An Ethic of Transcendence

Rosh Hashanah 2021, Rabbi Ed Feinstein

What’s it like to stand before the most evil person in the world? What would we ask? What we seek to know?

Sixty years ago, Adolf Eichmann stood trial in Jerusalem.  The Nazi officer responsible for carrying out the Final Solution, the annihilation of the Jewish People, Eichmann was chief operations officer for the greatest evil in human history.  The Mossad, Israel’s secret service, kidnapped him from his refuge in Argentina and brought him to Israel to stand trial for crimes against the Jewish People and humanity. 

Eichmann’s trial was a first -- the first time survivors of the concentration camps were invited to testify, to tell their stories. First trial to be televised worldwide. The first time the world was awakened to the depths of Nazi atrocities in the Holocaust. It was the first time the word Holocaust entered our vocabulary

The focus was on one man, and the question was -- Why? How could he do this, send millions of human beings to their deaths? What made him do it? Did he know it was wrong?  

According to prosecutor Gideon Hausner, Eichmann as a moral monster, an evil genius, consumed with hatred for the Jewish people and eager to carry out the Nazi’s Final Solution. And that was certainly true. But there were other interpretations. 

The German Jewish philosopher, Hannah Arendt, reported on the trial for the New Yorker magazine. Arendt saw a different Eichmann. He was evil, no doubt. But Eichmann was no genius. Eichmann was in fact, very ordinary, mediocre, in her word, banal. And that’s what made him truly monstrous. 

What permitted a very ordinary man to do such extraordinary evil? Arendt called it, Gedankenlosigkeit, thoughtlessness. Eichmann didn’t think that what he was doing was wrong, because he didn’t think at all. He had no awareness that his decisions affected the lives of other human beings. When questioned about the morality of his deeds, Eichmann answered in cliches, parroting the slogans of those he served, using only words and phrases that had been carefully scrubbed of moral responsibility. Eichmann had failed at everything in his life, and all he wanted was to earn the approval of his superiors. He did not consider himself a murderer. He claimed he had no particular animus against Jews. He insisted was not an evil mastermind, just a bureaucrat pushing a pencil.  He organized trains and timetables, arranging lines of  boxcars for the maximum efficiency, moving the greatest amounts of cargo for the lowest costs. He dealt in ledgers and charts, not victims; numbers and statistics, not men, women and children condemned to horrifying death. 

So Eichmann sat unrepentant, unmoved, untouched, as the survivors carefully recounted the details of the horrors they endured. 

  Hannah Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann was deeply controversial. Her observations were emphatically disputed. But her thesis remains compelling. 

We want Eichmann to be sinister and wicked -- a Marvel Comic villain -- because that way, we can distance ourselves from him. Arendt’s Eichmann -- an ordinary man, capable of extraordinary evil -- is so much more frightening. Comic book wickedness is rare. But it doesn’t take outright wickedness to generate genuine evil. It only takes thoughtlessness, obliviousness, indifference, and that thoughtlessness is all around us. It’s a pandemic, as infectious and contagious as COVID.

I am most definitely not calling anyone a Nazi. But I detect that same quality of thoughtlessness in the woman who stands in the middle of the supermarket screaming at the hapless box boy who asked her to observe the store policy and put on a mask. And in the restaurant patrons who verbally abuse the wait staff who ask them to distance themselves from the next table. And in the unruly airline passenger who assaults a flight attendant. 

It’s more than just rudeness. It is a willed indifference to the presence of others who share our social space. And it infects our culture.  

How else do we explain those who loudly rebel against the conclusions of medical science, those who spread misinformation about the disease and its remedies? How else to explain political leaders and cultural figures and media personalities who make a public show of rejecting the warnings of health experts, putting lives in danger?  

I don’t like wearing a mask. It’s uncomfortable, it’s constraining, it’s exhausting. But I wear a mask because I owe you the consideration not to get you sick. And I hope you feel the same. We share a social space. We owe one another that basic moral reciprocity. That’s what it means to be civilized. Yes, you are entitled to personal liberty. But remember that the exercise of personal liberty assumes that we all maintain a sense of responsibility toward one another. Otherwise we live in a jungle, Hobbs’ State of Nature, where there is no liberty, where life is constrained by constant fear and darkened by endless violence.

For all that COVID has taken away, it has given us this -- COVID has made all these abstract, philosophical questions of morality so very vivid and so very personal.. COVID won’t let us forget just how much we are in each other’s lives, how much we touch one another’s destiny and shape each other’s reality. COVID has revealed how deeply thoughtlessness has taken root among us. 

We are told, for example, that systemic racism infects our society. If you’re not part of the solution, we’re told, you’re part of the problem. We’re told: either you’re anti-racist, or you’re a racist. That doesn’t sit well. Frankly, I don’t think of myself as either. So I meet with a dear friend who is African American and I ask him about racism in America. He’s kind, and sensitive. We’re friends, he doesn’t want to hurt me. But as he begins to describe his experiences as a black man in America, I realize how different our lives are. We share the same space, my friend and I, but we live in different worlds.  I begin to apologize. No apology necessary, he reassures me. You enjoy privilege. And privilege is invisible. To you it’s just normal. But it’s something I live with every day of my life. There is racism and anti-racism, and then there’s thoughtlessness. As much as I resist the association with someone as evil as Eichmann, I confess that I too have been thoughtless.

 When the Harvey Weinstein story came out, I went to the women I work with and live with and asked them. Has anything like this ever happened to you? They roll their eyes at my cluelessness. Has it ever happened to me? Every day. Every day there is a word, a look, a gesture, a touch…. Women in this society, even after three generations of feminism, get used to being interrupted, overruled, overlooked, underpaid, undervalued, underappreciated. And sometimes, much much worse. According to one recent study, 25% of women in college will be victims of some form of sexual assault before graduation. Typically, it’s not a criminal, a sexual predator, but classmates, dorm-mates, dates, boyfriends, ordinary guys who don’t understand consent, because they don’t see the humanity in a woman. They’re thoughtless.

