Am I Kind to You?
by Nina B. Mogilnik
My husband and I have been taking a class entitled: The Ethical-Social Vision of Sefer Devarim, with the incomparable Shai Held. It is without fail an absorbing and provocative experience to learn from and with Rav Shai. This class, although only four sessions, grabbed me immediately with its title. Who would not want to know–especially in these awful, fraught times–what an ethical-social vision can and should look like?
In this class, we have read about and wrestled with issues of slavery and the ger, the stranger. We have looked at sources and commentary about those things, and tried to understand them in the context of near eastern beliefs and practices. We have confronted the complexity, the seeming contradictions, and the radical posture of Sefer Devarim’s conception of our obligations as human beings, and perhaps above all, God’s expectations of us. It has been a whirlwind journey, one which I feel ill-equipped to participate in fully, given my shaky Jewish foundation. But I attend with enthusiasm. I raise my hand to comment, to question. And true to his methods and generosity, my comments and questions are taken no less seriously by Rav Shai than anyone else’s. I encourage my husband to ask and comment as well, but he has not yet felt comfortable. I am thrilled though, that he is as captivated by the class as I am.
At a time when so much about life seems cheap and full of shortcuts, to be in the room with a teacher who can honestly and with evident regret talk about how hard it was on Friday evenings, leaving services he led years ago as a Harvard Hillel Rabbi, to pass the homeless man he gave money to every evening and tell him, “I’m sorry. I can’t this evening,” is everything one needs to know about how to walk with God in this world. Or just how to walk as if you were being commanded to be better, to do better, to take to heart the idea that the least among us are the ones to whom we owe the most.
We have been reminded that the Rambam (Maimonides) wrote and thought about character formation, not about obedience. Hearing this, I felt vindicated in my frustration with those I have referred to, somewhat unkindly, as “bean counting Jews,” the people who can cite laws and rules, but look askance at opportunities to do acts of loving kindness that obligate them in some way(s) to color outside the law lines.
So many things in this class have been revelatory. Perhaps chief among them is the idea that a runaway slave has the same freedom as God. And that Israel is a nation of runaway slaves. And that the Torah was in direct contravention of common near eastern laws that demanded the return of runaway slaves, upon penalty of death. The Torah demanded otherwise. To pause and consider the radical nature of that stance, of embracing the slave, of providing asylum to the slave, of having the obligation–and the freedom–as a nation of freed slaves, to do exactly that, is nothing short of breathtaking.
All of this together is profound and challenging. There are demands made of us in this ethical-social vision that most of us will fail to live up to. But I have a new understanding, through the idea of “Jewish possible-ism,” that these expectations are not pie-in-sky optimism about humanity, but a blueprint for actualizing a vision of human behavior that challenges us at every turn to do better, to be better. And in our most recent session, being reminded that kingship was permitted, but stripped so completely of the trappings of kingship as to make it nearly unappealing. Because the point was that even if kings were permitted (but not required), the law remained above the king, reminding us that earthly kingship in a Jewish context was (still) a full repudiation of Pharoah, of our enslavement to an all-powerful human. And that the embrace of kingship was not inevitable in the Jewish story, but was in fact a moment-in-time experience.
All of this paints a portrait of a people wrestling with how to be in the world, how to choose virtue and why. How to build the framework for a just society, one in which the hierarchy of power and wealth is flattened as much as possible, so that the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the homeless man in Harvard Square become the people most seen, most attended to. It is a tall order to achieve all of this, or even any of it. But the roadmap is laid out for us. It is not a straight and easy map to interpret, or to integrate into our beliefs and daily behaviors.
All of which brings me to something simple, yet profound. It is a question my autistic son asked his sister when she was at Luna Park in Coney Island with him recently. Out of the seeming blue, he turned to her and asked, “Am I kind to you?” Her answer, “Most of the time.” That interaction, from a young man considered by far too many to be “the least among us” was extraordinary, because it comes from a place of absolute purity, born out of genuine curiosity, with no ulterior motive. My son just needed to know if he was living up to what he has learned is the highest value, and treating his sister with kindness. In his simple question lies the essence of something we often miss: true wisdom. And as his mother, I am reminded that we often look to the wrong sources for wisdom, because we confuse wisdom with hierarchy, with status, with achievement. Wisdom lives at ground level, where eye contact is best made, or avoided. And in choosing to see, to ask, to tell, we open up something in our freed selves that can make the world infinitely better. We just have to choose.
Nina Mogilnik worked for decades in non-profit, government and philanthropy settings, doing work she believed did some good and no harm. She moved with her family from the suburbs to NYC after her autistic son graduated from high school at age 21. She continued to do some work remotely, but then realized that her real job needed to be (re) constructing a life for her son in his new home and city. She continues to write--as a blogger for The Times of Israel, for Medium, and occasionally for other publications. This is how she records/accounts for/shouts about/expresses and otherwise communicates the challenges and joys of living a complicated, sometimes heartbreaking, but always true, life.