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Fighting society’s disintegration is a group effort. Just ask Moses.
This story was originally published on My Jewish Learning.
(JTA) — This summer, in the middle of a 15-hour drive from Michigan to New Jersey, I stopped to buy two old wooden doors from a salvage shop in Cleveland. I found the seller, a kind, middle-aged dad whom I’ll call Jim, on Facebook. Jim renovates properties and has amassed a collection of old doors rescued from various job sites. His “shop” was a covered section of his suburban yard.
Jim had exactly what I was looking for: two matching solid-wood five panels, unpainted, 24 inches wide. When we pulled them out into the sunlight to look them over, Jim struck up a conversation.
“So, what do you guys do?”
“My wife and I are clergy,” I told him. “She works at a congregation and I work in education.”
“Oh nice,” Jim said. “What kind of congregation?”
“Well, a synagogue. We’re both rabbis.”
I shot my kids a look to see if they were monitoring the conversation.
“Oh, you’re Jewish. My favorite person is Jewish!”
“Really?” I said, with false curiosity and a hunch about what was coming next.
“Yeah, Jesus Christ! You know, there’s a Jewish cemetery across the way from our house. Sometimes I do some tree work over there. I tell my friends that Jewish cemetery is proof the Bible is true.”
He paused for a second to make sure I was listening. I nodded for him to continue.
“You see, the Bible says that if God’s chosen people don’t follow God’s ways, they would be kicked out of their land and scattered all over the earth,” Jim said. “The fact that there are Jews buried in a cemetery in Cleveland, so far away from their homeland, means that the Jews weren’t following God’s ways.”
At this point, I was strapping the doors to the rack on my car and all I could manage in response was, “That’s one way to look at it.”
The theology Jim espoused isn’t only, or even primarily, a Christian belief. Jews throughout history have believed that being scattered around the world was punishment from God for not following in God’s ways. We say it in the liturgy, and it appears in this week’s Torah portion, Ki Tavo: “If you fail to observe faithfully all the terms of this teaching in this book … the Lord will scatter you among all the peoples from one end of the earth to the other.”
When I was a young rabbi, I completely dismissed the idea that Jews would be punished because of our lackluster compliance with Jewish tradition. But the more I thought about this idea — or more accurately, this threat — that bad things will happen if we don’t behave properly, the more empathy I felt for what Moses and God were trying to teach. Moses and God were concerned about what would happen to the Israelites if they behaved poorly as a collective. If enough people engage in selfish behavior, society will disintegrate. To avoid this, Moses and God browbeat the people with two long lists: threats if they don’t behave, and blessings if they do.
Today, we face the same problem Moses faced — how to shape the collective behavior of a society — only the stakes are much higher. Put simply, there are many more humans using many more technologies that have much greater impact. Our collective behavior is having enormous consequences for the planet, leading geologists to label our era the anthropocene, the human epoch.
And yet, despite the incredible human accomplishments over the last two millennia, we don’t have many more tools than Moses had to shape collective behavior. We have democratic governance, but the track record of democracies is lackluster in this regard, with some so-called eco-authoritarians now arguing that democracy ought to be set aside to address climate change. We have mass social movements, but anyone who has spent time working within them (I count myself in this category) knows how difficult it is to actually galvanize a collective movement that shapes behavior at the societal level.
My father used to say, “People will never change their behavior unless they are forced to.” By people, he meant society. And by forced to, he meant that the negative consequences are so drastic there is no choice but to change. Was he right? Is humanity incapable of anticipating a societal-level threat and changing our behavior to avoid the abyss?
This is a great spiritual challenge of our generation. We live in an era in which we are likely, just by going about our lives, to cause planetary damage. Will we develop new ways to shape collective behavior for the better before it is too late?
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The post Fighting society’s disintegration is a group effort. Just ask Moses. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Iran Says Eight Arrested for Suspected Links to Israel’s Mossad Spy Agency
The Mossad recruitment ad. Photo: Screenshot.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on Saturday they had arrested eight people suspected of trying to transmit the coordinates of sensitive sites and details about senior military figures to Israel’s Mossad, Iranian state media reported.
