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THE UNITY OF HUMANITY By Rabbi Gershom Barnard The Israeli cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen (“Dry Bones”) once compared the celebration of the secular new year to the observance of the Jewish New Year, writing, tongue-in-cheek, that they had nothing in common, and then showing, in two of the panels of his cartoon, people wearing funny hats and someone blowing a noisemaker. Obviously, the two holidays have nothing in common. One could similarly contrast the American observance of people’s birthdays with our observance of the “birthday of the world,” Rosh Hashanah. At regular birthday celebrations, people light candles and eat cake, and on Rosh Hashanah …. The phrase “the birthday of the world” comes from the Hebrew “Hayom harat olam,” which we say in the Rosh Hashanah Musaf service, after the blowing of the shofar. The expression comes from Jeremiah 20:17, although there it has a rather different meaning. The rest of the paragraph is similarly based on various Biblical verses. The passage in the mahzor is:
The idea that today is the “birthday of the world” comes from the Talmud, Rosh Hashanah, where Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus is recorded as teaching that the world was created in the month of Tishri. Of course, this is metaphor. We are not talking here about paleontology or cosmology. The idea is that, on this day, we are to reflect especially carefully on the creation of the world and on our relation to the Creator. One of the most important implications of the Torah’s teaching of Creation is the unity of humanity. This point is made strikingly by a well-known passage from the Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5:
I must add, since some of you probably know about it, that there is an alternative reading of the passage that goes “One who saves a single Jewish life”. This is not the place for discussing the textual variants, but I will say that, even though the more particularistic version appears in many printed texts, the one which I gave - “a single life” - is the better reading. Let me also mention that this passage from the Mishnah has nothing to do with the biological origins of homo sapiens. It is making a philosophical and ethical point about how we ought to think about other people and act towards other people. The passage is justly famous, because its teaching, the underlying unity of humanity, is, in my view, absolutely fundamental to the Jewish world view. This teaching is not obvious. When we look around at people, we see that they differ in many ways, in physical appearance, in language, in culture, in personality. Our tradition instructs us to value this diversity, prescribing a b’rakha to be said when seeing people of (in a less than sensitive formulation) “strange” appearance. I understand the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel as a way of accounting for the apparent diversity of human types, despite the basic unity of humanity. Our Mishnah makes a similar point as it goes on: A person stamps many coins from the same die, and they all look like one another, but the blessed Holy One, the supreme Ruler, has stamped all humanity from the die of the first person, and not one of them is like the other. Recognizing the unity of humanity behind its apparent diversity is one thing. Upholding this unity in the face of more pointed challenges is another. Racism of all kinds, regarding race as a fundamental attribute of people, is one of the most serious challenges to the idea of unity. In fact, it is not clear if the concept of race is a coherent concept at all. When we go a little beyond the superficial fact that different people have different color skin and different kinds of facial features, the concept of race encounters serious problems. Even to the extent that the concept may be valid, there is not much of human significance linked to it. More generally, the tendency to describe others in non-human terms, whether or not it is supported by racial pseudo-science, is a challenge to the idea of the unity of humanity. We Jews have often been the victims of such dehumanization, from the Nazis, most notably, but also from others. Many Muslim preachers, at least in recent years, have referred to Jews as the “sons of monkeys and pigs.’ The expression goes back to the Quran 5:60, although it is not clear if it originally referred to Jews specifically. Jews are not the only victims of such dehumanization, however. In the 2nd century CE, Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, whose grave at Meron is a popular shrine, said, we read at Yevamot 61a, that the term “adam” (human being) refers only to Jews. On the next page in the Talmud, non-Jews are compared to donkeys. A former chief rabbi of Israel called Arabs “snakes and vermin”. A bizarre memory from my Cold War childhood is having read in Readers’ Digest an article about some American pilots whose plane crashed in the Soviet Union. The Soviets gave the Americans the best medical care they could, but their blood transfusions were consistently rejected by the pilots’ bodies. Only when American blood was flown in did the transfusions take. The clear implication was that Russians are of a different species than Americans. Less extreme than regarding others as non-human is excessive ethnocentricity. Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai is recorded in the Mekhilta Beshallah 1as having said,” the best of the goyim deserves to be killed”. (Incidentally, that passage is the earliest example, to the best of my knowledge, of a derogatory use of the term “goy”. In the Bible, it is purely descriptive and neutral.). A few years ago, an Israeli rabbi, Yitzhak Ginzberg, caused a stir by stating unequivocally that Jewish lives are worth more than non-Jewish lives. Many people, including many rabbis, condemned the statement, but others defended it. My daughter Ryvka went by mistake to a certain synagogue in Tucson last year, and heard the rabbi say the same thing. Finally, a rabbi formerly of Cincinnati once said to me (paraphrasing a passage from the Talmud), “If you are going to Dayton and meet a goy, you should tell him that you are going to Columbus, because, if you tell him the truth, he will use it against you.” If you want to find more such examples, look on any of the many anti-Semitic web sites. Anti-Semites claim that such statements and attitudes are characteristic of Jews and Judaism. We know that that is not so. However, we must recognize that there is a dark side to Judaism and Jewish life, which goes back to ancient times, and which is still present today. I must also add that all the examples of extreme ethnocentricity that I have given are Jewish examples. That is not because we are worse than other people. It is simply that I know Jews better than I know other people, and I am talking to Jews right now. Less severe than extreme ethnocentricity is the failure to see developments of Jewish interest in a broader context. For example, we know that Jewish apostates have often maligned Judaism to their new coreligionists, and we should recognize that apostates are not in general reliable informants about their former religions. Yet, I regularly receive e-mails giving negative reports about Islam from former Muslims. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Between 1880-1920, about three million Jews came to the United States, fleeing religious persecution and seeking economic opportunity. That story is part of the family stories of many of us. We should remember that, during those years, there were 24 million immigrants to the United States, and that many of the same reasons moved those other people as well. We are proud of how the Jewish pioneers in Eretz Yisrael made the desert bloom. In fact, Palestine underwent a general economic development beginning in the middle of the 19th century. The main reasons were Ottoman reforms and European investment. The Jewish efforts were part of that picture, but only part of it. We must reject all such assaults on the unity of humanity. Even as we feel a special personal connection to the Jewish people, we must affirm that all people are brothers and sisters. Besides rejecting racism, excessive ethnocentricity and tunnel vision, there are some positive things which we can do to advance the ideal of humanity. One is to be concerned about all people. The theoretical basis for this concern is the story of Creation as understood by our tradition, that we have all, so to speak, one ancestor. In the Talmud Gittin 61a, we already learn that we should take care of needy non-Jews just as we take care of needy Jews. Our support of the Over-the-Rhine Soup Kitchen and Operation Isaiah, the Kol Nidre food collection, which will now support Shared Harvest of Warren County, are examples of that concern. Our movement towards involvement in the Interfaith Hospitality Network is another example. We must also be concerned about people suffering elsewhere in the world. I spoke a few weeks ago about the ongoing disaster in Darfur. We must support the efforts of our government and others to keep pressure on the government of Sudan to stop the massacres. We must also be concerned about, for example, the people of Iraq. In terms of current political controversy, that concern cuts two ways. On the one hand, we cannot say that, if the Iraqis were suffering under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, that was not our problem. On the other hand, we must be sure that what we do to help them really helps. Another way in which we can uphold the ideal of humanity is to support the international humanitarian and human rights movement. We have problems these days with organizations like the International Red Cross and Amnesty International, and we should not hesitate to rebuke them when they make unfair and one-sided statements critical of Israel. However, this movement, which began in modern times with the founding of the Red Cross in 1869, and which counts among its major achievements the several Geneva Conventions, attempting to mitigate the horrors of war, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is an important expression of the drive to put into practice the doctrine which we can trace to the beginnings of our faith, that all people are equally created in God’s image. A fine example of a current Jewish expression of this ideal is the IDF doctrine of “purity of arms,” expressed in the following words:
I once heard another similar statement, which I thought was from IDF doctrine, but which I could not locate now. It is worth stating: “Remember that, in the last analysis, your enemy is also a human being.” (Ha-oyev hu ben adam) One of the stock activities of Jewish educators is to get students to debate, in some form or other, the issue of universalism vs. particularism. The terms in which the debate is phrased are not always very precise, but there is a real tension between the two ideals. We obviously need a balance between the two. In the words of Hillel: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself alone, what am I?" I have been especially disturbed lately, over the past few years, really, by what seems to me to be excessive Jewish particularism, so I have followed the advice given by the Rambam in Hil. Deot 2:2, that if people are veering to one extreme of behavior, emphasize the other side, and that is what I have done today. The central b’rakha of the Rosh Hashanah amidah acknowledges God as “melekh al kol ha-aretz, m’kadesh Yisrael” (Ruler of the entire earth, the One who sanctifies Israel). We must always recognize both aspects of God, and we should remember also that to proclaim and witness that God is Ruler of the entire earth is part of the sanctity of Israel. |