Review #1: The New Hampshire State Motto

In 1971, the New Hampshire legislature changed the slogan on their license plates from “Scenic New Hampshire” to the state’s fiery motto: “Live Free Or Die.” One particular resident, George Maynard was troubled. He didn’t believe in freedom over everything. As a Jehovah’s Witness, George believed that God-given life was the most important ideal. So one day, he took red tape and covered over the slogan. Soon his car was ticketed. George refused to pay, and the tickets piled up. Eventually, he was brought before a judge and sentenced to 15 days in jail. As George later explained, “if you don’t want to live free or die, you go to jail in New Hampshire.”[i]

In American discourse, so much emphasis is placed on freedom that it can be easy to forget that there are other values. But in the Jewish tradition, like in George’s, there are higher ideals than freedom. In the Torah, God declares: “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life—so that you and your offspring would live.”[ii] And how do we choose life? The next verse tells us , “by loving the Eternal your God, and by heeding God’s commandments.”[iii] We choose life by fulfilling our obligations, to God, to each other, and to this world.

Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai tells the story of a group of sailors on a boat. One lays down his oar, pulls out a hand drill, and starts making a hole in the bottom of the boat. “What are you doing” shout the other terrified sailors. “What?" he responds. "I’m drilling under my seat, not yours!"

The other sailors reply: "That may be so, but when the water comes in, it will drown us all."[iv] Rabbi Shimon understood that living means sharing the boat with other human beings - that our fates are all inextricably linked. When we pretend otherwise, we risk death, not just for us, but for everyone in the boat. The New Hampshire state license plate declares “Live free or die”. The Jewish tradition demands “choose life.”

With that in mind, I can only give The New Hampshire State Motto 2 out of 5 stars

Introduction

If there is one tool that has been most useful to me in this pandemic, it is the User Review. If you want to pick a restaurant for take-out, or decide what show to binge next, or choose among seemingly identical sweatpants on Amazon, you have to read the reviews. And if you don’t have time to read the Reviews, thank God for the five-star scale. The concept of rating on a scale of one to five stars has been around since the 1950’s,[v] but it became ubiquitous when Amazon introduced user reviews and suddenly all of us became critics. As the author John Green notes, “the 5-star scale has become a kind of background hum”[vi] in our daily lives.

For me, the background hum of the pandemic hasn’t just been user reviews. There is a question that has been constantly gnawing at me: “what do we owe each other?” These 18 months have called us to reckon with the ways we care for ourselves, our neighbors, and the world. And I have been blown away by the compassion I have seen from this community. I have marveled watching you show up for each other, even from a distance. And yet, there have been times these past 18 months when compassion has felt countercultural. The voices that conflate caring with weakness and venerate freedom above all other ideals are getting louder. But we know better. We have shown, time and again, that we believe it is good to care about each other.

It has not been easy. There have been times when there was conflict among our obligations to ourselves, our families, and our communities. Balancing these obligations has stretched our hearts. And I have muddled my way through, just as you have. Along the way, I have found certain Jewish texts and traditions helpful as I navigated these questions. I would like to share some of them with you, in the hopes that they will replenish your desire to show up for each other as you have throughout this pandemic. And because I want these texts to be as indispensable to you as they have been to me, I will offer them in the format that has become indispensable in our lives. So here are my thoughts on the ways we are responsible for one another, in the form of User Reviews.

Review #2: Pandemic Pods

As the first spring of the quarantine rolled around, and my family was going stir crazy, we started to hear more and more about Pandemic Pods -- small groups of friends or a few families that agreed to see each other exclusively. These so-called quarenteams were a way to have your cake and not get sick from it. By agreeing on ground rules and expectations, you could finally see some friends again and feel fairly safe. For many, these pods were a lifeline. Loneliness is endemic in the pandemic and it poses its own mental and physical health risks. Pods seemed like an answer to our prayers.

