Why Kindness Is More Than Being Nice - Sponsored Content

At a time of rising political fear and social distrust, how can kindness become more than a private virtue? 

For this special episode, recorded live in San Francisco last month, Yehuda Kurtzer delivered the Hartman Institute’s inaugural Dan Rubin Memorial Lecture. He argues that Jewish tradition elevates acts of loving-kindness from a personal ethic to a foundation for building a healthy society. Drawing on rabbinic texts, the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., and modern democratic thought, he explores whether kindness can function as a genuine political value rather than merely a form of civility. What would it mean to practice moral courage, resist fear, and build communities capable of sustaining both disagreement and democracy?

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A full transcript of this episode is available below.
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Why Kindness Is More Than Being Nice

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Michele: Hi, I’m Michele Siegel, the producer of Identity/Crisis. Today, we’re bringing you a special episode recorded on Monday, October 25th before a live audience in San Francisco. 

Yehuda Kurtzer delivered the Hartman Institute’s inaugural Dan Rubin Memorial Lecture. Dan was a beloved Hartman board member, and we’re grateful to share this talk in his memory. Dan was especially passionate about Hartman podcasts, and our recording studio is even named in his honor. Yehuda chose the lecture topic “The Moral Mandate of Kindness” because it captures who Dan was as a person and how he engaged with the world around him. Here’s Yehuda.

Yehuda: So I don’t love oversimplifications of Judaism. In fact, our institute often tells people if somebody tells you “Judaism is…” you should run in the other direction. I don’t wanna simplify things of a complex tradition that is invested with so many complicated and sometimes competing ideas within the same tradition, but I do wanna say something simple about what I think the five books of the Torah believe is ultimately the purpose of Judaism. 

The story is actually quite simple. It follows a pathway of creation, revelation, and a hoped-for redemption. The people of Israel are created, they experience the receiving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. It is a complicated covenant, and then they proceed on a pathway towards the promised land, and the imagined telos, the imagined end of Judaism, is that they will arrive in that promised land and build a model city, a city on a hill. Well before John Winthrop absorbed that term as a model for America, it was meant to be the biblical model for what the story of the Jewish people was supposed to be. 

Now, the Bible is clear that that society is supposed to be characterized by ethics. We know how many times in the Torah, the Torah invites us to consider the plight of the widow and the orphan. How many times the Torah, I believe it’s 36, tells us about our responsibilities for kindness towards the stranger. It’s very clear that these are obligations that the Bible thinks about more seriously than other obligations which only appear once or twice. 

And most famously, the Torah tells us in the context of a series of verses telling us how people are supposed to interact with one another, that they are supposed to actually hold each other accountable, not to bear a grudge against each other by actually providing feedback and criticism. 

In Leviticus 19:18, perhaps the most famous verse in the Hebrew Bible, “To love your neighbor, your fellow as yourself,” all in service of the end of that verse, which is, “I am the Lord your God.” In other words, the Bible wants us to build a model society which requires following God’s rules, and some of those rules are very clearly about our relationships to one another. 

Now, sometimes when our relationships to one another, the business of ethics, is put in the same sentence as the obligation to love God, it can be hard to determine which is the driver of that obligation. Is it that God will love us if we’re kind to others, or is that being nice to others is a way of serving God? 

And by putting that doubt in there, it reminds us that in essence, the ethics are not the end game, I believe, in the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible’s vision is not ultimately that we be nice to each other. The Bible’s vision is that we travel through the wilderness, arrive in the promised land, and build a model civilization in which ethics should be characteristics of that civilization, but perhaps not the end goal of the civilization. 

If you read the Bible, including the parts that are not nice sounding, like “love your neighbor like yourself,” you realize that this also involves building a significant cultic practice of sacrifices in Jerusalem and a whole bunch of other rules that involve obeying God. Building God’s society hinges on it being God’s society, and there’s in the sense of a kind of immediate gratification. 

We’re gonna build the society, plow towards the promised land, and live there permanently and in perpetuity, and kindness is one of its features. The civilization is the point. Kindness is one of its characteristics. 

It’s reasonable to read the Hebrew Bible and come to the conclusion that interpersonal ethics are a part of the Jewish story, but not the point of the story. 

