how can we not be angry?

I was an angry teenager. I shaved off all my hair, wore thick eye-liner and big boots and started smoking clove cigarettes. I was the epitome of the angry, privileged youth—angry at my parents (whose rules, I can see now, kept me out of a lot of trouble); self-righteous but without a cause; flailing out, as if by hurting the people around me, it would somehow help me to better define myself.

As I got older, even towards the end of high school, the anger faded, cooled. I stopped blaming everyone around me for the things I wanted but could not have. And that calm lasted for years, carrying me through most of college, and then depositing me directly on the doorstep of Judaism.

Judaism is not always a calm faith—it is a human faith, a faith with a sense of humor as well as a temper. It is a faith that demands action, rather than simple acquiescence. And my relationship with Judaism has progressed much like my relationships with other humans: first, it began with flirtation, a sudden fluttering of the stomach, an inability to stop thinking of the other. Then, the voracious devouring of facts, learning a lifetime, a thousand stories behind scars and moles and the way they eat their hummus, as fast as possible, laying down the language in which to speak to one another.

Third came the star-gazing period, a time of long, philosophical conversations, poetic exchanges of deep, meaningful letters and mix tapes.

That is, perhaps, where my relationship with Judaism stands today.

Next, I imagine, will come the part where the flaws, the cracks in character, seem to threaten the structure of the whole relationship. And then, the realization of the other as a complete being, weaknesses and strengths both vital to the whole, without whom existence is unimaginable.

Now, though, in this star-gazing period of long, philosophical conversations, I have spent endless hours poring over a collection of essays by Dr Abraham Heschel. Dr Heschel escaped from Warsaw to New York mere months before the German invasion. He dedicated the entirety of his life in the US to expanding Jewish though, especially with regards to ethics and civil rights. He was an active participant in the anti-war movement of the sixties as well as the civil rights movement. The collection, which I bought on a whim, is titled ‘Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity,’ which comes from a telegram Dr Heschel sent to President Kennedy in 1963:

Demand of religious leaders personal involvement [with civil rights issues]. We forfeit the right to worship God as long as we continue to humiliate negroes…Ask of religious leaders to call for national repentance and personal sacrifice…I propose that you, Mr. President, declare a state of moral emergency…The hour calls for high moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.

Although he does not use the phrase as often as one might expect, what Dr Heschel was talking about was tikkun olam. Tikkun olam is a phrase that means ‘repairing the world.’ Tikkun olam is manifested in the mitzvot, or religious duties, of Judaism, These include not only following halachic law, but also performing ethical mitzvot, efforts geared towards creating a moral and religious world. To paraphrase a modern Jewish writer: What good is your personal revelation if it does not help the most retched of our society? “The urgent issue,” Heschel wrote, “is not personal salvation but the prevention of mankind’s surrender to the demonic.”

I had heard the phrases ‘mitzvot’ and ‘tikkun olam’ before reading Dr Heschel’s essays, but I don’t think I had understood them. The world I see around me, the world in which I participate daily, is one riddled with selfishness.  We (and I do mean we, myself included) are obsessed with ourselves, blithely turning our eyes in the face of immense suffering. The world measures success in material goods, in physical beauty and in power or triumph over others. Reading Dr Heschel’s essays, I felt as though I had been standing, for all of my life, on the top of a pyramid, without even knowing what it was below me. And what was below me was the suffering and mistreatment of others; I was standing on the suffering of others. Seeing this, how could I not be angry?

Judaism will not accept this. Tikkun olam demands action. Judaism will not allow me to sit calmly; Judaism will not allow me to surrender my anger.

I am not speaking of the undirected anger of my younger years, of the hot, untempered violence of angst. Instead, I am talking about the focused anger, the tempered anger of Judaism. It is an anger that sees wrongs and will not suffer them. It is an anger tempered by compassion, by love, by service.

I was attracted to Judaism at first by its love songs, by its smile, so to speak. But beneath that smile is a passion, is a will, a drive, and I want to be a part of that too. Choosing Judaism is choosing service, choosing participation and duty. It means joining a movement, a community dedicated to the remedying of the world. And it means leaving behind the comfortable, blind world in which I was raised. A friend of mine, a Christian, referenced the idea that “one of the greatest tricks in the devil’s arsenal is to make us concerned, but not moved.” His devil references may not be my favorite thing in the world, but the underlying message of his statement cannot be ignored.  The mitzvot of Judaism do not just apply to moments of ritual significance, they apply to all that we do. They demand us to go out and live an ethical life.

Reading: Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays by Abraham Joshua Heschel

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