Ultimately, we chose not to join a pod, because of the potential complications. People in pods had to negotiate difficult conversations about their exposure and risk tolerance. There were breaches of trust and resentments over each other’s choices. And there was a question about the extent to which pods really protected anyone. New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo decided to contact trace himself - to see how many people he was really connected to.[vii] He was working from home, and he and his wife were rarely seeing people socially. But his kids were in a learning pod with seven other students. By the time he tracked down the exposure of those kids, their siblings, and their parents, he saw that his tiny pod connected him to over a hundred people. Manjoo wrote, “For months, I’ve been linked to two dozen strangers, just a few ill-timed coughs away from Covid, and all the while I’d been none the wiser.”

Podding strives to make our world very small. Podding imagines Rabbi Shimon’s boat with only a few people in it. But global crises, like pandemics and climate change, mean that the person drilling into the boat may live on the other side of the world. Never have I been more aware of the ways my fate is bound to the fates of every other human. In truth, our boat, our pod, is the entire planet.

Harvard psychologist Joshua Green has theorized that our moral brains evolved for small group cooperation, for solving “small boat problems”. A tribe of hunter/gatherers needed to work together and share resources. But our earliest ancestors knew only their tribe and maybe the tribes in the next valley over. Our brains did not evolve for thinking on a global scale. It is hard for us to fathom that the human race is our tribe.

Our Jewish ancestors understood this tension. The Talmud teaches, “We feed non-Jewish poor together with Jewish poor, visit their sick together with our sick, bury non-Jewish dead as well as Jewish dead, for the sake of darchei shalom, the ways of peace.”[viii] In the ancient Rabbis’ world, their commitment to their Jewish neighbors was unquestioned. This was their tribe and they felt responsible for each other. But they also had non-Jewish neighbors -- and it was not entirely clear if their responsibilities extended that far. The Talmud answers unequivocally “yes!” We are commanded to expand our circles of concern and identify when our neighbor is poor or sick or dying, even when that neighbor is very different from us.

And why? “For the sake of darchei shalom, the ways of peace.” For those early rabbis, this was not some feel-good slogan, but the essence of Jewish living. The Talmud states “Kol hatorah kulah… mipnei darchei Shalom hi”[ix] – all of Torah is for the sake of the ways of peace”. The true purpose of the Torah is to teach us morality -- not the morality that is instinctive and comes easily, but that morality that is hard and counter-evolutionary. We must see the suffering of our neighbors, and our neighbor might live in the next valley or on the other side of the world.

In the end, our pods may not have been as insular as we had hoped. If the actor, Kevin Bacon, has taught us anything, it is that we are so easily connected to so many people by so few degrees. And in this way, pods have also reminded us of an important lesson, that we are all connected to each other. Our mutual survival is dependent on our acknowledgment that our pod and our planet are one and the same.

I give Pandemic Pods 3 stars

Review #3: Psychic Numbing

When Rabbi Stephen S. Wise visited China in the 1930s, he learned that the primary form of urban transportation was rickshaws. Most were pulled by older men, who coughed constantly as they dragged their burdens. Rabbi Wise was kept awake at night by the rasping coughs of drivers congregating outside his window. He expressed to his hosts his distress that his transportation depended upon the labor of these suffering men. “Don’t worry,” his friends told him, “in two weeks you will get used to it. In a month, you won’t even hear it.”

And that is precisely what happened. Some years later, Rabbi Wise referred to the day he stopped hearing the coughing as the “most embarrassing day of his life.”[x]

If we are committed to darchei shalom - the ways of peace, we must not only see the suffering of our neighbors - we must resist our tendency to grow accustomed to it. We must draw continuously from the wells of our compassion. But after a year and a half of pulling endless buckets from the wells, many of us have started to feel like it has run dry.