And for good news and bad news, Judaism as we know it is not actually the religion of the Bible. And one of the most fascinating things that our rabbis do in a post-biblical era, when the rabbis maybe give up, at least temporarily, or they ask us to consider the much longer arc of history, the rabbis invite us to consider that maybe interpersonal ethics are not merely one characteristic of building a civilization. 

Being kind to others is not just a good thing to do if you wanna live together with other people, but maybe something bigger than that, maybe the foundational principle of Torah. The most amazing thing about the Bible is the Bible doesn’t tell you these are the most important things. You might be able to say, well, the Ten Commandments, that seems like it may be the most important, but immediately following the Ten Commandments in the Torah are, like, 150 more commandments, leading you to believe there’s actually a lot of rules to organize the society. 

And the rabbis come along and do something extraordinary, and this is the second text you have in your packet on page one, where the rabbis describe a situation of an individual coming before Hillel and Shammai and saying to these two sages, “Convert me on condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I’m standing on one foot.” Shammai pushes him away with the builder’s cubit in his hand. I don’t wanna go deep into that. 

He comes in front of Hillel, who converts him immediately. No conditions. You wanna be part of the Jewish people, I’ll convert you. And then he says to him, “That which is hateful to your fellow you should not do. This is the entire Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and study it.” 

The rabbis do something here that is unthinkable when you read the Hebrew Bible, which is there actually is one core principle in the entire Torah. That core principle is act towards others the way you want to be acted, a kind of reverse version of what is written in the Bible. 

It’s not “love your fellow as yourself,” it’s just, “don’t do hateful things that you wouldn’t wanna do to you, exercise towards others, that is the whole thing.” But he then says, “Go study.” 

By the way, there’s other things. But if you want a starting point, the starting point of the Bible, according to the rabbinic tradition, is the belief in interpersonal ethics into an ethic of kindness. 

Even if the Bible’s story is one of trying to build a world that is premised on living in the land of Israel, the rabbis take a different approach, and maybe the reason they do this is because they don’t necessarily know whether they will be able to get to the Promised Land. 

Maybe they do this because they understand that Judaism is actually a religion of delayed gratification as opposed to imminence and arrival. Maybe we know that if I can’t get there in the long run, I can’t focus on one singular mission of arrival into the promised land, and I have to invest much more deeply in the texture of a society that is prepared for the long haul 

And a texture of a society that is preparing not for a quick journey towards the Promised Land, but that assumes that it is gonna be part of a long arc of history that maybe in the long run bends towards justice, but in the time being, I don’t know if it will. 

Maybe the rabbis have to recognize that we are not really a society that wants to be so focused on truth and justice. Maybe we need to dig deeper into being a society predicated on kindness. Maybe if we wanna stay together for longer than we think we should, we are gonna have to figure out what it means to actually love one another, to actually make it central to what Jewish civilization and diaspora is supposed to be about. 

And the rabbis therefore raise the bar one level higher. It’s not just that being kind to others is a core principle of Torah. The rabbis go on to argue that actually being kind towards others is a world-building principle. It is not just a means of managing. It’s not just an interpretive principle of the Bible itself. 

It may be one of the core elements that we need in order to create a world, not merely to live in it, not merely to be alive in it, not merely to sustain ourselves through difficult times, but to actually construct something remarkable on the other end. And I wanna show you one of the really most astonishing pieces of rabbinic text, which is on the bottom of page one. 

In the chapters of the Fathers or the core principles of the rabbinic tradition, Tractate Avot, Pirkei Avot, the Mishnah had started with a whole catalog of how Moses received the Torah at Sinai and handed it down over a series of generations, and the rabbis are gonna start telling us what are the core ideas of this tradition, and this is the first.

Rabbi Shimon the Just was among the survivors of the men of the Great Assembly, and he used to teach, “Al shlosha devarim ha-olam omed,” on three principles the world stands. It exists on the basis of these three things: On Torah, study, acquiring of knowledge and wisdom that comes through the study of Torah; on service of God, maybe service in the temple, but service more generally, religious practice, the life of serving God, whether it’s through prayer or sacrifices. That’s the second core principle. 