They are accused of having provided the information to the Mossad spy agency during Israel’s air war on Iran in June, when it attacked Iranian nuclear facilities and killed top military commanders as well as civilians in the worst blow to the Islamic Republic since the 1980s war with Iraq.
Iran retaliated with barrages of missiles on Israeli military sites, infrastructure and cities. The United States entered the war on June 22 with strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
A Guards statement alleged that the suspects had received specialized training from Mossad via online platforms. It said they were apprehended in northeastern Iran before carrying out their plans, and that materials for making launchers, bombs, explosives and booby traps had been seized.
State media reported earlier this month that Iranian police had arrested as many as 21,000 “suspects” during the 12-day war with Israel, though they did not say what these people had been suspected of doing.
Security forces conducted a campaign of widespread arrests and also stepped up their street presence during the brief war that ended in a US-brokered ceasefire.
Iran has executed at least eight people in recent months, including nuclear scientist Rouzbeh Vadi, hanged on August 9 for passing information to Israel about another scientist killed in Israeli airstrikes.
Human rights groups say Iran uses espionage charges and fast-tracked executions as tools for broader political repression.
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Body of Idan Shtivi, Murdered on Oct. 7, Retrieved from Gaza in Special IDF Operation
Idan Shtivi. Photo: Courtesy of the family
i24 News – The body of Idan Shtivi, a 28-year-old murdered by Palestinian jihadists at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, was recovered in a joint operation by the IDF and Shin Bet in central Gaza, it was cleared for publication on Saturday.
Shtivi’s remains were returned to Israel alongside the body of Ilan Weiss, another hostage killed during the October 7 massacre.
“Idan Shtivi was abducted from the Tel Gama area and brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists after acting to rescue and evacuate others from the Nova music festival on October 7th, 2023. He was 28 years old at the time of his death,” read an IDF press release.
“Following an identification process conducted at the National Center for Forensic Medicine, along with the Israel Police and the Military Rabbinate, the Hostages and Missing Persons Headquarters notified his family.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Shviti “was a gifted student of sustainability and governance, and a courageous individual” who acted heroically on October 7, helping others flee.
“He was killed in the process and his body was abducted to Gaza by Hamas. My wife and I send our heartfelt condolences to the Shtivi family. So far, 207 hostages have been returned, 148 of them alive. We will continue to act tirelessly and decisively to bring back all our hostages—living and deceased.”
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Woman Stabbed at Ottawa Grocery Store in Latest Antisemitic Attack
A social media post by the alleged attacker, Joseph Rooke of Cornwall, Ontario. Photo: Screenshot via i24
i24 News – The stabbing of a Jewish woman at an Ottawa grocery by a man with a long history of antisemitic posts on social media, the latest antisemitic hate crime in Canada, sparked outrage and prompted condemnation from officials including the prime minister.
Both the victim and the attacker are in their 70s. The woman is reportedly in serious condition.
The suspect was identified as Joseph Rooke, who has authored a series of lengthy rambling screeds on social media, ranting against Israel and Jews.
“Judaism is the world’s oldest cult,” he writes in one post, going on to say “over time jews have become insidious in governments, businesses, media conglomerates, and educational institutions in order to do what they do better than anyone else. Jews are the world’s masters of propaganda, gaslighting, demonization, demagoguery, and outright lying. Using their collective wealth they have become masters of reprisal.”
“I am under no obligation whatsoever, legal, moral, or otherwise, to like jews and I do not. If that means I meet the jewish definition of an anti-semite, so be it.”
Canada has seen a steep spike in antisemitic attacks over the past two years, including a recent incident in Montreal where a Hasidic Jew was beaten in front on his children.
After Prime Minister Mark Carney condemned the incident, many, including former Israel’s ambassador the US Michael Oren, pointed out that Carney’s rhetoric and policies contribute to the increasing insecurity of Canada’s Jewish community through uncritical embrace of outrageous and easily disprovable allegations that Israel and its supporters were guilty of the worst crimes against humanity.