life according to the moral and ethical precepts of the Torah ought to seek out the right kind of community. We read in the Talmud, “[A] student of the Sages may not live in a city that does not have the following [essential things]: a court […], a charity fund collected by two officials and distributed by three, a synagogue, a [public] bathhouse, a [public] privy, a physician, […] a scribe, a [Kosher] butcher, and a teacher of young children.”[3] These are things a community must have in order to nurture and sustain those who would live according to Jewish values. A community needs a fair court to adjudicate the law and to resolve disputes. A community requires each of its residents to contribute to a social safety-net to provide for the needs of the poor and the orphan and the widow, and it distributes those funds fairly and impartially. A community cares for the spiritual and religious lives of its inhabitants. A community tends to the physical and medical needs of its residents. A community provides opportunities to record its deeds and its learning. A community ensures that people have access to appropriate food. A community educates future generations. The great Sage Rabbi Akiva even added that an ideal community must have “several kinds of fruit trees, because their fruit gives light to the eyes.”[4] Aesthetics and beauty, fresh air and natural resources—these, too, make a Jewish community whole and enriching.

Traditional Jewish law took community responsibility very seriously. Contribution to the communal charity fund, for example, is required of each individual, according to his wealth; of course, the specifics of this requirement are contested and argued and adjudicated in many cases throughout traditional Jewish literature—but the general sentiment is that community sustenance is up to the whole community. Community leaders carried great responsibility, too. In the Talmud, we learn that community officials must perform an annual inspection of public facilities and utilities like roads, plazas, and ritual baths; should they neglect their repair and upkeep, these officials incur guilt for any injuries or deaths that occur as a result of accidents.[5]

How will you tend to the upkeep of your communities this year? Will you participate in the political process as a way of ensuring attentive care over public institutions from which we can all benefit? Will you work to improve the education of children in your hometown, in New York City, across the world? Will you engage in spiritual exploration here with the Bronfman Center? Besides yourself, to whom are you responsible?

And how far can our responsibility extend before we feel, like Buffy, that there’s just too much evil to fight alone? Jewish law guides us to a notion of concentric and expanding circles of obligation: sustaining our own families must take precedence, for example, over our contribution to the community charity fund; those “closest to us,” says one Code of Jewish Law, must take precedence over every other person.[6] Even to care for “the poor of one’s own city” is my responsibility before I become obligated to sustain someone in a faraway land.[7] And a person cannot be expected to financially sustain another if he cannot financially sustain himself.[8]

Our own community involvements are not singular. We each exist in many communities—some of them overlapping concentric circles and some of them seemingly isolated cells. We live in tension. Princeton professor Kwame Appiah calls it the pull between “the idea that we have obligations to others, ties of kith and kind” the world over, and “the value not just of human life but of particular human lives”[9]—a pull between universal and particular, between global and local, between a broad sense of care for all our human “brothers and sisters” and our real ties of affection and responsibility for our families and friends. In his study of “community” ties in America, Robert Putnam finds that, when most people think of “community,” they cling to the most inner of inner circles; he writes, “For most of us, our deepest sense of belonging is to our most intimate social networks, especially family and friends.”[10] Community organizers seem to want to tap into this sense of affection and mutual obligation—this sense of identity and belonging—and build on it to connect to our ethical obligations to those in ever-widening concentric circles. In the past, the kahal confined its “community” obligations to “the permanent [Jewish] residents in a given locale”—even going so far as to “decide who might or might not settle there.”[11] But in a postmodern, “cosmopolitan” world—a world in which we might feel responsible to family and to friends and to neighbors and to fellow citizens and even to strangers—the borders of “community” can seem messy and confusing.

To whom are you responsible? I cannot answer that question for you, though I hope that, over the course of the coming year, some of us can begin to explore that question together—through Jewish learning, through social justice projects, through Shabbat celebration, and in our social interactions.

כל ישראל עריבים זה לזה kol Yisrael areivim zeh la’zeh—“All Israel is responsible one for the other.”[12]

And who is “all Israel”?