And then this third phrase, “al gemilut hasadim,” performing acts of lovingkindness. If this is not just an idea that is a good rendering of Torah, the rabbis imagine this as a core principle that helps to uphold the world. Now, you notice it doesn’t say love. It’s not, love your fellow as yourself. It is a new phrase, a phrase called gemilut hasadim, which to the rabbis becomes one of the most important ideas. 

Gemilut hasadim is not just love. Doing acts of love and kindness is love with teeth. To love somebody can be expressed through emotion, through a kind of generosity and kindness in how you speak to other people, giving them the benefit of the doubt. 

But if you wanna really show love in a way that builds a world, start doing things for others that make demands of you. Start giving of yourself. Start acting towards others in ways that turn that love into a nice sentiment, from turning from a nice sentiment into a genuinely societal building activity. Do the kinds of things that create bonds of interpersonal relationship and that hold a society together, and notice. 

You know, rabbis love Torah. I don’t know if you know that. Rabbis love Torah, but they don’t say Torah comes first and all of these other things come second. As a religious tradition, they don’t say serving God comes first and then taking care of your neighbor comes second. 

They actually insist that all three of these commitments to serve God, to study Torah and be living a life of Torah and wisdom, and performing constant chronic acts of love and kindness must coexist for a serious Jew to think that they are creating something enduring and possible in the world.

The world stands on all three of these things. Now, what does that mean? What are acts of loving kindness? For the rabbis, they are not merely holding the door open on the elevator to let somebody come on, nor is it merely, and this is a really interesting thing, nor is it merely doing acts of charity. 

Charity is great. The rabbis think it’s very important. The rabbis demand that one gives away ten percent at minimum of their wealth to the poor. It’s a complicated thing in Jewish tradition because—and it’s a really interesting question to talk about at another time, but what they mean by charity is directly giving to the poor, which is not the same as how we understand philanthropy. 

Charity is really important, but the rabbis say, actually, gemilut hasadim, what we’re talking about, these acts of loving kindness, are not merely charity. If you look at page two, the Talmud says, Rabbi Elazar said, “Acts of kindness are greater than charity. Sow according to charity and reap according to kindness. 

If a person sows, it’s uncertain whether they will eat or not eat, but if a person reaps, he certainly eats.” In other words, one has to actually not just create conditions for people to benefit in the future, but actually has to do direct acts of service that transcend merely acts of charity. And the rabbis go to explain, what do we mean? 

What does it mean that acts of loving kindness supersede simply giving charity? I’ll give some examples of this in a moment, but the rabbis say, the sages teach that acts of kindness are superior to charity in three respects, is charity is about money, but acts of kindness are about both person and money. Charity is to the poor, while acts of kindness are both for the poor and the rich. Charity is to the living, while acts of kindness are performed for both the living and the dead.

Coming together to honor someone’s memory, the act of burying the dead, those are acts of generosity that are not merely I’m giving money to somebody in their lifetime, but I’m actually honoring their legacy well beyond their lifetime. 

And Rabbi Elazar said, “Anyone who performs charity and justice is considered as though he filled the whole world entirely with kindness.” If you can do both of these things, give of your money, but transcend it with your actions, you create the possibility for filling the world with kindness.

There’s so many places where I actually see this show up. There’s a lot actually in the world of charity that is often unkind. Sometimes there are donor gifts, maybe you’ve heard this, called going away money. If I give you this gift, you’ll never come back and bother me again. It’s unkind charity. 

The moments in my life where I came closest to quitting this job were moments when I felt toyed with by donors, made to feel that being in the position of having to ask for money made me lesser than the people on the other end. 

The rabbis intuit that simply being charitable, simply giving money away, does not actually m- make you a participant in building the social order. It doesn’t create fabric between two people. We have an American tax code which rewards the giving of the dollar towards a nonprofit organization, but has no relationship to what that dollar is supposed to be for. 

Actually, it’s even messier than that. As you know, you can park your money in a donor-advised fund, get the full amount of the tax benefit, and most people then wind up giving away less money every year because it grows in a donor-advised fund. And I’m not disparaging donor-advised funds. I know I’m here with the support of the Federation. You should give to your donor-advised funds. 

