hannah arendt – Sim Lev

Have you ever heard someone say “who am I to judge?”

Not just casually. I’m talking about major situations, when something clearly is wrong. There are those who will shrug off great indecencies, and say they don’t feel qualified to provide a moral assessment.

There is a tendency, in the modern West, to avoid moral judgment, even when something quite clearly deserves condemnation. There are situations when people say “who am I to judge?” when they really ought to be judging.

This desire not to act as judge likely comes from certain interpretations of the Christian tradition. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus teaches: “Judge not, lest ye be not judged” and in the Gospel of Luke, he instructs: “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned.”

There is a fundamentally Christian idea underpinning the notion that we shouldn’t judge. We are flawed flesh and blood, whereas God, who is perfect, is the only one who has the right to judge.

This is, I think, the direct opposite of the Jewish attitude towards judgment. Quite on the contrary, we are expected to be God’s hands in the world. We are expected to look at the world, analyse it, judge it, and find ways of making it better. We are supposed to be active participants in the world, working towards holiness and justice, by discerning right from wrong. God is not going to intervene for us: we have to intervene for God.

(I should be clear here that I don’t want to set up a false dichotomy between Christian and Jewish teachings. Some Christians say the verses I quoted from the Gospels are really about avoiding hypocrisy; and some Christians are in fact overly quick to judge others. I draw this distinction only to show that, in Judaism, judging is good. According to our Torah, our Prophets, our Mishnah, and our philosophy, judgment is the key to living righteously.)

In our parashah this week, Moses recalls the system of government he established with his father-in-law, Yitro. He reminds the Israelites that he appointed judges and told them: ‘You must hear the cases of your fellow Israelites and the foreigners living among you. Be perfectly fair in your decisions and impartial in your judgments. Hear the cases of those who are poor as well as those who are rich. Don’t be afraid of anyone’s anger, for the decision you make is God’s decision.’

For Moses, it’s not that God makes perfect judgments in Heaven and we make flawed ones on Earth. The process of judging is sacred. Finding a way to judge everyone fairly is doing God’s work.

We are supposed to judge. Fairly, honestly, without deference to the rich or patronising the poor, without fear or favour, human beings are supposed to judge each other.

In our haftarah, the Prophet Isaiah tells us exactly what happens when we stop judging. He chastises Israel: “Your leaders have become rebellious and companions of thieves; everyone loves bribes and runs after payments; they do not advocate for the orphan, and the quarrel of the widow does not come to them.”

When you abrogate responsibility for judging, it is the most vulnerable people who suffer. Unless people are willing to say that something is wrong, the people with the least power are left without advocates or intercessors. In Isaiah’s time, he saw that this created “a sinful nation, a people heavy with iniquity.”

Not everyone will sit on the Sanhedrin, but all of us are supposed to be on the lookout for infractions against the moral order. In the aftermath of the Second World War, this became especially relevant.

Hannah Arendt, one of the 20th Century’s greatest philosophers, escaped from the Nazi Gestapo in 1933. She was a stateless refugee in Paris throughout the war, during which she spent some years in an internment camp.

Afterwards, Arendt moved to New York, and became one of the only foreign journalists to report on Israel’s trial of the Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann. Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to refer to the Final Solution’s pen pusher. Anybody, said Arendt, could perform the most wicked acts in the most indifferent ways. She warned that, if the most disgusting crimes could be prosecuted, they could almost certainly be committed again.

When Arendt wrote her reports, and turned them into a book, she received considerable backlash from readers. Sometimes, she defended what she had said. Some of it caused her to revise her position. But only one criticism made her truly incensed. What got her truly angry were those who said she had no right to judge.

“Who are we to judge?” her critics asked. “How can we say that we would behave any differently to Eichmann under the circumstances? How easy it must have been to get swept up in the fog of committing genocide. Maybe anybody else would do such a thing.”

Arendt wrote a furious riposte to such critics, called Responsibility and Judgment. She said:

“Who am I to judge? actually means We’re all alike, equally bad, and those who try, or pretend that they try, to remain halfway decent are either saints or hypocrites, and in either case should leave us alone. Hence the huge outcry the moment anyone fixes specific blame on some particular person instead of blaming all deeds or events on historical trends and dialectical movements, in short on some mysterious necessity that works behind the backs of men and bestows upon everything they do some kind of deeper meaning.”

This reluctance to judge Nazi war criminals who oversaw death camps was offensive to Arendt, as one who had survived that terrible era. But it was also, she felt, philosophically abhorrent.

If you can’t judge, says Arendt, nobody can ever take responsibility for anything. And if nobody can take responsibility, then history is just a bunch of forces acting on us all, that never requires us to take action.

On the contrary, judgment is the prerequisite for recognising when something is wrong in the world, and doing all we can to change it.

You can’t blame psychology or circumstances or material realities. Everyone must take moral responsibility.

That is by no means easy. The Christian rebuttal against judging warns that if you judge someone, you will be judged to the same standard.

Yet surely that is the point! Saying that something is morally wrong means making a commitment not to do it. Labeling another’s actions as monstrous means we commit ourselves never to be like them.

Arendt saw Eichmann, the mass murderer and war criminal, as an everyman. He was a mindless bureaucrat, who had never given any thought to whether what he was doing might be wrong. To adopt the familiar phrasing, Eichmann was “just following orders.”

One of the central goals of Shoah education must be moral instruction. Not only to teach about what happened to our people, but to show what any person is capable of doing. It must be to train people to look critically, with judging eyes, at all that happens in the political sphere, and never excuse it by blaming circumstances, history, psychology, or upbringing.

No, let us never say “who am I to judge?” Let us instead insist on appraising right from wrong and good from evil at every possible opportunity. Let us be willing to assess, without fear or favour, what we feel lives up to and defies God’s law.