If you argue that “all Israel” refers only to ethnic Jews and converts to Judaism, you could find evidence to back your assertion, sure. Rabbinic literature abounds with claims limiting how we might apply Torah precepts like “Love your neighbor as yourself.”[13] Our neighbors, the Rabbis sometimes argue, refers only to the Jewish people.

But the Torah also tells us that “the Jewish people” itself is a mish-mosh gathering, a diverse collection. When God frees us from Egyptian enslavement with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, we pour out of Egypt—men, women, children, and livestock. And with us, marching joyfully in the Exodus—with us an ערב רב erev rav—“a mixed multitude.”[14]

Today, the Jewish community is most certainly an ערב רב erev rav. Each of us has endured a different kind of Egypt. Each of us walks to freedom a little bit differently. But we’re all mixed-up in this together. And we’re mixed-up, too, in the widening concentric circles of community in which we find ourselves—the ערב רב erev rav of this University, this great City, our nations, the world.

As we build and strengthen a progressive Jewish community this year at the Bronfman Center, we would do well to recall, as the Talmud reminds us, that sometimes we must imitate God by gathering together diverse materials from which to shape our holy communities. God, Rabbi Meir was known to say, did as such when creating the very first human being: “The dust of the first man was gathered from all parts of the world.”[15] Isolated, specialized communities will not fulfill the ethic of this act of the creation of human beings in the Divine image—gathered, as we each were, from the humble dust, collected not from one, single source, but from all the places of the earth. Perhaps it is this very diversity in our origins that contributes to our holiness, as the Torah teaches, “for all the community are holy, all of them, and the Eternal is in their midst.”[16]

Be a part of that holiness, this year—that divinely-sparked essence within each human being that, gathered in community, can create amazing things. Be the Hand or the Heart, the Brain or the Spirit. Be the one strong enough to know you can’t go it alone.

כל ישראל עריבים זה לזה kol Yisrael areivim zeh la’zeh—“All Israel is responsible one for the other.” And together, there’s nothing we can’t face.



[1] References are to Joss Whedon’s FOX Network show Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, which aired from 1997 to 2003.
[2] Bavli Shevuot 39a-b.
[3] Bavli Sanhedrin 17b.
[4] Ibid.
[5] See Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh Deah, Hilchot Teshuva.
[6] Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh Deah, Hilchot Tzedakah, 251:3.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, xv.
[10] Putnam. Because I purchased and accessed Putnam’s work on a Kindle device that does not support page numbers, I am unable to cite precise page numbers in referring to Bowling Alone.
[11] Katz 88.
[12] Bavli Shevuot 39a-b.
[13] Leviticus 19:18.
[14] Exodus 12:38.
[15] Bavli Sanhedrin 38a.
[16] Numbers 16:3.
[17] Bavli Shevuot 39a-b.

Unexpected Intimacy

Today I saw a hysterectomy scar. Not mine, I thank God, and not the scar of someone I love. It wasn’t even the scar of someone I know. It was the scar of a stranger I encountered during my Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) training. The woman bearing the scar needed to adjust an itching bandage; exposing the scar seemed matter-of-fact. She didn’t comment on it; neither did I.

Working as a chaplain intern at a major hospital, I am learning to offer a humanizing touch in a deeply alienating and dehumanizing setting. And when I say “learning,” I am pretty sure I mean “floundering,” “failing,” and “doubting.” The hours are long, and vulnerability and rejection abound. Some doctors and nurses don’t seem to welcome pastoral care, nor value it. Others smile at me like I am a child and imply I am nothing but a glorified Candy Striper. I walk into rooms feeling unwanted by patients, and the medical and social work staff fly past me, concentrating on their own well-defined and clearly essential tasks.

I struggle with how to introduce myself and how to offer care. I struggle to break some patients’ association between the title “chaplain” and imminent death (as in “I thought I was in here for minor surgery and they called the chaplain!?”). There are times when I immediately see the relevance and the healing power of eye contact and a listening ear, prayer and blessing, questions that invite a patient to become a person again, to offer me their narrative and their perspective on the world, to allow them to make meaning in the midst of suffering.

