Adath Jeshurun

Them’s Fightin’ Words

Yom Kip­pur 5771

Rabbi Laura Metzger

First there was a note in my mail­box ask­ing me to attend a neigh­bor­hood meet­ing. Then the emails began, going from neigh­bor to neigh­bor on our street. Back­yard con­ver­sa­tions. Fence side con­fronta­tions. It’s all about the garage under con­struc­tion on our cor­ner. This is, right now, a two and a half story struc­ture, rather taller and big­ger than any­thing else next to the street. It doesn’t meet zon­ing laws. A build­ing per­mit was issued. You can tell there are con­flict­ing views here.

Work was halted and a zon­ing vari­ance hear­ing was sched­uled. That led to zon­ing cita­tions up and down the street. More meet­ings. More emails. Another hear­ing, a law­suit or two. This has got­ten ugly.

We used to feel com­fort­able with our neigh­bors. We knew and trusted each other. We could ask each other to watch our kids, take in our mail, water our gar­dens, tend our pets. It’s not that way right now. Peo­ple are tak­ing sides; though some have tried to stay out of it, even they are feel­ing the animosity.

Sit­u­a­tions like this hap­pen, where peo­ple, work­ing to meet their own needs, step on the needs of oth­ers. Some­times peo­ple work them out. Some­times they don’t. This isn’t work­ing out well at all.

Both sides have rea­sons. Of course they do. They need a garage. They need an attrac­tive and safe neigh­bor­hood. You can under­stand their points.

I do have an opin­ion about this; I have sup­ported a posi­tion. But I’m sad­dened by how ugly this has got­ten the way so many dis­agree­ments do, because we some­how can’t resist pil­ing feel­ings on top of facts, adding in all the pre­vi­ous dif­fer­ences, infer­ring a few new ones.

You know how that works in a fam­ily. You get argu­ments like this (not from my house, I assure you): “You didn’t take out the garbage and now it’s over­flow­ing and stink­ing up the kitchen. You never take out the garbage. You never do any­thing to help around here. You just don’t care about me. You’re just like your father. Your whole fam­ily. Peo­ple from Slobovia.”

See the esca­la­tion from fact to prob­lems com­ing from the fact to yesterday’s com­plaint to gen­er­al­iza­tion, exag­ger­a­tion, and char­ac­ter assas­si­na­tion. When feel­ings are strong, we fight dirty.

Take the New York City exam­ple, the Mus­lim cen­ter. Strong oppo­nents used exag­ger­ated asso­ci­a­tions: Abe Fox­man of the Anti Defama­tion League invoked Auschwitz and Newt Gin­grich referred to Pearl Har­bor. You still see and hear main­stream news media call it The Mosque at Ground Zero. It’s nei­ther a mosque nor at Ground Zero. It’s a mul­ti­cul­tural Mus­lim com­mu­nity cen­ter with wor­ship space.

So now on my street, it’s not only the garage peo­ple com­plain about, but the dri­ving, the park­ing, the fenc­ing. And then, in case it hasn’t got­ten heated enough, the accu­sa­tions about what so and so meant in doing this or that. He told me this but he always meant that. They had it in for me because I didn’t …)

Each side reads into the actions of the other some mis­lead­ing, mis­rep­re­sent­ing, malev­o­lent, under­handed … intent. As if one could know what some­one else intended when all we can see, all we can ever see, is what they do.

Dr. Patri­cia Roberts-Miller of the Uni­ver­sity of Texas is an expert in rhetoric. She calls this kind of think­ing motivism, this ascrib­ing motives to the other per­son, and then assum­ing their motives to be base while being sure that our own are sound. Here’s how it works (and I’m quot­ing from Dr. Roberts-Miller’s paper on Demagoguery):

Imag­ine that I am a cat fanatic, and I loathe dogs. If a dog bites me, I say, “See, that’s typ­i­cal of dogs—they’re vicious.” If a cat bites me, I say, “Oh, that poor kitty, it must be hav­ing a bad day.” Any­thing bad the dog does is because of their essen­tial bad­ness, while any­thing bad a kitty does is explained away as some­thing par­tic­u­lar about that cat or that moment. It doesn’t reflect on cats in general.

