Shabbat Shof’tim

SERMON  PRIDE SHABBAT /MURDER OF HOSTAGES  Sept 6, 2024

Rabbi David Edleson, Temple Sinai, South Burlington, Vermont

TWO SLIPS OF PAPER

Noah,  thank you so much for being willing to share your bar mitzvah evening with PRIDE Shabbat.  It is in one way very appropriate, because we are so proud of you and how much your learned and how much you engaged what it meant to become bar mitzvah.   So in some ways, this is your Jewish Pride Shabbat.

PRIDE is actually an interesting word.  It can be both very good or very bad. 

On the one hand, feeling proud of ourselves is a healthy, good thing as long as it means feeling satisfied and gratified by our efforts and choices and how we have risen to an occasion in our lives.  In that way, you, Noah, should feel very proud of yourself.  That kind of pride doesn’t need to feel better than someone else; in fact, in finding pride in who you are, you may also find you become proud of other people and who they are.  When you are proud of your own efforts, and you can be proud of the efforts and accomplishments of your friends and family.  This kind of pride is a sort of happy satisfaction.  It is pride balanced with humility and self-awareness. 

It is a pride rooted in the Jewish belief that we are all created in the image of God.  As Orthodox Rabbi Yitz Greenberg put it in what he calls the three fundamental dignities of Judaism:

1.   We are each of infinite worth – no one is expendable, and we cannot quantify the value of any human life.

2.   We are all fundamentally equal – no human being is any more important than any other human being.

3.   We are each totally unique – there is no one else like us, and no one is interchangeable with anybody else.

This is a sort of pride that is rooted in the dignity and worth of every human.  The challenge sometimes is feeling that about ourselves.

But there is a different sort of pride that is rooted in feeling better than other people, feeling our family, or our group is actually morally or physically superior to other people. It’s the sort of pride that is also called self-righteousness, ultra-nationalism, or narcissism.  I think this sort of pride is really rooted in insecurity and the need to overcompensate for feeling less-than.  This sort of pride often comes with a sense that we are morally superior, and those who have a different view than ours as being unenlightened, unintelligent, barbaric or evil. 

One key feature of this kind of pride is a sort of moral certainty, of being so sure that we are right that we can start to believe it is ethical to force others to agree with us and to exclude or punish those who do not.  This sort of pride is also dangerous because it is intoxicating and feels really good.  It feels good to be certain you are right and your views are morally superior. 

The gay community’s original approach to pride was the good kind.  It was a way of pushing back against and healing from being made to feel ashamed, inferior, evil, or even sick.  It was the hard work of learning to love yourself even when others didn’t, and of finding pride in just being who we are. 

For me, that shift from shame to pride was incredibly powerful and healing.  The goal was for people to let us live our lives in peace, to let us create our own culture and family structures, and not to impose their moralism on us.

Today, there is a sort of pride, very strongly coming from the organized LGBT community, that seems to me to be less about live and let live, and more about imposing a moralistic set of values on everyone, and if you don’t agree you are the enemy, you are working against justice, and you are even killing people by simply disagreeing with their point of view.

As a person whose life was transformed by the idea of Gay Pride, I am surprised, and deeply saddened that so many in the queer community have embraced a sort of binary moralism of right and wrong, with us or against us on a wide range of issues having nothing to do with ones gender or sexuality.

I think there is a key way to keep the healthy sort of being proud from turning into the moralistic Maoism of certainty -  that is the idea of humility.   This is a central idea of Judaism. 

There is a famous saying by Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Pershiska (1765-1827) that I’ve shared before but it is so good it is worth sharing again , especially at a bar mitzvah, and especially on PRIDE Shabbat.  Rabbi Simcha Bunim said that every person should keep two slips of paper in his pocket. On one should be written: “The world was created for me.” And on the other: “I am but dust and ashes.” The trick is to have the wisdom to know which slip of paper to read at the right time.

Here we need to hold two truths at the same time.  They are opposite and yet both true, and the key to being a good person is finding the balance between them. 

Noah, as you become a bar mitzvah and move to adulthood, I hope you can keep those two pieces of paper always in your proverbial pocket, and that you find ways to hold your own values, but also hold to the value of not-being-certain, the value of knowiding you might look back one day and realize you were wrong, and that what you thought was cutting edge and broad minded, was really old biases that are very narrow minded.

Smith Magazine used to have a project that they called Six Word Memoirs, where writers and others were to try and some of their lives in six words.  Some were funny, like “You’re too quiet says deaf boyfriend.”   Some were so sad, like “Still making coffee for two.”  But one that has always stayed with me and goes through my head regularly when I am feeling certain about what I think is right and wrong.  This Six Word Memoir read:   “Tried not believing everything I think.”

Shabbat shalom,