But you can wind up with a situation where charity is an infrastructure that allows people to do one basic act that is deeply disconnected from the work and the activity of loving kindness on the other end. It can actually be a mechanism to distance ourselves from the people that we are actually supposed to be helping. 

I don’t know how much the rabbis knew about donor-advised funds—I’m gonna guess very little. But they are intuiting that to genuinely build a life as a human being that is about world-building as opposed to being about fulfilling obligations You are gonna need to fill in the texture of how you exercise your relationship towards others. There’s so much in our tradition that’s about fulfilling obligations. I did this and I’m done. I checked this box, and the rabbis are insisting that what makes a difference is not just the very act of doing that which you’re supposed to do, but a embodied way of engaging with others in the world that actually builds social texture. 

What it looks like when you actually take a shovel and bury a loved one. What it feels like when you bake a lasagna and take it over to someone in need. What it looks like when you overcome what many people experience as a visceral distaste for being with people in places of vulnerability, and you actually sit with the ill in their moments of weakness. 

Charity doesn’t build a world, the rabbis are saying. It helps people. It’s vital. What builds a world is our capacity to do something more than that. The rabbis go on to say on page three, what do you wanna understand? What is, like, Torah actually about on source number six? When we talk about teaching our children the ways that they should live, what does that consist of? 

And listen to this incredible list of things that you’re supposed to do. Obviously, acts of loving kindness. You should help them figure out how to earn a living. Rabbi Eleazar Modi’i says that they should visit the sick, they should bury the dead, they should practice loving kindness, they should perform the law, and they should go above and beyond the letter of the law. 

An amazing list built of completely random different things. To really raise your children is to make them competent adults. There are no report cards. You make them competent adults. You teach them to feel embodied ethical responsibilities towards others. You teach them both to respect the law and to transcend the letter of the law to be committed to something bigger than that. 

You wanna imagine a comprehensive strategy for living in a world in which you not only complete your obligations, but you participate in the social order. I have to do all of these things. I have to give charity. I have to use charity in my body through acts of loving kindness. I have to adhere to the law. I have to adhere to the spirit of the law. 

Ultra-Orthodox communities are some of the most charitable Jewish communities that we have in Jewish life. I don’t know how much you know about the phrase a gemach. How many of you have heard the phrase a gemach? A gemach is a phrase from gemilut hasadim. All over ultra-Orthodox communities, there are things called gemachs for anything you could possibly need. 

There are gemachs for wedding dresses. You have a wedding dress, you give it to the gemach, and then somebody who needs a wedding dress can get one without having to incur the cost. You can have a gemach for pots and pans, for strollers. There’s a fabric of internal communal loyalty and support, and the criticisms that many of us have about communities like the ultra-Orthodox is that, great, you’ve done a powerful thing about building internal kindness in your community, but are you also participating in the other stuff of world-building and the social order? 

But the reverse also is true for liberal Jews. The things we like to do that contribute to the social order are not often the same types of interpersonal kindness that are actually rigorous that we would think to be essential features of what a robust Jewish community is supposed to be about. 

The rabbis invite us to consider that beyond the telos of the Bible of arriving into the promised land and building a holy nation and a city of a hill, that a religious life requires something else, requires of us to think of acts of loving-kindness as foundational principles of what it means to be a Jew. 

Now, I could stop here. I think this is important Torah for us to consider about what it genuinely means to be a Jew. The way our responsibilities go beyond simply justice to actually an embodied spirit of participating in helping to improve the lives of others, to stretch beyond our comfort level, to do things on behalf of others that none of us think we’re as good as, but to simply take that as an ethos that transcends charity and helps to build a powerful Jewish life. 

But I want to ask something bigger about the promise of loving-kindness. And the question I want to ask, and it builds on this multi-day conference, on the precipice of massive electoral events, both in America and Israel, this feeling that so many of us are sitting in of deep uncertainty about the future. 

The question I want to ask is whether loving-kindness can have a politics. What does it mean to think about loving kindness, acts of loving kindness, a spirit of loving kindness, an approach to understanding that it is a feature of world-building? How do I even think about that in a moment like we are in where the urgency seems to be about winning and seems to be about the unjust that is being proposed on the other side of the aisle? 

