In this week’s haftorah, Yirmiyahu (Jeremiah 36) is instructed to tell the people to free their slaves, freeing them up to do the dirty work of War. ‘Call a dror, an emancipation,’ Yirmiyahu’s God tells him. He does and they do. Maybe it’s the Jewish version of Spartacus or something: ‘Set them free when we need them.’ But this time there was no slave revolt … no uprising. … When the manpower shortage was over, the people took their man-slaves and their women-slaves back into servitude … just as occurred to our Black brothers here in the US of A when they were captured up North … just as occurs with our Mexican crop-pickers as we send them back or refuse to let them in after we’re done with them or don’t need them … . God was pissed and told the people that they, too, would now be free … free, that is, to be killed by the swords of the invading hordes … free to suffer pestilences … free to die of starvation.
I go to a Chavurah meeting most every Shabbos; I did, today. The speaker noted this, as he spoke of the three times the law is put forth about a Hebrew slave who marries in slavery and is about to leave … according to the Torah … without his family. The Law speaks of what to do with him if he refuses to leave. The ceremony is well known … driving a peg through the ear lobe of the Slave and into the doorpost. The talk was given by a very learned Rabbi, trained in the Jewish Theological Seminary maybe 50 years ago, a time when there were towering Rabbinic scholars at JTS.
He continued to talk about other forms of servitude, using as an example the addiction to cel-phones that has become so much a part of life, these days. He wondered, too, about who was responsible if a self-driving car killed or caused damage. The (non)driver? the engineers who designed the system? Who? The Parsha this weeks talks much about who bears the resp[onsibility if an ox gores, a topic taken up in the first pieces of the Talmud typically taught to young people? Like all of this Rabbi’s divrei Torah, there was much to learn and reveries from which one might take-to-flight in taking in his words.
I said nothing maybe, in large part, due to the busyness in my mind that his talk catalyzed. Surely, there’s a price to be paid for all technology. To think anything “new under the Sun” is Bug-Free is foolish, at best. As the saying goes: Everything has a price. Or, as Aristotle had it, virtue is the recognition that one is essentially never in the position of choosing between a Good and a Bad … life is about choosing between Goods (looking at their respective benefits) or (flipping them over and looking at the price) between two Bads. I suppose each generation looks at its choices as new and more difficult. The Mishnah says: לא כדרות הראשונים דורות האחרונים … ‘the new generations can’t stand up to the older ones.’ Maybe? Maybe not?
It was easy in my mind to think of earlier technologies … the telephone that our parents and grandparents recognized as something of a danger. … Remember the locks on the dial phones? They were, I tend to think, not just to keep the bills down. Oh, and the Car … the Machine, in the lingo of that earlier generation … in der machine du villst ich gai’en? ‘You vant I should get into that monster?’ The Victrolas and Hi-Fi’s (that’s not the same as High-Fives!) that turned the Rabbis beards from Black to White trying to figure out if the prohibition against men listening to women’s sexy voices carried over to the recordings made by these enticing she-Devils? And as to who is responsible for a runaway auto-drive-auto, similar considerations are necessary in (just per example) the maintenance of cars … tires … brakes ...Who is to blame? Driver? Manufacturer? Life is messy, in any Century. Ah! So, this IS a problem in every generation.
But then my thoughts struck closer to home with what for me are the almost invisibly creeping changes that have altered human living circumstances since the Big Cities and the Industrial Revolution. I was thinking of a quotidian change in our lives as we/I began to move at quicker and quicker speeds, as one example. I drive most every day, passing by 1,000’s of homes containing a similar number of stories to which I pay no attention. The residents of those homes don’t exist for me. We live as strangers and barely know our neighbors. Torah says: ואהבת לרעך כמוך … ‘and you should cherish your neighbor as you do yourself.’ But what if you don’t know your neighbors? How can you possibly keep this Mitzvah -- this positive commandment to consider others as Subjects in Their Own Right, just as we see ourselves as Agents in our own World. Without contact with these neighbors, one cannot keep this Mitzvah. Maybe that’s part of what Small Town America finds so offensive in the Bicoastal City Folk. Have we lost touch? Are they onto something?
I had lots of thoughts scurrying about in my busy brain. In synagogue, do some people offer an opportunity for congregants to call out the name of their ailing friends and family (Mi she’Bayrachs) as a supplication to God or as an opportunity for the rest of the Congregated to recognize that their neighbor is suffering and worried about their loved ones? Is Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, another opportunity to feel for their mourning co-celebrant? And (a personal pet-peeve of mine) is coming to a prayer (or luncheon meeting for that matter) meeting on time in order to “make a minyan” not also a way of privileging our responsibilities to form a community.
These insidious changes in our living conditions frighten me more that my six grandchildren with their six iphones. My grandchildren are reaching out to touch someone in the alienated World that my generation helped to shape. I reach out, too, on Daily Kos … on Elders of Zion … on other websites that bring me out of that ungodly state in which I can drive by 10,000’s of homes on a single car-trip and pretend that all these homes are empty of joy and strife and sadness. It has been said that the Trump administration is not the illness but the symptom. Our republic and not few of the other Democratic Republics in the Western Alliances have been choosing leaders that caricature this alienation with their Narcissism and their Psychopathy and their Sadism ... but it is, I fear, baked into the cake.
Gutte Shabbos.