The psychologist Paul Slovic has spent decades studying compassion fatigue and the reasons why people stop caring.[xi] His research has demonstrated that we feel compassion when we hear stories of individuals and small-scale tragedies. But when we are confronted with increasingly overwhelming tragedies, our compassionate response tapers off. Dr. Slovic calls this phenomenon “psychic numbing” and explains succinctly, “the more who die, the less we [seem to] care.”[xii] One cause of psychic numbing is the immobilizing feeling of inefficacy. In one study, Slovic and his colleagues showed people a picture of a starving child and asked for a donation to feed her. People donated less money if her picture appeared next to statistics on global hunger. The feeling of helplessness in the face of a problem on that scale made people less generous, even though their donation would still have fed the starving girl.

Deuteronomy commands lo tukhal l'hitaleim, “do not remain indifferent.”[xiii] The Torah understands what Dr. Slovic discovered, that we are inclined to be indifferent to large-scale tragedies. But in an age of global community, many of our tragedies happen on a scale that stretches our hearts to their limits. We must resist the temptation to look away, the temptation to become inured to suffering, even when, especially when that suffering is great. These years of pandemic, of racial reckoning, of natural and human disasters, have tested our capacity to care.

Dr. Slovic says that resisting this psychic numbing and our feelings of inefficacy means constantly reminding ourselves that “even partial solutions save whole lives.” [xiv] Perhaps the Rabbis of the Talmud were responding to these feelings when they wrote, “Whoever saves a single life has saved the whole world.”[xv] It matters if we save that girl from starvation, even if the impact on the world negligible. It matters to her.

I give psychic numbing 1 star.

Review #4: Dr. Wu Lien-teh’s Disposable Face Mask

In the early 20th century, Manchuria was contested territory, to which Russia, China, and Japan all laid claim. Then, in 1910, it became the site of an incredibly deadly plague[xvi]. The mortality rate was so high that 95% or more of those who were infected died within just a few days.

Enter Dr. Wu Lien-teh, a talented, young Chinese-Malaysian doctor. He had studied all over Europe. He’d been the first ethnic Chinese student at Cambridge. China’s government brought him in to lead their efforts against the epidemic. He quickly determined that it was a pneumonic plague, meaning it was spread through airborne droplets. Dr. Wu made a simple suggestion: Everyone should start covering their faces, both physicians and the public. He even invented a simple, cheap, disposable face mask that looks a lot like what we are using today.

The more experienced doctors from Europe and Russia dismissed this thirty-something and his simple prescription. One French Doctor named Gérald Mesny called Wu a racist slur while performatively refusing to wear a mask, even while treating patients. It was not long before Mesny contracted the plague and died. After that, people listened to Dr. Wu, and in just 7 months, masks had helped put an end to the plague. And some of the practices that Dr Wu championed, mask-wearing, quarantining patients, and cutting off travel, are still part of our mitigation strategies today.

What was true in Dr. Wu’s day is true again in ours. Masks have become controversial. In statehouses, courthouses, and Facebook pages across the country, Americans are debating should we have the right not to wear a mask?

This is a quintessentially American question, but I would argue it is not a particularly Jewish one. Rabbi Joseph Telushkin teaches that “Jewish law focuses on obligations, American jurisprudence focuses on rights.”[xvii] For instance, according to American law, if Olympic swimmer Katie Ledecky was walking past a pool and saw a toddler drowning, she would be within her rights to keep on walking..[xviii] There is no obligation in American law to rescue an endangered person.

But Jewish law is oriented differently. The laws of the Torah do not define the boundaries of our freedoms. Rather, they define the terms of our obligations, to both God and to each other. The concept of p’kuach nefesh -- saving a life, obligates us to save someone else, using just about any means necessary, aside from putting ourselves in mortal peril. Thus, a person who cannot swim should not jump in to save the drowning toddler, but a competent swimmer must. Similarly, Jews are obligated to build a railing around their roof or patio, lest anyone fall, and forbidden from raising a vicious dog, lest it bite anyone. We are commanded to act in ways that protect our neighbor, even from unintentional harm.