May we fulfil the words of the Prophet, and live out Isaiah’s proclamation, that we shall be redeemed through justice and find repentance through righteousness.

Shabbat shalom.

I started wearing a kippah full-time out of the house about six years ago. I was growing increasingly religiously observant and wanted to see how it felt to physically mark my faith. I have worn the kippah almost every day since, and feel naked if I greet guests or leave the house without one.

The results have surprised me. First of all, Britain is way more accepting than I anticipated. I have lived all over London and travelled all over the country and never had a negative reaction.

I am often met with positivity and fascination. Non-Jews ask me questions and start conversations I’d never otherwise have had.

Meanwhile, Jews come up to me to see if my kippah offers them a sense of belonging. It is like a hat that McDonald’s workers wear saying “ask me about our special offers”, except mine says “ask me about our special task.”

I am very aware that how I conduct myself through life now reflects not only on me but on Jews and Judaism as well. I have become an ambassador for Judaism. I feel obligated to live a more ethical life, and I wonder if that is, perhaps, the point.

Religious clothing carries deep meanings for those who wear it, and has done throughout our history. The kippah itself is not mentioned in the Torah. It is a medieval innovation in Judaism. In the world of the Bible, the item of clothing that symbolised Jews’ distinctiveness and sacred purpose was the tzitzit.

In this week’s parashah, Shlach, God tells Moses: “Speak to the children of Israel and say to them: make for themselves fringes upon the corners of their clothes for all generations, and put a blue thread among them.”

Now, says God, whenever you see them, you will remember what God has commanded of you. You will do what is right instead of what you like. And these fringes will make you holy before God.

But why? What is it about these fringes that should serve such a purpose? Are they simply visual aids? And, if they are, what is it about dangling threads at the corners of garments that should work to remind us of holiness and covenant?

Rashi suggests that the reason is not fringes themselves blue strand among them. This, he says, was once the colour of royalty, and an expensive dye to acquire. The thread is a reminder to the Israelites of their shared regal status – an affirmation both of their equality between each other and of their special status in the eyes of God.

But the blue string that was once part of the tzitzit can no longer be seen. The dye that was once used no longer exists. Although efforts have been made to revive it, for most Jews, our fringes have no dye.

I think the fringes have a meaning of their own. To me, these tzitzit are meaningful because of where they are.

They are situated on the margins. They are so often translated as being “fringes.” They are at the edges.

In this way, they are like Jews.

Every Jew, no matter how visible or assimilated, knows what it means to be on the fringes. It might be the ambivalence we feel as Christmas rolls around, or the unease we feel at a cultural reference that doesn’t include us. It might be a story in the news that we know we are reading differently precisely because we are a Jew.

Throughout history, we have used our marginal position to better understand both the non-Jewish world we inhabit and the Jewish one we inherit. Jewishness gives us a perspective not everyone has: a sense of how life can look from the edges.

When we see tzitzit, we see ourselves: the fringes.

The great 20th Century philosopher, Hannah Arendt, argued that this was no coincidence. We are not just on the margins because others have put us there, but because that is where we are supposed to be.

Arendt says that, even after the Jews were given citizenship and turned into emancipated members of European states, most Jews continued to be “pariahs.”

They were marginalised, never fully accepted into European society. As a refugee from Nazi Germany, Arendt knew this well.

From this position as pariahs, Jews could either consciously embrace who they were or pretend they were assimilated. Arendt says we should be conscious pariahs. We should embrace our marginality. We should use our special position as outsiders to see things the way nobody else can.

But tzitzit are more than just fringes. They are the sacred part on the border that give purpose to the centre. Without its fringes, a tallit is just a scarf. The fringes are the visibly different part that mark it out as holy.

Is this not the role of the Jew in the world? Is this not what it means to be ‘a light unto the nations’; that we are visible reminders to the world of who God is and what it requires of us? Isn’t it exactly our holy purpose to transform the world from the vantage point of our difference?

We who turn up to synagogue, who keep up our strange ways of living at the weekend, who sometimes have unusual dietary requirements. Yes, we who sometimes don kippot and dress in fringes. We have embraced our difference and turned it into a point of pride. We have chosen to live a life by Jewish ethics, transforming society and ourselves.

That is where these tzitzit point us.

They tell us not only that we are sacred for our place on the margins, but that we need to look beyond our space to the further fringes. There are others more excluded than we are, whose difference has made them more vulnerable and excluded.

The fact that they are fringe makes them, like us, sacred. They have perspectives we cannot. Their difference is spiritually powerful. It is not that we should pity the people more marginalised than we are, but that we should seek to bring them from the borders to the centre.

This Torah portion concludes with reminding us why we wear these fringes: God brought you out of the land of Egypt.

With that special deliverance came a sacred purpose.

Countless times, the Torah implores us: you know the heart of a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

If our holy purpose comes from being on the fringes, we need to look to those further out for where to go. Torah tells us about its most marginalised people: orphans, strangers, widows. These are the people that ancient Israelite society too often left out.

In ancestral times, these were the people without income or papers. Judaism calls on us to look to those most marginalised people. Unless we are centering them in our decision-making, we are failing in our religious duties.

The tzitzit at the edges of our tallits remind us where to look. They tell us that the margins are where things matter most.

So, make yourselves fringes. Now whenever you see them, you will remember what God has commanded of you. You will do what is right instead of what you like. And these fringes will make you holy before God.

Shabbat shalom.

This sermon was inspired by the political philosophies of bell hooks and Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz. It is for Parashat Shlach at Edgware and Hendon Reform Synagogue, to be delivered Saturday 5th June.

Tag: hannah arendt

Make yourselves fringes