“If you have a sapling in your hand, and someone should say to you that the Messiah has come, stay and complete the planting, and then go to greet the Messiah.”
–Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai (Avot de Rabbi Nathan, 31b)
With all due respect to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, their most famous creation, Superman, is a con job. A great big con job. So is Wonder Woman, by the way. And, by logical extension, so is the Messiah.
Why? Because by the very fact of their existence, as they invite us to imagine it, we see ourselves as less than. They can save the world. And we, who are not inhuman, super powered creatures, cannot.
- Somebody Save Me!
Let’s look at this Superman guy, in his cape and tights. The character was created by two young Jews from immigrant families who had fled persecution. Most of their relatives were back there, trapped, threatened by the evil of rising fascism in Europe on one side and just as much by the immigration quotas enacted by the United States Congress on the other.
It’s the plot device of so much Hollywood: “only one person can save them.” What is Superman if not a projected wish to save one’s relatives from evil? In Michael Chabon’s book about it, a character wonders: ”Superman, you don’t think he’s Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself.’’
Why was Superman so instantly popular as a comic book character in the 1930s and 1940s for Jews – and others – if not precisely because of the escapist relief he provided from an all too grim and inescapable reality? There is nothing remotely realistic about a Superman who is seen as “a symbol of American patriotism in his blue-and-red uniform, [fighting] tyrants and dictators and even apprehend[ing] both Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin in a special comic prepared in 1940 for Look magazine.”
Ah but this is wonderful! If only it could have happened! And it is an escapist fantasy that belongs in the comics because no individual can overcome great evil. Not a human individual. None of us have the power to save a loved one, or a city, from tragedy. Superman was, after all, the only survivor of his entire doomed planet. That world is gone. So is Bialystok; so is Cordoba; so is Bari, for the Jews. There are no Jews there anymore, and no one Jew alive at the time could stop it.
The same is true of tragedy that does not spring from human evil. Every parent of a teenager knows that there are fatal accidents; anyone ever caught in a power outage during a heat dome knows that there are life-threatening weather events; all of us who are alive live every day of our lives knowing that there are mortal diseases.
For the Jewish orientation to ethics, it’s dangerous to indulge in Superman and Wonder Woman fantasies, because it contorts our understanding of what it means for us to activate our real human potential to care, and to act, in the world. To put it another way, we each have a yetzer hara’, an “evil impulse” which is at the root of all our desires to turn away from what we are obligated to do in life, by life. And sometimes the yetzer is cloaked, insidiously, in the language of goodness: “I should do that mitzvah, and I would, but it won’t make a difference, really. It doesn’t matter what I do.”
How often when you look at the news do you feel terrible because you feel helpless to do something – whether it be human suffering in a faraway town or in a tent on a nearby street. And how often does that sense of helplessness cause you to turn away and do nothing at all, because it would only be “a drop in the bucket.” Since we cannot save the world, we might conclude, it is hopeless to do anything. At that point what is most in danger is our ability to believe in the meaning and purpose of our little, individual, human, not super-powered, normal lives.
That’s your yetzer hara’ talking, and on this Rosh HaShanah eve of the Days of Awe, we have ten days to consider how to outsmart it.
II. We are not the Messiah, we are just human
Damn you, Superman and Wonder Woman and all the rest of Hollywood, you’ve become idols. We measure our existence in these unreal terms of men of steel and women with magic lassos who can always find out the truth. And we always come up short, and we look at our human hands and consider our human potential and know that we are not super. Little me. If only I had the money I could effect meaningful change. If only I had the political power I could make a difference. If only I had the audience of a celebrity I could move the hearts and minds of millions.
And so instead of believing in the teaching of our Jewish tradition, which urges us to cherish the mitzvah as the highest form of human behavior, we are tempted to go along with Western society, and put our faith in money, in political power, and in celebrity.
The age old problem with idolatry is not that anyone is actually worshipping wood and stone, as the ancient prophets told the story. They were deliberately dismissing a much more problematic idea. Ancient human beings as well as modern ones want more than anything else to define and therefore understand the forces of our lives, and so learn where to put our trust. Which horse to bet on, in more colloquial terms.
Idolatry in every age is the same: it’s the act of defining the power that you feel certain will save you in human terms. Yes, it’s true, we have no other terms, but it’s also true that, as one Rabbi put it, “any G*d I could define, I couldn’t believe in.”