My first week has not been overflowing with such times, and today I left the hospital feeling pretty defeated, thinking about the long weeks stretching ahead, a summer not bright with sunshine but dark with uncertainty and mistakes (you know how we over-achievers shrink from those!).

And then a young woman boarded the subway car and took a seat next to me. She wore dark jeans, a hoodie sweatshirt, and a tight black hijab (Muslim headscarf). Her eyes were lined in dark black eyeliner and she wore pale pink nail polish. She carried a purple leather bag that I admired. She fidgeted nervously and kept looking at me out of the corner of her eye. She seemed like she wanted to talk, so I smiled and said, “Cute bag.” “I know,” she said, her shoulders relaxing, angling herself toward me on the bench. “I keep forgetting to latch it, though. I hate bags without zippers, but it was so cute I had to buy it.” We both laughed. I didn’t have much else to say, but she looked expectant, her dark brown eyes still turned toward me. She asked me if the M train were running today, but she didn’t seem much interested in my answer. Instead, she told me she had moved to New York just a year ago.

She spoke quickly. Her voice was bright, but she seemed nervous, like she just needed to make some kind of connection. Perhaps I am projecting, because I definitely needed to make a connection, to feel less isolated. So here I was, my feet sore from standing pretty much all day, eyes itchy and dry from crying, hands smelling of the antibacterial sanitizer I have to apply constantly to ensure patient safety, wearing a Star of David pendant and chatting with a Muslim woman, a complete stranger. The conversation started with accessories and subway schedules, but it turned quickly to marriage, commitment, and relationships.

“I’ve only been in New York for a year,” she said. She carried a large textbook stamped with the name of a local university, so I asked if she moved here for school. “I got married,” she said. She described a whirlwind courtship: at her cousin’s wedding, a man, a friend of the groom’s family, noticed her across the room and asked about her. They were soon engaged, living on opposite sides of the country. After a two-year engagement, the two were married and the bride moved to a fast-paced city and a new life. I asked if the couple had any children and she raised her eyebrows, shaking her head emphatically. “I’m still young!”

If I type out the rest of the conversation, I am afraid it will sound silly and trite. But I assure you, it wasn’t. We talked about how, even in a happy relationship filled with love, it can be a challenge to move from making choices independently to being ever-mindful of your partner’s needs. We talked about how we worry for our spouses’ health—sometimes more than they worry for their own. We talked about establishing a rhythm with your partner before adding children to the family. We talked about carving out time for emotional intimacy amidst career tasks and schoolwork. She was surprised to hear that I am ten years older than she (“I thought we were the same!”). When she learned my partner was a woman, she apologized for assuming otherwise and the conversation continued smoothly. She asked for advice in shaping her marriage and ensuring fulfillment for herself and for her husband. We weren’t “the same,” but the ways in which we were different mattered little. In some ways, it was the differences that made the conversation enriching.

When I got off the train, I started to cry. It had been such a long, tiring day, and most of it was spent wandering hospital hallways feeling lonely and useless. On the subway, I became a person with something to offer: my life experience reassured a young bride. On the subway, I became a person worthy of care and attention.

At home, I opened Siddur Sha’ar Zahav, the prayerbook of the LGBT synagogue in San Francisco, and read the “Prayer for Unexpected Intimacy”:
“In the dark, in a strange place, our father Jacob encountered a stranger with whom he grappled all night. He never knew the stranger’s name, yet their encounter was a blessing, which turned Jacob into Israel and made him realize, “I have seen God face-to-face” (Genesis 32:31). May this intimate time with another person be an encounter with angels that allows us to both touch and see the Divine, in the Name of the God of Israel, who created passion and wove it throughout creation, turning strange places into holy ground and strangers into a source of blessing.”

I needed an easy conversation, a surprising connection, a simple, human encounter, and that is what this young woman blessed me with today. Before I left the subway car, I asked the woman her name. “Huda,” she said. I looked it up on the internet and found the meaning “right guidance.” Thank you for guiding me back to a complicated and surprising world and for reminding me that unexpected intimacy can connect us to the best in our humanity. We cannot reach transformation without uncertainty, without scars.