What room do we even have in a society like this one to talk about kindness without advancing a kind of banality of kindness? People who talk about kindness look like political weaklings. Sometimes people who talk about kindness as a core principle of a society become, like many ways the rabbis are, political quietists, not trying to actually fix that which they can’t fix, but simply trying to build a kind of internal culture in a society that at least will make us immune from the toxicities of the politics around us. 

What does it look like for Jews of the twenty-first century who have become political insiders in our society in ways that totally depart from the story of Jewish history when we were on the outside of politics to be on the inside of politics to still insist that our tradition demands of us that our values, our principles, a commitment to loving kindness is not so simply be like, “Well, when I’m being Jewish, I bake lasagna for my friends, but when I’m actually trying to win an election, I’m gonna be an asshole like everybody else”? What does it look like for our tradition to ask us to bridge that gap between one or the other? 

I think, you know, one of the most heartbreaking experiences I had as a parent was in 2016. So my boys were eight and ten, old enough that they actually were curious about politics and about the presidential election, old enough that they were attentive, right, to the media spectacle around the presidential election, and especially with the candidacy of Donald Trump, who was ready-made for the era of social media and TV. 

And to have to sit with them during the debate after the Access Hollywood tape had come out, and explain to them why it seemed that that was not politically disqualifying. They genuinely couldn’t understand it. They were like, “How could a person talk like that and still be President of the United States?” I was like, “Let me tell you about the presidency,” right? 

And then by the way, just to be fair, I was like, “Well, maybe I should explain to you President Clinton.” Right? So this isn’t like—it actually is—may have not been the worst thing said or done by presidents in terms of boundary crossing in the history of the American presidency. 

But that actually, that kind of betrayal of the human spirit is actually native to our politics as opposed to being completely anomalous. How do you raise children to say, “I’m gonna still root for candidates to beat the other guy even though they are people who I would never want to sit at a table with”? 

We’ve reached new heights, the race in Ohio. And if you followed the comments of last week of mocking a fellow candidate who was a victim of terrible child and sexual abuse by saying that it was a sign of her weakness, that these are just characteristics of the political climate that we’re in. We find ourselves amidst a moment of extraordinary unkindness in our politics that is sometimes encoded as simply being politics. 

Like when people are dragged out of their homes and children are separated from their parents, and that is treated as though it is a political debate about the legality of an immigrant as opposed to an expression of a kind of brutality that may hinge on a public policy debate but need not manifest with that kind of hatred. 

And to say that, to even say that, is to invite the accusation of being partisan. A few months ago, when the Minnesota ICE stuff was taking place, the Hartman Institute did a day-long learning event about what it means to be kind to the stranger. I got interesting feedback actually from a number of people who said you titled that wrong. This isn’t about kindness to strangers, it’s actually about kindness to neighbors. In fact, even coding someone as a stranger is a way of saying I’m not sure what my obligations are to the stranger. Whereas when I actually describe neighbors, you obviously awaken in yourself that you can’t allow terrible things to happen to your neighbors even if it is actually the law to do so. 

And even the decision to do that day of learning invited criticism from people who said you’re being too partisan, it’s somehow being willing to stand up and say, “My decision to believe that we are obligated to act with loving kindness, not just to our own, but to others, in this political climate gets treated as though it is choosing a side on a political issue, or more grotesquely, choosing a side between blue and red.” 

Could reasonable people disagree about the nature of immigration policy in America and its prosecution and its law enforcement? Of course, but our politics currently invites us to think about those choices as though they are completely separate from a broader ethic of how human beings are supposed to treat one another. 

And we know how difficult it is to construct this conversation when not only does kindness get coded as a partisan position, which is an incredibly crazy thing, but it is also encoded, as I alluded to earlier, as a kind of political weakness. It’s like bringing a banana to a knife fight. I’m gonna be nicer towards the other side. I’m gonna speak with deference and respect. I’m gonna treat others the way I would wanna be treated. You get massacred in a debate. You look like a fool in the context of American politics to say, today, to say, “How do we lower the temperature of what is taking place in our society?” Not just because we are endangered by that polarization, but also because we don’t like living in a society where this is how people talk to each other.

