Kol Nidre - Should We Talk Social Justice on Shabbat? By Rabbi Scott Perlo

בס''ד

Should We Talk Social Justice on Shabbat?

By Rabbi Scott Perlo

אִם תָּשִׁיב מִשַּׁבָּת רַגְלֶך

If you turn back your feet because of Shabbat.

אִם תָּשִׁיב מִשַּׁבָּת רַגְלֶך

If you turn back your feet because of Shabbat,

and restrain yourself from pursuing your business on my holy day

 עֲשׂוֹת חֲפָצֶיךָ בְּיוֹם קָדְשִׁי

and you call Shabbat a pleasure,

וְקָרָאתָ לַשַּׁבָּת עֹנֶג

and call God’s holy day an honor, and honor it, not doing your own ways, nor pursuing your own business, nor speaking of yours matters.

לִקְדוֹשׁ יי מְכֻבָּד וְכִבַּדְתּוֹ מֵעֲשׂוֹת דְּרָכֶיךָ מִמְּצוֹא חֶפְצְךָ וְדַבֵּר דָּבָר

Then you will take great pleasure in God, and I will set you riding the heights of the earth, and I will feed you from inheritance of your father Jacob -

אָז תִּתְעַנַּג עַל יי וְהִרְכַּבְתִּיךָ עַל בָּמֳתֵי אָרֶץ, וְהַאֲכַלְתִּיךָ נַחֲלַת יַעֲקֹב אָבִיךָ 

for the mouth of God has spoken it.

כִּי פִּי יי דִּבֵּר

Some of you know that last year we created a new Shabbat service at Sixth & I called Good Soul. It’s Shabbat prayer with a full fledged service, but acoustic instruments. It is built of the best music we could think of or have experienced. It is designed to reach people at a soul level. It meets at Sixth & I, and sometimes at Chinatown Coffee, just down the street, every third Friday of the month. And it was created so that you shouldhave to sit here and endure this shameless plug.

In any case, part of my vision in creating Good Soul was to expose us all to the opportunities for social justice within Washington D.C. For me, being a good soul means being a good neighbor. Rabbi Shira and I, along with two core community members Eve Bentovim and Amy Kurz, have started to grow our involvement in justice and service. Good Soul seemed like a perfect platform.

In order to test out the concept, I brought the whole idea to a few other community members - people whose opinions I trust, and laid the whole thing out before them. Soulful connection, connected community, good neighborship - Good Soul.

They said, “Scott - we like every piece of the plan except one. The social justice. Please don’t do that.” Somewhat taken aback, I asked why. Here was their reply:

“All week long all we hear about is how broken the world is. A number of us work in social justice. When do we get to turn it off? Where is our spiritual refuge? We come to Shabbat to leave the craziness behind us. Can’t there be at least one place in which we don’t have to feel guilty?”

I’ve been thinking about what these confidants said to me ever since. I’ve been thinking about it because it made so much damn sense. Those two verses rung in my ears: אם תשיב משבת רגלך - if you turn back your feet on Shabbat, and restrain yourself from doing business, nor speaking of your own matters.” Shabbat is supposed to be a refuge. It’s supposed to be a taste of the world to come. It’s supposed to be a break. And please, couldn’t we all just catch a break, for once? The world is remarkably short on breaks.

Tonight’s drash is an attempt to answer that question. It is an argument. It is an argument from a rabbi who knows the truth. It is an argument from a rabbi who knows the truth of so many of you are thinking, so many times, when justice or politics are brought up in shul: “please, for the love of everything holy, please stop trying to be Martin Luther King Jr., or Heschel, like every other rabbi on the planet. You may have a dream, rabbi, but it probably involves people not eating bacon. Let’s get real.”

Nonetheless this is my argument of why, on Shabbat, I think it is still incumbent upon us to discuss justice, and its absence, especially in our own backyard.

אם תשיב משבת רגלך - if you turn back your feet on Shabbat. That’s what Shabbat is. It’s a turning back. It’s a reconnecting with the Source. That’s why that Hebrew word is there: שוב - to turn back, to return, to get back to. It’s the same root as the word Shabbat itself - "Ceasing, When God turned back from doing." That is what Shabbat is for. That is what Shabbat does, when done right - it gives us back our soul.

When a lot of us think about this idea, we start asking rather penetrating questions, questions like: Why aren’t I in Cabo right now? And: please explain to me how 3 hours of Hebrew followed by heavy, Eastern European food is supposed to give me my soul back.

The answer lies in a deep, true understanding of what restoration is.

I’ve been to Cabo. When I was in my twenties, my incredible, generous grandparents, of blessed memory took the whole extended family on a cruise down California into Mexico.

What they didn’t quite realize was that this was a booze cruise. Hundreds of twenty-somethings piled onto this boat in order to drink the night away, wake up sluggishly in the afternoon, more than occasionally in the wrong bed, and then do it all over again. On alternate days, these college educated professionals thought it a good idea to clamber onto shore, drink from ridiculous plastic cups with frogs on them, and try not to get caught on Girls Gone Wild. Or to try and get caught on Girls Gone Wild. Depending upon your community’s custom, of course. We are a pluralistic institution here.

