If the Jewish Council on Public Affairs has its way, it won’t be the presidential election, the ailing economy, social justice or personal ethics that top the list of High Holy Days sermon topics this year.
The public policy group is hoping that the study materials and sample sermons it released late last month will inspire rabbis to address the topic of civility — in particular, the lack of it in communal discourse — when they ascend the bimah for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
“Increasingly, conversations are giving way to diatribe,” said JCPA President Rabbi Steve Gutow in a news release accompanying the materials. “We can do better.”
The new materials come as JCPA — which has offices in New York and Washington, D.C. — continues to push its Year of Civility campaign launched in 2010.
Civility for years has been a focus of communal attention. Back in 2008, the campus group Hillel made civility the theme of its summit in Washington. And last year, Bay Area community leaders launched the Year of Civil Discourse, an initiative that grew out of the corrosive impact of debates about Israel.
It’s not only Jews who are concerned about civility. Overheated rhetoric has been blamed routinely for tragedies large and small, including the massacre that nearly claimed the life of Rep. Gabriel Giffords in Arizona.
The JCPA’s latest contribution to the civility effort is a series of study texts, source materials and sermons touting the rich Jewish history of dialogue and debate. Several invoke the precedent set by Hillel and Shammai, heads of competing schools of rabbinic thought nearly 2,000 years ago who disagreed endlessly on matters of law but managed to remain friends. Others cite the extensive legal prohibitions on slanderous speech to show how Jewish tradition recognized the immense destructive power of words.
There are multiple references to the teaching that the second Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed because of baseless hatred. And thinkers as diverse as the medieval biblical commentator Rashi and the modern-day Reform philosopher Eugene Borowitz are cited in support of the notion that respect for the humanity of all people must always be preserved.
In a sermon titled “Civility in the Age of Immediacy,” Rabbi Stephen Pearce of Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco faults the BlackBerry, snarky online commentary and the obsession with connectivity, among other evils, for fueling a disregard for kindness.
Rabbi Paula Marcus, of Temple Beth El in Aptos, says the Genesis story is proof that God wants humanity to remain in relationship with those with whom we disagree.
And Rabbi Melanie Aron, of Congregation Shir Hadash in Los Gatos, offers a bit of anatomical rabbinic wisdom to demonstrate Judaism’s intense concern with the power of words.
“Life and death are in the power of the tongue, the Bible teaches, and the rabbis tell wonderful stories about body parts, arms and legs, thighs and shoulders, competing for supremacy, only to be shown up by the power of speech,” Aron writes. “The strongest muscles, literally and figuratively, are not the biceps or the quads, they are the muscles in the tongue.”
Nearly every sermon on the policy council’s site notes the intensity and often demonizing nature of communal dialogue on Israel.
Some do it in passing. But Rabbi Daniel Pressman of Congregation Beth David in Saratoga dives right in, describing the Jews fighting among themselves as the Romans burned Jerusalem to the ground. Failing to curb the anger and hatred that animate discussion of Israel could see the country lost again, he notes.
“The danger of being quick to attack someone as anti-Israel, or assuming that only those who agree with you really love Israel, that unless everyone agrees with you Israel is doomed, is that you force people out of engagement,” Pressman writes.
Perhaps it is to be expected that a disproportionate number of writers included by the JCPA are non-Orthodox rabbis from the greater Bay Area, where clashes over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict often have been ugly.
The rabbis included in the JCPA materials are excruciatingly judicious in their handling of the issue, and generally avoid fingering either side, but they mostly emerge from along the liberal end of the spectrum. This could reflect the reality that
while conservatives within Jewish communal politics feel besieged on a host of issues, liberals more often are the ones fending off accusations of disloyalty.
No one disputes that civility is generally a noteworthy thing. And for some, the lack of it is of more than a passing concern.
In her speech to the JCPA plenum in 2010, the text of which is included on the council’s site, Rabbi Melissa Weintraub made the case for why civil discourse must become a communal priority.
“We believe the ways the Jewish community is and isn’t currently talking about Israel is preventing us from having the kind of vibrantly alive culture of learning and creative problem-solving we need to survive and thrive as a people,” Weintraub said. “Nothing less than the Jewish people is at stake.”