We’re embarrassed to show it to our children. We’re embarrassed to cheer on people who we find completely detestable. It’s extraordinary to me to watch the Joe Rogans and the Hasan Pikers, vulgar people, vulgar people who say very mean things about other people, become kingmakers in a society when it comes to rational and reasonable people making choices about what’s best for their politics. 

And there’s another concern as well, an idea shared by a political philosopher named Linda Zerilli from the University of Chicago, who has an essay entitled, I think it’s called “Against Civility.: It’s like a alarming title. She doesn’t believe that people shouldn’t be civil to each other, but she correctly notes that sometimes throughout human history, when people demand civility in a society, what they’re trying to do is suppress difference. She said historically, women who act out, suffragists, were told they were being uncivil. 

So sometimes simply demanding that people be civil can actually be a mechanism to repress the cause of justice, right? So the demand for civility has to also be accompanied by a kind of politics. Being kind is not just a way to tell people, “You should stop with your grievances about things that are going wrong.” It has to be accompanied by a larger commitment to continue pursuing politics as opposed to trying to repress it. 

I fear, as many of us should, that simply saying, “Let’s just be kind to each other and disconnect from the larger public conversation,” would lead to political quietism. It could result in thinking that kindness is something separate from politics, or it could lead to a world, which I think we live in now, where we can be kind in our interactions to our friends and neighbors, but ruthless in our politics as relates to everybody else.

I wanna consider two texts, not Jewish texts, modern texts, that I’ve been thinking with. Ilana likes to use the phrase, “I’m thinking in pencil.” So these are two texts that I’ve been thinking with, about what it looks like for an ethos of kindness, of optimism to actually be effective in achieving some measure of social change. 

The first text, which I’m a little bit obsessed with of late, is King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. That’s the title of the speech as was given to by others. I think King’s speech is probably the closest that modern human beings have ever had to prophecy. As is famously the case, at the end of his speech, King talks about his impending assassination with the language of, “I’m not gonna make it with you to the promised land.” 

If you listen to the audio, people were gasping as he talked about this, and he was assassinated the following day. So he, he knew profoundly how endangered he was, and in that moment, he expresses, then, this truth of what it looks like to try to win with love. It’s an extraordinarily moving idea. What does it mean to try to win with love? 

If you’ll indulge me, I’m gonna read a couple of parts of the speech that have nothing to do with my talk, but just because I wanna read them. That’s okay, right? At the beginning of the talk, King says something amazing, and it may not have a lot to do with a talk about kindness, but it does say something really important to Jews today. 

He says, “Something happening in Memphis, something is happening in our world, and, you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, ‘Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?’ I would take my mental flight by Egypt, and I would watch God’s children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness, on towards the Promised Land, and in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn’t stop there. 

I would move on by Greece and take my mind to Mount Olympus. I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides, and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon. I would watch them around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality, but I wouldn’t stop there. I would go on, even to the great heyday of the Roman Empire. I would see developments around there through various emperors and leaders, but I wouldn’t stop there. 

I would come up to the day of the Renaissance, get a quick picture of all the Renaissance did for the cultural and aesthetic life of man, but I wouldn’t stop there. 

I would go by the way for the man for whom I am named had his habitat. I would watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the Church of Wittenberg, but I wouldn’t stop there. 

I would come up on to 1863 and watch a vacillating president by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come to the conclusion he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, but I wouldn’t stop there. 

I would even come up to the early 30s and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation and come with an eloquent cry that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, and I wouldn’t stop there. 

Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty and say, ‘If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy.'” 

So first of all, this is completely stunning and so deeply true for how I feel as a Jew. You think things are hard for the Jewish people right now? Pick one better era in Jewish history where you wanna live. I guarantee you you’re wrong. I find this to be an extraordinary vision that helps people to get out of the nonsensical nostalgia that we somehow have for previous eras when things weren’t so hard, and to shift to a posture of gratitude to be alive at this particular era in our history. 

Daily, I wake up and think two things: “Oh my God, the world is falling apart,” and, “Oh my God, how grateful I am to be living at this moment of Jewish history as a Jew,” where the, the problems that the Jewish people have today would have been the fantasy of our ancestors. 

