Shabbat Eikev

SERMON  Eikev 2024   August 23, 2024

Rabbi David Edleson, Temple Sinai, South Burlington, VT.

FOOTBALL METAPHORS

So the last few nights, I’ve been watching the Democratic Convention.  Anyone else?  

I also watched good chunks of the Republican Convention a few weeks ago. 

Two night ago, before Tim Waltz spoke, one of the former students he coached spoke and then the state championship team Waltz had coached all came out in their Jerseys.   Fight Songs played.  People cheered.  

I found myself crying because it moved me, and then I found myself a bit disturbed that it had moved me and wondering why I was crying at football fight songs.  

As you know, I was in band all through high school, so I went to every football game for four years.  As drum major, I had to cue up the fight song anytime we got a touch down, or there was a big play.   I never cared, and often, other people had to poke me and tell me to do the fight song because I wasn’t paying attention at all.  I never understood football, and when my father and brother would watch and cheer and scream at the TV, I would go to another room.  I have pictures of me as a 5  year old forcibly dressed in football togs with the should pads and knee guards, the helmet – the whole thing.   I look miserable and confused.

But here I was crying at this football moment.  I think the best thing I’ve read of this was the New York Time’s Michelle Goldberg commenting:   “Waltz made me wish I understood football metaphors.”

Then last night, as Kamala Harris spoke, and there was so much pride and nationalism in the room, chants of USA USA, and a general celebration of patriotism, I was moved again, and, again, even as I was moved, I was suspicious of my own reactions and emotions.  

It got me thinking about Nationalism, a word that is much used today to decry some politicians but not others, and yet something used in celebrations across the political spectrum.  

As I’ve thought about it, some of my favorite words from Martin Luther King keep coming into my mind:  

“time is neutral, it can be used either constructively or destructively. And I'm absolutely convinced that in so many instances the forces of ill will in our nation, the extreme righteous of our nation have used time much more effectively than the forces of good will.

Is nationalism, like time, a morally neutral word that can be used for good or for bad?  Perhaps it is only in how we use the term and for what purposes that its moral quotient can be found.

There are so many words like this that get used at political conventions and at protests.   Words like ‘freedom,” or “social justice”, or “equity.”   These are all great things, right?   Sure, but I think that the words themselves are empty signs, and it is what we fill them with and to what purpose that determines if they are good or bad.  It is not inherent in the word.

For example, growing up in the deep South during desegregation, lots of people used the word “Freedom” to mean the freedom of white people to go to schools that don’t allow black people.  Or it means the right to belong to a country that doesn’t allow Jews.   These people were passionate about what freedom meant to them, and they were often helpful kind people, but the word “freedom” carried very different meaning for them.

If we imagine how a member of the Nazi party or of Hamas might define “social justice” we can quickly realize that buzzwords like that are fickle and can be used constructively or destructively, and in fact, good people might disagree about what is constructive or destructive.

So as I was crying while watching the American pride on display, I was also deeply suspicious of how my own emotions were being manipulated.  It would be easy to dismiss it as nationalism and therefore evil, or to embrace it as patriotism, and therefore good, but I think the truth is much more complicated than that, and we can’t always know if the buzzwords we latch on to are ultimately good or bad. 

Choice is another such word.  As a feminist with a mother who was an activist for abortion and reproductive freedom (that word again), I definitely resonate to the word choice.  But is  choice inherently always good?   We can after all choose to be part of some pretty awful things. 

In the Bible there is a line that reflects this.  In describing a particular time in history, it says, “when everyone did what was right in their eyes.”   We might read this as meaning that had the freedom to choose what they believed was right.  However, that is most definitely not what the Bible means.  “Everyone did what was right in their eyes” is the Bible’s idea of a failed society, of chaos and anarchy, when there are no public institutions that are trusted and so things turn into a sort of Wild West.  For many Americans, “Everyone doing what was right in their eyes” is the description of individual liberty.  It is Utopia. 

As Americans, we idealize the Wild West in movies and TV Shows.  Current shows like “Yellowstone” continue this romance, but like the Bible, I know that I would not want to live in the Wild West when everyone did what was right in their eyes. 

In other words, ethics are incredibly complicated, and how we balance individual freedom with societal cohesion is a key question that we often try to skip or ignore.   Whether we are talking about the election, the war in Gaza, or about justice here at home, we might all be using the same words, but what we mean can vary profoundly. What we hear varies profoundly.

This week’s Torah Portion, Eikev, reflects this in an odd way.  In reading the portion this week, I noticed that on the one hand it was fiercely nationalistic and militaristic.  It tells the Israelites to have “no pity” when attacking an enemy and to utterly destroy them.  That’s the kind of nationalism that concerns me, but then the Torah turns right around and warns the people not to believe that they will win because they are better or because they did something right.  Indeed, it tells the people that they are terrible, stubborn, rebellious, stiffnecked and impossible to manage, and that far from being “NO 1” we are in last place in terms of numbers and strength. 

Rather, the Torah says that our strength comes from being moral, from having laws and a court system that is fair, from having rules that every has to follow equally whether they like it or not.   In other words, the impulse to nationalism must be balanced with an awareness of humility.  The great danger is hubris.  That is what many Israelis are saying about their government.

And then our Torah portion says this: 

And now, O Israel, what does your God יהוה demand of you? Only this: to revere your God יהוה, to walk only in divine paths, to love and to serve your God יהוה with all your heart and soul, keeping יהוה’s commandments and laws, which I enjoin upon you today, for your good.

The Torah portion also tells us to “cut away the callous around our hearts” so that we might uphold “the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and befriends the stranger, providing food and clothing.—”  We must cut away the callous from our hearts so that we might also “befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

So much of our discourse is centered on key words that define us, words like freedom, choice, peace, justice, or words like colonialism, revolution, Zionist and intifada.  These words, the morality of these words is determined by whether we are keeping our heart open to the most vulnerable.   The Jewish ethical tradition has no problem with war – it has a problem with dehumanization and callousness.  

We would do well to look at how we rely on certain words to define us and to define what is good.   We form our identity around certain words.  We would do better to approach such words with a healthy skepticism, knowing that words are morally neutral, and it is how we enact them that matters.  Chanting slogans is simply not the way to the promised land, even when I agree with the slogan and I’m the one chanting it.

After the year we’ve had, it is important that we take a step back from our various moralistic high-horses, and instead focus on removing the callousness from our hearts, a callousness that is made thicker by fear and anger, and rededicate ourselves to seeing even those we most strongly disagree with as human beings made in the image of God. 

Shabbat shalom.