A homeless fellow lives beneath an underpass not far from here. We’d see him from time to time when we took afternoon walks, and give him a few dollars or a bag of food. Once the traffic light took forever to change, we struck up a conversation. His name is Robert. He came from Bakersfield. He’s a veteran, suffering from severe PTSD and other mental illness. His family threw him out when his behavior became impossible. He needs some warm socks before it gets cold; maybe a jacket. The light changed, and before we crossed, he thanked us, not for the money, but for the acknowledgement, the connection. We have a critical homelessness problem in LA. The statistics are dire. This is Robert. He’s not a statistic. He’s a man struggling to survive. In a silent way, he’s asking us to shake our thoughtlessness, and recognize his humanity.  

 Thoughtlessness is insidious, infectious, and contagious. But is it inevitable? Is it part of our nature to turn away and hide our eyes from the evil that surrounds us? Can it be remedied? There is a vaccine for COVID, is there a vaccine for thoughtlessness?  

Listen to the Torah --
Moses grew as a prince in the palace of the Pharaoh. He grew up with servants and slaves who bowed to him, and performed every menial task. One day, he stepped out of the palace and opened his eyes. Looking out at the panorama before him, he did not see a magnificent new Egypt rising from the desert sands. He did not see the majestic monument that would stand for millenia. He did not see a booming, thriving economy. V’yar b’sivlotam, he raised his eyes and saw thousands of human souls suffering under the lash of slavery. He felt their agony and hopelessness. At that moment he knew who he was, and that these slaves, and not their masters, were his people. 

Isaiah grew up in privilege, in the nicer suburbs of Jerusalem. Every holiday, his family made pilgrimage to the Holy Temple to share offerings and prayers. The Temple was in the oldest part of the city, a neighborhood now filled with the poor, the sick, the broken, the abandoned. Stepping gingerly through the crowded streets of the ghetto, so as not to stain their fine gowns and garments, pressing a handkerchief to their faces so as not to breathe the illness and the stench, pushing away the crowds of beggars, the well-to-do and the well-appointed made their way up toward God’s holy House to pray and ask God’s blessings. 

Every year, Isaiah joined the procession. Then one year, he raised his eyes and saw the hypocrisy -- the religious rites performed meticulously in the midst of egregious human devastation. At that moment he heard God ask, mi eshlach? Whom shall we send? And Isaiah responds, heneni, shi’lach’eyni Here I am, send me. 

Esther came to love the life of the palace. The gowns and the jewels, the cosmetics and perfumes, the parties in the garden and the lavish banquets in the great halls. She forgot that she was Hadassah, orphan niece of Mordecai the Jew. She forgot that she was a child of exiles, refugees from Jerusalem. She forgot that she belonged to the people Israel. Until the day Uncle Mordecai appeared at the palace gate with a message of desperation. “We are condemned to destruction. Only you can save us.” “No!” she responded. “That’s not me anymore. Not my problem. I belong to the palace now.” “You can’t hide from this,” her uncle responded. “And, perhaps it was for this very moment that you are here.” Esther awoke to her truth and confronted the evil. Mi hu zeh, v’ay’zeh hu, “The enemy and adversary is this evil Haman.”

Moses raises his eyes. Isaiah raises his voice. Esther raises her truth. Rising up, moral transcendence -- rising above the narrowness of the self, rising above the immediacy of our wants and desires, rising above the constraints of our fear, rising up to care -- is the opposite of thoughtlessness. It is the way God enters our world. The philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel taught that the one quality of God we can affirm is caring. 

It is the moral project of the Jewish tradition to cultivate a culture of moral transcendence, of rising up to caring. 

Heschel’s ancestor, Rabbi Yehuda Leib Alter, the Gerrer Rebbe offered an even more radical version of this. He wrote to his children -- We say Shema Yisrael every day. Most people think that the meaning of  “Adonai Echad”  is that there is only one God. That’s true, but there is a deeper meaning.  “Adonai Echad”  means that there is nothing else but God. We are part of God, all connected, all part of the one. We are cells in the body of God.  The boundaries we defend among us, the individuality we so zealously protect, are illusions. We are one. What happens to any one of us, affects us all, because we are organically connected, bound together. 

This is a elusive truth. Hard to remember. Difficult to practice. And that’s why it is sown into the fabric we call Jewish life.  

Vahavta et Adonai Elohecha. B’chal levav’cha, uv’chal naf’sheh’cha, uv’chal me’odech. 
Attach yourself to One, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. 
Practice it daily, morning and night, in all your places, in words and in thought, 
Teach it diligently to your children, 
Bind it on your person, 
Write it on the entrance of your home, and every place you dwell. 

There is no vaccine for thoughtlessness. Only everything we do as Jews -- a project without end, a task that is never finished.  

We believe that we can learn to see the divine in the Other who stand before us.
We believe that we can learn to see that the Other is just like me, part of me, part of the One 
We believe that we learn to see that we are bound together, and our fate, our destiny are bound together as one. 

It is so ironic that COVID has succeeded in making tangible, in making real, making personal, the greatest wisdom of the spiritual traditions -- that we are one, and share one fate, one destiny, one future, on one tiny crowded planet. We are one.

And we believe that if we learn that truth, we willyet see the fulfillment of God’s promise --

L’ma’an yeerbu yamaychem, v’yamay bneichem al ha adamah. So that your days, and the days of your children will endure in the world that God promised to your ancestors, as the days of heaven over earth.  And no Eichmann shall ever rise among us again.