This pandemic has given us a choice. It is not just a choice between being like Dr. Mesney who threw out his mask and died, or being like Dr. Wu Lien-Teh who wore his mask to save others. It is the choice between whether we center our lives around individual freedom or around our personal obligation to each other. It is the choice not just about what we will die for, but who we will live for, and what we will stand for.

I give Dr. Wu Lien-Teh’s face mask 4 and a half stars.

Review #5: Breath

To turn Adam from a lump of clay into a soulful human, God breathes into his nostrils. There is an intimate connection between breath and life. The Hebrew word for soul, neshamah is the same as the word for breath, neshimah. The Talmud says “Just as the Holy One..., fills the entire world, so too the neshamah fills the entire body.”[xix] When we breathe in, we are filled, and with every breath, we experience the fullness of the Divine in the universe. To breathe is to bring some of the universe into us and to put some of ourselves out into the universe. This is why the psalmist declares kol haneshamah tehallel Yah[xx] -- “let everything that has breath praise God.”

This pandemic has given me a new relationship with my breath. It is an airborne virus, not unlike the Manchurian plague of 1910. And so suddenly my breath, which gives me life, which sustains me, also poses an existential threat to you. And yours to me. COVID-19 affects people’s lungs, it starves them for breath - for their very life force.

Gone is the illusion that our breaths are separate, that our souls are separate. When I am breathing, I am breathing in some of the you that you breathed out into the universe. I am breathing in particles of breaths that started their journeys on the other side of the world. Breathing is a constant lesson in our interconnectivity. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner writes “the more we comprehend our mutual interdependence, the more we fathom the implications of our most trivial acts. We find ourselves within a luminous organism of sacred responsibility.”[xxi]

We have come to see that we are all connected. In truth, we are not merely on one big boat. We are all breathing the same breath. All of our souls come from the same Divine exhalation - all our lives are the breath of God. When this pandemic ends, [and it will end] and life returns to something we call normal, let us not forget this new truth we have embodied, that we are all part of that luminous, breathing organism of sacred responsibility.

I give breath 5 stars

Conclusion:

At its best, a User Review is an acknowledgment that we are not alone in this boat. To review a meal is to say, “I am eating this for me, but I am thinking of those who will eat after me.” Like all of our work on these High Holy Days, a User Review draws us out of our own individual concern and calls us to see the wider world around us. On the whole, I give this pandemic zero stars. But I give the moments that we have shown up for each other as a congregation and as a human family 5 stars, because I cannot give them more.

In this season of review, we are called to ask that same question that has been a background hum of this pandemic - what do we owe each other? How would you review your actions this year? How did you walk in the ways of peace? Were there times when you found yourself drilling into the boat?

In this new year of 5782, may we celebrate not only our freedom but our sacred obligation to one another. May we resist the exhaustion of our empathy, and remember the value of life. May we have abundant reserves of health and courage, strength and compassion, and when those reserves are running dry, may we offer ourselves and each other grace. And may our actions in the service of each other, humble as they might be, continue to be worthy of 5 stars. Shana Tova

[i] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/masking-for-a-friend/transcript/

[ii] Deuteronomy 30:19

[iii] Deuteronomy 30:20

[iv] Leviticus Rabbah 4:6

[v] John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed, p. 3

[vi] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/10/books/review/john-green-the-anthropocene-reviewed.html

[vii] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/opinion/sunday/covid-bubble-thanksgiving-family.html

[viii] Babylonian Talmud Gittin 61a

[ix] Babylonian Talmud Gittin 59b

[x] As Reviewby Rabbi Joseph Telushkin in The Book of Jewish Values, p 445. Quoting from Jack Reimer The World of the High Holy Days, p 132

[xi] https://sinaiandsynapses.org/multimedia-archive/open-your-eyes/

[xii] https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_slovic_human_tragedies_the_more_who_die_the_less_we_care