Let’s consider this problem by recalling our ancient Jewish concept of the messiah. The term Mashiakh means the anointed one. A quick flip through the pages of our Tanakh will show you that more than one human is anointed to indicate special status: the prophet Shmu’el anoints the young soon-to-be-king David right in his father’s backyard, and the High Priest Aaron gets anointed, along with the altar itself, on the day that the Mishkan is dedicated and the sacrificial cult described in the book of Leviticus is initiated.
The mashiakh, the anointed one, is a person who is a divinely appointed and socially recognized leader. During the long struggle of Jewish life under Roman oppression, the idea of a messiah who would lead us in rebellion against the Roman Empire arose: the true messiah would be none other than a descendent of the long ago anointed King David. This person would be destined for the kingship, but also a charismatic warrior who could rally the people and restore us to freedom. The third revolt against Rome was led by such a person, or so our ancestors believed: Shimon Bar Kosiva, under whose leadership a new Jewish republic was founded in the year 132 C.E. It lasted three years, and he was killed by the Romans at the final battle, in Betar.
Not unlike any other concept of the final salvation, the death of this messiah did not stop our people hoping for some kind of final rescue and return to home and country. In Exile now, our concept of the messiah necessarily became more fantastic: by the medieval period, our midrash speaks of the messiah hanging out with HaShem in heaven, just waiting for the right day to descend to earth and bring about the End of Days, and the happy ever after for us Jews.
And so in our desire to believe in instant one-fell-swoop salvation, our religious tradition made the messiah into a divine figure. Never mind what other religious traditions have done! The desire to believe in something or someone that has the power to fix it for us is so strong. That’s why we root for Greta Thunberg, a youth who has been striking from schoolwork every Friday for years now, to demand that we pay attention to climate change. That’s why we celebrate individual heroes like her; they are making a difference, we say. But are they? A UN report following up on the 2015 Paris Accords published on September 8 found that
“Governments are failing to cut greenhouse gas emissions fast enough to meet the goals of the Paris agreement and to stave off climate disaster, a major report by the UN has found.….There is a “rapidly narrowing window” for governments to move faster, according to the report, as global greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2025 at the latest, and be rapidly reduced from there, to limit temperature rises to 1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Emissions are still rising, however.”
Greta has done a lot by making the problem more visible. But she cannot do it by herself. She can only do what a human being can do. She’s not the messiah. She can’t rescue us; she spoke at Davos and nothing, nothing changed.
The messianic hope devalues our ability to believe in the necessity of what you and I can do and should do every day. And the problem is that while we are struggling with our inability to save the world, we are distracted from what we actually can do.
Have you seen the the meme … wait, first I should ask if you know what a meme is? A meme is created when you take a photo or picture and use it to illustrate an idea, by way of comparison to the content of the photo or picture.
There is a meme that always comes to mind for me when I think about the challenge of believing in individual actions against the backdrop of great evil. The photo is of three boats surrounding a fire on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. The three boats are fire-boats, and they are each pouring water onto the raging fire. That photo has been shared on social media as a meme: the raging fire is labeled as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Brandon, three billionaires all competing to shoot the best rocket into space. The idea here is that their competition is adding tremendously to the human-caused emissions that trap heat in the earth’s atmosphere and add to global warming. And the fire-boats, directing their small arcs of water onto the fire to what seems to be no effect at all? That’s you and me, conscientiously not using plastic straws.
The yetzer hara’ really scores with that one. Because when we feel incompetent we let ourselves off the hook for what we are capable of doing. We don’t even start, because what can the small efforts of you and I even accomplish? If we can’t save the world, why even try? What good is one drop in a bucket anyway?
When we cease to believe in what we are capable of doing, according to Jewish ethical tradition, this is the final victory of the yetzer hara’. What difference will one mitzvah make? And slowly, the bucket gets lighter as the water evaporates, and slowly, we become aware of a great and profound thirst.
III. Be Kind
On Rosh HaShanah we add this verse from Psalms to our prayers:
תִּקְע֣וּ בַחֹ֣דֶשׁ שׁוֹפָ֑ר בַּ֝כֵּ֗סֶה לְי֣וֹם חַגֵּֽנוּ׃
Blow the horn on the new moon, when the moon is covered, for the festival.