You know, this is like a famous line, “Wake up your ancestors and say, ‘You wouldn’t believe what’s gonna happen in the elections in Israel.'” And they’d be like, “There’s an Israel?” Right? That is already an important step. I think it is an important mindset shift to think about how an orientation towards social change should actually look. What happens when I take a kind of posture of fundamental gratitude towards the position you live in history as an anchor for thinking about how you’re supposed to fix it? 

He goes on and says, “That’s a strange statement to make because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land, confusion all around. It’s a strange statement, but I know somehow that only when it is dark can you see the stars, and I see God working in this period of the 20th century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding.” 

And he says, and then skip a paragraph, “Another reason I’m happy to live in this period is we have been forced to a point where we’re going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple through history, but demands didn’t force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. 

Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace, but now no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and non-violence in this world. It’s non-violence or non-existence.” 

We have no choice but now, forced to the brink. I feel we are forced to the brink in Israel. In some ways, it feels like we’re forced in the brink now to choose. Is it going to be non-violence, or is it gonna be non-existence? Are we going to choose a society in which we want to live, or are we gonna continue to choose the very societies that tear us apart? 

But the crux of King’s argument is not merely that description, but it is actually much more theological, and I’m gonna cite his use of a text which is really not a Jewish text. 

In fact, it is a text that had quite a bit of history in the history of anti-Semitism, although King does not use it for that purpose. It’s his reading of the parable of the Good Samaritan, one of the essential teachings about kindness in the church. And I give King immense credit that he de-Judaizes the story. That’s not the point of the story. The parable of the Good Samaritan, where a man has fallen down by the road, and two people come by, right? The priest goes by, and the Levite goes by, and neither of them stops to help the man, but a Good Samaritan comes by and helps him. And in a lot of Christian history, this was treated as Jews are bad; non-Jews, AKA Samaritans, are good. 

And King is like, “That’s not the point of the story.” If you look at the bottom of page nine, I wanna read a piece from King. 

He says, “Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.” In today’s scribe, a man came to Jesus and had a debate with him. And look down on the next paragraph. 

“Jesus immediately pulled the question from midair and placed it on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho, and he talked about a certain man who fell among thieves. You remember that a Levite and a priest passed by on the other side. They didn’t stop to help him. And finally, a man of another race came by. He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy. But he got down with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need. Jesus ended up saying, “This was the good man. This was the great man.” He has the capacity to project the ‘I’ into the ‘thou,’” quoting Martin Buber, “and to be concerned about his brother.

Now you know, we use our imagination a great deal to try to determine why the priest and the Levite didn’t stop. At times we say they were busy going to a church meeting, an ecclesiastical gathering, and they had to get on down to Jerusalem so they wouldn’t be late for their meeting. At other times we would speculate that there was a religious law that “One who was engaged in religious ceremonials was not to touch a human body twenty-four hours before the ceremony.” And every now and then we begin to wonder whether maybe they were not going down to Jerusalem — or down to Jericho, rather to organize a “Jericho Road Improvement Association.” That’s a possibility. Maybe they felt that it was better to deal with the problem from the causal root, rather than to get bogged down with an individual effect.

But I’m going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It’s possible that those men were afraid. You see, the Jericho road is a dangerous road. I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road, I said to my wife, “I can see why Jesus used this as the setting for his parable.” It’s a winding, meandering road. It’s really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about 1200 miles—or rather 1200 feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho, fifteen or twenty minutes later, you’re about 2200 feet below sea level. That’s a dangerous road. In the days of Jesus it came to be known as the “Bloody Pass.” 

And you know, it’s possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it’s possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. 

And so the first question that the priest asked—the first question that the Levite asked was, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”

The biggest obstacle to a culture of kindness in society is fear. This has come  over, over and again in this weekend, talking about the fear that Israelis have, that building a totally different approach to the Palestinians will be a ruse. All they mean is to deceive us into the possibility of being killed again and again. So much fear characterizes the American political discourse that it generates a hostility towards the other as opposed to an inclination towards kindness. 