Maybe you don’t see your­self in this, but research sug­gests that we all do this to some extent. Dr. Roberts-Miller again:

For instance, dri­vers who do some­thing rude or unsafe explain that inci­dent as an excep­tion to their oth­er­wise good dri­ving method but other driver’s rude­ness or bad dri­ving moves as a sign that the other per­son is a jerk or stupid.

What we have now on our street is a legit­i­mate dif­fer­ence, caused by con­flict­ing needs (and com­pli­cated by sloppy bureau­cracy). This has been inten­si­fied with pil­ing up of com­plaints, related and not, exag­ger­a­tion, dis­tor­tion and mind reading.

And this is wrong. When we exag­ger­ate we dis­tort truth. That’s lying. When we carry our dis­putes from house to house, that’s tale bear­ing. When we don’t lis­ten to the other side because we’ve already made up our minds to dis­agree, that’s refus­ing to judge fairly. When we assume we know what the other person’s inten­tions are, that’s tak­ing the role of God.

Maybe it’s developmentally/evolutionarily adap­tive to see every­one as friend or foe. Maybe it once served humankind to divide every­one into us and them, pro­tect­ing us and attack­ing them. Once. Today, our instinct to bunker might not be so help­ful. It’s a tool we decry when it’s used by dem­a­gogues. But we do it, divid­ing the world up into us vs. them. If we’re right (and we are), then they are wrong. We rep­re­sent truth and they tell lies. There’s no bridge now, and no dis­cus­sion because there’s no place for dis­cus­sion. There’s no place for com­pro­mise when get­ting along is seen as an agree­ment with the devil.

There’s noth­ing wrong with hav­ing opin­ions and act­ing on them. We should read, lis­ten, learn and form opin­ions. That’s respon­si­ble cit­i­zen­ship. We shouldn’t let our needs be sub­sumed by the needs of others.

There is some­thing wrong with demo­niz­ing the other. There is some­thing wrong with allow­ing our judg­ment to be per­verted by the emo­tions attached to strong lan­guage. We should be smarter than that. We should be more aware than that. We should be nei­ther tools of dem­a­gogues nor users of dem­a­gogic rhetoric.

In every Yom Kip­pur ser­vice, we chant a litany of con­fes­sions, most of them sins of speech — al het she­hatanu lefanekah — for the sins we have done right in your face:
By hard­en­ing our hearts. By act­ing with­out think­ing. By speak­ing per­versely. Pub­licly and pri­vately. Know­ingly and deceit­fully. By cor­rupt speech. By wrong­ing oth­ers. By evil thoughts. Inten­tion­ally and unin­ten­tion­ally. By foul speech. By fool­ish talk. Through the incli­na­tion to evil. Know­ingly and unknow­ingly. By fraud and false­hood. By mock­ing. By slan­der. By idle gos­sip. By haugh­ti­ness. By effron­tery. By per­vert­ing jus­tice. By betray­ing oth­ers. By being stub­born. By run­ning to do evil. By tale­bear­ing. By cause­less hatred. By breach of trust. By con­fu­sion of values.

It’s not about hav­ing feel­ings and desires. It’s about how we express them. It’s not about dis­agree­ing. It’s about how we speak when we disagree.

When Rabbi Yis­rael Meir Kagan (19th cen. Lithuan­ian tal­mud­ist), wrote his com­pi­la­tion of all the teach­ings on evil speech, he called it Hafetz Hayyim, echo­ing the psalm: Who is eager or life, who desires years of good for­tune? Guard your tongue from evil, your lips from deceit­ful speech.

The lines seem almost unre­lated. The desire for a good and long life. The avoid­ance of evil speech. But one look at my neigh­bor­hood con­nects them. We can live well when we can live side by side even with peo­ple we dis­agree with. If we can dis­agree civilly. If we can keep unre­lated mat­ters out of the dis­cus­sion. If we can find ways to talk with­out ran­cor and dis­tor­tion. If we can search for just solu­tions rather than win-lose solutions.

We might not always like the out­come, but we can live with it when we haven’t poi­soned the atmosphere.

Think about it. It’s just what our par­ents told us: keep a civil tongue in your head; think before you speak; watch your words. If it were easy, we wouldn’t have to be told. But it’s not and we do.

G’mar hatimah tovah.