That was this vacation.

Here’s the problem. A couple of times, we stepped a few miles outside these cruise/spring break towns - right into desperate poverty. People who live so far away from the world of spring break and vacation cruises as to make either lifestyle incomprehensible to the other. 

The problem is not the fact of going on vacation. Vacation is lovely. However, in order to preserve the illusion of the pristine world we visited, we had to do something kind of terrible: we had to shut our eyes. Much of our leisure requires that we be blind. It requires that we be unconscious.

Anything that induces our unconsciousness isn’t restoration. It’s anesthesia.

I’m worried about our reliance upon anesthetic: more people, smaller spaces, fewer resources, increasing pressures - it seems to me that we keep upping the dosage.

I've always loved the work of the Vietnamese monk Thich Naht Hanh, and was grateful when a friend reintroduced me to him for the purposes of this drash. What he says is this:

"Mediation is not to get out of society, to escape from society, but to prepare for a reentry into society. We call this "engaged Buddhism."

"I think that our society is a difficult place to live. If we are not careful, we can become uprooted, and once uprooted, we cannot help change society to make it more livable. Meditation is a way of helping us stay in society. This is very important."

I'm not Buddhist. I only bring his words to reflect a universal truth: even meditation, the most internal of the spiritual practices - to its deepest practitioners is an act of restoration with the world around us.

אם תשיב משבת רגלך

If you turn your feet back because of Shabbat.

I've neglected to mention another way that that root – שוב - to return, to cease, to turn back is used. It's the root of the word תשובה - repentance. Shabbat cannot exist without teshuvah. The world loses its calibration in the daily grind. There has to be a time in which we deeply reflect, and consider putting it back on track. That will not happen during staff meeting.

But back to my confidants and the wisdom of their point, which is this: in order for human beings to be good, we must be reminded of our nobility. Guilt and shame are dangerous drugs, not to be prescribed lightly. Without a time to recognize our own holiness, we are worse, not better. Shouldn't Shabbat be that place and that time?

What I think is that it isn't the issues of justice themselves that are the problem. It isn't hearing about homelessness or the environment or the working poor that leads us astray. Perhaps it is our response to reality that is awry: "the world is broken, and we need to fix it yesterday, and if we just killed our apathy, and it is ALL OUR FAULT." That would be a hard burden to bear, week in and week out.

Rabbis like me bear a good portion of blame, here. We act, more often than not, like frenzied spiritual football coaches, frothing at the mouth - "get out there, blitz the bad people, and grind injustice's face into the turf. Then dance in the end zone. Moral lollygagging will be punished with laps around the synagogue."

Often our solutions are inadequate - walks around parks don't end genocide - they're simply what we can do, well and easily, in the face of the incomprehensible. We all know that. We are all left feeling guilty, and worse, without tangible ways of fixing the problems set before us.

But what if the purpose of speaking of social justice on Shabbat was not quite yet to fix, but rather just to see. To see the world around us. To know. To be wide-eyed.

This is from a friend of mine

"I took a mediation class in grad school where we took real life conflict and learned how to mediate between two angry, highly emotional parties. I don't remember a whole lot from the class except that the teacher hammered home one point over and over again.  The point was that we, the royal we, tend to jump to the solution phase way too fast.  We want to solve before we even understand, before we've had a chance to truly be heard, before we feel satiated that the other person knows our best intention.  In a mediation, you can't even move on to the brainstorming phase until both parties feel that they are done verbally expunging, vomiting, etc."

Shabbat is not about fixing. It is forbidden to fix things on Shabbat. That law exists for a reason. It is the epitome of wisdom.

Shabbat instead, is about seeing. It is about understanding. It is about contemplating. It is about generating compassion. It is about see our small place in the big picture. It is about recognizing how we fit, before we fix. For these are the behaviors that will restore our souls. And they are the ways that, when we emerge from the holy, we will have the inner strength to do what must be done.

What if we understood Shabbat as a time, not of frenzy, but of clarity? What Shabbat was dedicated, not to shame, but to understanding. What if, on Shabbat, we sought more than sleep? What if we found a way to be truly awake.

The rest of the week is there for the doing. Shabbat exists for compassion. אם תשיב משבת רגלך - if you turn back your feet on Shabbat. תורת השם תמימה, משיבת נפש - God's Torah is pure, restoring the soul. Perhaps the restoration we seek is found in openness to the world.

For the conceivable future, that's what we'll be doing in Good Soul. But there is the beginning of a new initiative - for the week, not for Shabbat - that starts with a partnership with SOME. Come the fall, we’ll be volunteering once a month together there – serving breakfast or lunch. And we’ll build from there. So please contact me at rabbiscott@sixthandi.org if you’re interested.

But we’ll also have Shabbat: a time not to fix, but rather to think, to be, to understand, to see. And in its own way, that will redeem us too.