We begin Nisan & Leviticus this week with parashah Vayikra… And He called.
The Israelites are riding high, so to speak, or at least as high as Israelites can ride. Sure, there was that Golden Calf incident, but Adonai had rescued and freed them from slavery, parted the Reed Sea for them, and given them His Commandments. Then He promised to dwell among them in the mishkan. And the cloud lifted—in the narrative, at least.
How were the Israelites feeling? How would we be feeling? Grateful? Absolutely! Elevated? Sure. Divinely selected? Probably. Chosen? It would have been tempting… hubris is seductive.
A traditional reading of Vayikra says the small aleph ending the word “vayikra” is a reminder of Moses’ humility, and so a kavanah for all of us to live and lead with humility. That lesson seems particularly important now in the face of unprecedented Presidential hubris.
Let’s don’t forget that hubris is the first giant misstep toward failure. Because are several steps from hubris to failure, though, we know there is time and space there today for humility. We do not have to succumb to hubris–not in ourselves and not in our President. Humility is a step toward hope. And change.
Our own Bobbi Breitman offered a drash at Minyan Dorshei Derekh in late 2020 (that Evolve published soon after) on the “Ethical Imperative of Hope.” She asked and answered a question, which I am paraphrasing today: How do we go on when everything around us feels hopeless? She drew her answer from a midrash she had heard about Noah, Moses, Joseph, and Mordechai: “It was because they could see a new world.”
Another teaching I have leaned on for decades is the Stockdale Paradox.
Admiral Jim Stockdale was the ranking U.S. military officer in the Hanoi Hilton—the North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp—during the Vietnam War. By the way, if you’re in need of some humility, the Vietnamese call it the American War.
Military protocol made it Stockdale’s primary responsibility to help his men survive. What he learned and practiced—what became the Stockdale Paradox—is that the men who survived saw the harsh reality in front of them with brutal honesty yet never stopped believing that they would prevail.
“Oh,” someone once asked him, “you mean the optimists?”
No, Stockdale explained, the optimists all died of broken hearts. They kept telling themselves they would be released soon—by Pesach or by the 4th of July or by Christmas. The pessimists, meanwhile, could not imagine that things might get better; they died of despair, the absence of hope.
Those who survived could envision a different, better world.
When I said that hubris is the first step toward failure, I did not mean that as an abstraction.
I am an avid student of Jim Collins, who studies success and failure. During the the Great Recession, he published a book on organizational failure following success called “How the Mighty Fall.”
They fall in five steps:
First, they embrace hubris born of success. Can you think of a kid who inherited millions of dollars as well as his father’s successful housing business but tells everyone he lifted himself by his bootstraps?
The second step is the reckless pursuit of “more.” Elon Musk keeps coming up for me here.
Third, denial of risk and peril. The Republican Party.
At this point—and this is the point I assume we all fear we as a nation are today or will soon be—recovery is still possible.
The fourth step toward failure is grasping for salvation. Panic is not a strategy.
Some of us fear that we as a nation are already grasping for salvation. But the fact that we are talking, writing, resisting, and protesting about the risks and perils is proof that we are not giving in.
Organized people can and will make the difference.
The final, fifth step to failure is capitulating to irrelevance.
So How DO we Reconstructionist Jews keep ourselves relevant?—Boldly relevant, in fact! How do we hold onto hope?… and What hopes do we hold on to when we see, with brutal honesty, the irrevocable harm being done to people we know, people we don’t know, our economy, our nation, and all the people and nations who rely on us?
I believe that experience is not what happens to us but what we do with what happens to us. We are humble, we are responsible, we see the facts before us with brutal honesty, and we never stop believing that we will prevail.
As we prepare for Pesach—and so for ALL the times when impossible things are possible—I offer Bobbi Breitman’s words as a blessing:
“May the light of these holy days help us see with new eyes, as we find the strength and courage to bring forth the world in which we hope to live and pass on to our children and grandchildren, an olam hadash,” a renewed World.
Dibarti.
Mark Pinsky serves as Treasurer to the Board of Directors of Reconstructing Judaism
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