Fear so dominates our political discourse that we feel, as I alluded to, that trying to be the side that prioritized kindness as a political value is absolute foolishness. And merely reversing the question, if I decide to participate in doing something fundamentally different, what will happen to me? By reversing it and saying, “If I don’t stop to do something different, what will happen to others?” changes the entire burden of responsibility for what is supposed to happen in this process. 

At the end of King’s speech, when he finally says at the end, “I’m not gonna get to the Promised Land. I won’t be with you in the Promised Land,” he actually reminds me of the rabbis. Because if you feel you are on the precipice of getting to the Promised Land, you don’t have time for kindness. 

You feel it is your job to bring about redemption and let whatever happens along the way to those along the way happen. You prioritize the holiness and justice of your mission. One of the most dangerous features of kind of the political messianism that has gripped Israel, and in some ways grips both the far left and the far right in this country, we can make such dramatic change, doesn’t matter to us who has to die along the way to get there. 

But it is only once you start recognizing that over time you are just taking one step after another in a wilderness that you start to recognize, as the rabbis did in elevating loving kindness as a principle, that we must make this the core feature of a society that will be stable enough to ensure that we can survive over a long period of time. 

And the last piece I wanna share with you is an essay I can’t stop quoting from Jill Lepore on the last page that’s here. Lepore, a professor at Harvard and a writer in The New Yorker In 2020, Lepore wrote this essay called “The Last Time Democracy Almost Died.” And it’s very consistent in Jill Lepore’s approach is like, take something you’re struggling with in the present, find analogous moment in history. 

Jonathan Sarna at Brandeis does this too with a line, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Find an moment in previous history and figure out what might we have learned from that moment to figure out what is supposed to happen differently today. 

And Lepore’s core argument, which we’ll read in a moment, her core argument is that the reason that we have managed in previous eras of history to not kill each other in phases of declining democracy is because of the courage of simple people to step up and build the fiber of a strong society. 

She writes, “In 1937, The New Republic arguing that, quote, ‘At no time since the rise of political democracy have its tenants been so seriously challenged as they are today.'” I love reading that over and over ’cause I feel like I read that this morning, right? 

“The New Republic ran a series on the future of democracy. The editors asked each writer, ‘Do you think that political democracy is now on the wane?’ The series lead contributor, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, took issue with the question as philosophers thankfully do. I call this question meteorological. It’s like asking, ‘Do you think it’s gonna rain today? Had I better take my umbrella?’ 

The trouble, Croce explained, is that political problems are not external forces beyond our control. They’re forces within our control. We need solely to make up our own minds and to act. Don’t ask whether you need an umbrella. Go outside and stop the rain. 

Here are some of the people who went out and stopped the rain in the 1930s: school teachers, city councilors, librarians, poets, union organizers, artists, precinct workers, soldiers, civil rights activists, and investigative reporters. They knew what they were prepared to defend, and they defended it, even though they also knew that they risked attack from both the left and the right.” 

The way she describes what school teachers and librarians and city councilors did is they started staging debates. The whole point was not winning on the issue by insisting on the hegemony of one particular viewpoint of the other. It was starting to humanize that the differences that we had between us, the things that were terrifying each other, were actually things we could talk about. The crux of a democracy is not that we ultimately agree. The crux of a democracy is that we can actually fight with civility, that I can fight you until the ballot box, and then I decide not to kill you. 

You do that, your democracy is working, great. In other words, it embeds an orientation towards responsibility to the other as a political act. It’s not just about the gemilut hasadim of charity and helping the other. It is taking the mindset of gemilut hasadim into how we practice the business of democracy. 

And all of these people decided to step up and do something. Fear is the obstacle to kindness in our society, and moral courage is not gonna be by responding to hate and hostility with more hate and hostility. Hate and hostility cannot be the antidote to each other. Moral courage in this moment is the choosing of a radical alternative, not simply by saying it, but by stepping into the world and doing it. 

And listen, I don’t know whether a commitment to kindness, to decency can actually repair our world. I don’t know whether it is powerful enough to counteract the hostility that so characterizes our political culture. I don’t know whether decency, loving kindness with teeth. I don’t know whether decency can fix these challenges, but it feels to me like a decent place to start. Thank you very much.