This is different from all our other festivals, which take place at the full moon, when the light is brightest all day and all night for celebrating. Rosh HaShanah is observed bakeseh l’yom hageynu, when the moon is covered, or hidden by darkness. On this day we are to seek out and lift up what we can barely see: this is the new moon of that which is not yet, that which is possible.
Did you know that in 1993 the comic book writers killed off Superman? And in ancient Jewish theology, it turns out that the Messiah dies too (that’s why a second, supernatural Messiah appears). Wonder Woman seems to be okay for now (just don’t get me started on the suppression of female divinity in the world).
On this Rosh HaShanah of 5784 I urge you to consider with me what it will take for you to put aside the siren call of the yetzer hara’ that undervalues your acts. Our people has faced the kind of challenge we cannot overcome before, and it has not enervated us. We as a people have not given in to the temptation of helplessness and the luxury of feeling sorry for ourselves and our suffering. Rabbi Kalonymos Kalman Shapira and his congregation kept studying Torah in the Warsaw Ghetto. Jews didn’t stop following the Jewish life path because of the Inquisition. And after Bar Kosiva died, our ancestors kept on believing that life is still beautiful and worth living.
In one of the most powerful prayers of the High Holy Days, the unetaneh tokef, we contemplate the many ways we live, and in which we will die. We are not assured of justice or “fairness” in that poem. It ends with the assurance that teshuvah, tefilah and tzedakah are the three practices that create and support a meaningful life, short and anxious as it may be.
Teshuvah, turning away from what you know is not your best and highest potential.
Tefilah, the time and, by extension, patience that it takes to be with your community and by yourself to contemplate and internalize, and settle, and ground yourself in your highest potential.
And Tzedakah, which we know as justice, as practiced in daily acts. This is the most important task we undertake as human beings – and we have an effective tool, you might say almost a superpower, to make the difference we can make. And we’re not talking here about systemic justice – that’s another distraction. Jewish tradition insists that you must do justice in all your every day acts – and that this is the highest human bar.
The small superpower that we have at our disposal is called hesed. Kindness. Kindness is the best resistance we have to the yetzer hara’ that tells us that nothing we do makes a difference. As one poet has urged us:
Why not
inundate the world with minute small
Kindnesses?
Dust is certainly all our fate, so why not
Make it the happiest possible dust,
A detritus of kindnesses?
The practice of kindness may not seem to be a superpower, but before you dismiss it, consider the power of kindness as you know it in your own life, and think about how hard it is to remember to be kind when you feel upset or hurt. Being able to be kind under all circumstances is the obverse of letting oneself feel anger, and if the rabbis call anger the most destructive emotion, then where are we with kindness if not looking at the key to our most creative potential?
Where are we going, you and I? Where are we headed, on this pale blue dot, as Carl Sagan called it? As he put it, there is no indication that any power is here to save us but ourselves. In a world full of messages that bigger is better, we have to learn that small is the most precious of all.
We have a group in our community of people who know this to be true: it’s our Hesed Committee. They do small kindnesses, like bring you groceries if you’re unable to get out, or give you a ride to shul or a doctor’s appointment when you need it. Each of these small acts saves us. It saves us from our own despair, our private cynicism, our doubts. If you’re not on that committee, you should join it. Ideally those who care and are willing to do acts of kindness for others should be all of us, no?
It’s dark out there, and there’s only a hint of possibility on a night like this. On this Rosh HaShanah I tell you that it is not too dark in your life to believe in the power of the small acts of kindness you do and can do. They are needed. They are a drop, yes, each one is only a drop. And in this room alone we might this evening find that one act of kindness by each of us is already enough to keep the voice of the yetzer hara’ just far enough away to function – on a human level. Not a Superman level. No messiahs here.
I conclude with a poem I’ve always loved ever since I found it twenty years ago. The author is unknown. That seems fitting, since so much is unknown to us on this evening. But the poem speaks an eternal truth.
Because What Do I Know about Love
Except that we are at sea in it
– and parched for its lack?
Let down your buckets, my dears.
Haul up the sweet, swaying spill.
Tilt your face to the stream.
Be washed.
Be drenched.
Turn loose
the dripping dogs to shake themselves among you.
Flood the decks; fill the cisterns.
Then drink, and find it fresh.
You have sailed all unknowing
into your home river.
Torah for the 21st Century by Rabbi Ariel Stone 