A D’var Torah by Rabbi Alon C Ferency for Parshat Chayei Sara
I’ve served the sweet, smart, funny congregation of Heska Amuna Synagogue in Knoxville, Tennessee, since I was ordained in 2010; this past Shabbat Noach was the last time I preached to my beloved community. I explained a lesson I’d learned with a colleague: All the work of a rabbi doesn’t amount to a hill of beans unless they can love their community and make them feel that love. (All else is commentary.) Honestly, that love alone is no small challenge; most people are given to love a few, maybe two dozen people in a lifetime, whereas even a small congregation like mine is already more than 300 souls.
Nonetheless, love is not to be confused with like. Liking a person is often largely a matter of shared interest, belief, humor, and compatibility. But loving another is a way of seeing them as God, their parents, and the tradition knows them. If we all made such a practice of loving-kindness (chesed), the world would be greatly improved.
In the Torah, love is rarely spoken and often ends badly. Even in this week’s parshah, intimacy is concealed in deference to modesty and privacy of lovers: “Isaac brought her [Rebecca] into the tent of his mother Sarah, and he took Rebecca as his wife. Isaac loved her, and thus found comfort after his mother’s death.” (Genesis 24:67) Rebecca and Isaac’s love is not based on a liking, but a more resolute and robust soul’s knowing. As Naftali Tzvi Yehudah Berlin (Belarus, 19th century) says, “He could have not loved her… Yet, love made his spirit joyful (korat ruach).” Literally, Isaac’s spirit is cooled and calmed by her presence, guiding him to a more generous awareness, less reactive or liable to judge and then catch fire impulsively.
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Judah Loew (Prague, 16th century) says that Rebecca represents chesed, most often translated as loving-kindness or grace. Loew’s perspective originates in the family servant Eliezer’s solicitation of God’s chesed (24:12, 27), and is further accented in midrash about the matriarchs. Chesed is akin to the love I implored my community to seek: a compassion for, a knowing of and attunement to the sacred in each person. Through such sacred attunement, Rebecca draws in the Divine Presence with her openhandedness. This is perhaps best symbolized in the way she generously responds to Eliezer’s request for water: “Drink, and I will also water your camels.” (24:14)
Would that public discourse could embody such chesed! As a paradigm, I’d like to focus on the poorly defined, over-broad, and shopworn term “cancellation.” This has come to include legitimate termination or legal action, but also the dangerous and performative outrage of internet pile-on, social contagion, McCarthyist public shaming, or Maoist struggle session. If chesed is a measure of intellectual charity (assuming the best in another’s thought and action), then cancellation is a sort of anti-chesed (presuming that a person ought to be judged by their worst moments). Cancellation has no Yom Kippur, no legitimate process for teshuvah (amends). Nor does cancellation recognize the Jewish precept of k’vod habriot (human dignity). Each person, regardless of celebrity, contains multitudes, and we can’t fully know another person as God does. By reducing an artist (or professor, for that matter) to their basest actions, we have unwittingly objectified another individual, with no tempering of chesed. At our peril, we deny the inherent worth of each person and the possibility of repentance therein.
In my budding practice as a spiritual counselor with stuck artists, I am disappointed by the unjustness of this process and the lack of any corresponding process of redress. I can attest that artists can be canceled for any misstep, without accommodation for the necessity of art to be transgressive, challenging, and by its nature experimental and exploratory. Any unregulated surprise therefore becomes unforgivable. Art has the power to transform a fractured, even crumbling world by bringing forth new modes of expression.
“Eve” was a Twitch streamer I followed in my spare time. In trying to make an avant garde artistic production, she made a serious yet uncharacteristic mistake on air, was fired, and then even publicly shamed. To a degree, the audience could not distinguish art from artist (the Fundamental Attribution Error), thereby penalizing an artist who took a risk in her art.
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So I wrote to Eve, and she surprised me by writing back. Our conversations meandered among Kurosawa films, Mongolian heavy metal, and the inescapable tension between making art that’s public-facing, and art that’s risky, personal, intimate, even spiritual. In less than two years, I’ve watched her go from desperation to a place of grace, gratitude, and giving, nurturing an immediate and real artistic community in her hometown that has nothing to do with Twitter and Twitch. Over the same time, I found a soul-mate for the lonely work of creating. We taught each other creative courage. This is a lesson that more of the world needs to learn.
Cultivating chesed is the lesson plan. With creative courage, this chesed must be expressed in really attuning to and attending to the expression of another, artist or not. For example, Eliezer’s story of seeking Rebecca to wife for Isaac may be the first redundancy in the Torah; he experiences, tells, and re-tells, all before eating (24:33). As Rashi cites in midrash, “The ordinary talk of the patriarchs’ servants is more pleasing to God than even the Torah of their children; Eliezer’s story is doubled, yet many important laws are only learned by inference.” By listening to human narrative, and even re-visiting what’s challenging, chesed recognizes k’vod habriot in each soul and makes an opening for teshuvah.
As I meagerly tried to offer and teach each human in my congregation, art and other forms of communal discourse must be attended to, seen, and heard as God and our tradition might. This requires chesed, a generous awareness of listening and re-listening, attending to and attuning with the message of the performer, the speaker or teacher. It’s surely my fervent hope that we have not lost the power to love, listen, and attend, even to those who might challenge us through art or argument. Without the courageous creativity of artists, our society can only become more brittle. So, we as a public are doomed to sacrifice the capacity of art to surprise and change us, and the power of expression to remake and create a new, more open society.
We will surely be the poorer for it.
Rabbi Alon C Ferency is a spiritual counselor to stuck artists worldwide – actors, filmmakers, game designers, novelists, painters, poets, sculptors, and songwriters; of any faith or none at all. You can connect with him at www.eclecticcleric.com and meditate together on InsightTimer.com/EclecticCleric.