To Whom Am I Responsible?

“I’ve been sober for seven years, Jimmy McDonald exclaimed, and I get saved by a tiki bar.” That’s actually the end of the story. It’s the sermon starter I’ve waited for my entire career. The story is... a few weeks ago Jimmy McDonald was kayaking in upstate NY, and capsized. He said, reflecting back on the moment, that his ego told him--he had it under control; but moments later, he realized his life-jacket had loosened and Jimmy began to panic underneath it. His thoughts went dark, very dark.. If he were Jewish, that may have been his “Shema” moment, which I’m sure many of us have experienced in Jumbo Jets during even the lightest of turbulence.

But moments later, his salvation, as he would call it, arrived. A floating tiki bar to the rescue, piloted by seminarians from Saint Joseph’s, our neighbors in NE D.C., on a religious retreat--because what religious retreat for future clergy doesn’t include a floating Tiki Bar? Very, very, holy. The seminarians, aware that a man had drowned just a week earlier in those same waters--quickly coordinated the effort to bring him to safety, together. Therefore, McDonald, now very much sober and currently a substance abuse counselor, reflects: “I’ve been sober for seven years, and I get saved by a tiki bar.”

Abrupt transition now. September 11, 2001. As the scope and scale of the calamity unfolding at the World Trade Center escalated, city and state police collaborated with municipal agencies to put Manhattan on lockdown, halting buses, subways, and commuter rails, as well as closing roadways, bridges, and tunnels to prevent further attack. But sealing off the city also prevented people from leaving. All the while, conditions grew worse.

"I just turned my boat around," said New York Waterway ferry captain Rick Thornton, recalling the seconds after a fireball exploded from the side of the South Tower. Instead of making his scheduled run, he steered the ferry south. "I didn't call anybody on the radio, I didn't check in with anyone on board to say, 'I'm going offline.' ... My pure instinct was just to head downtown."

It’s a story that continues to go largely unrecognized, the spontaneous boatlift that came to the rescue when terrorists struck the US on September 11, 2001. Jessica Dulong, author of Dust to Deliverance recounts that crews aboard ferries, fishing boats, and tour boats, joined mariners of all kinds to launch an unplanned maritime evacuation in New York Harbor that delivered nearly 500,000 stranded civilians off Manhattan Island in less than nine hours.

What had begun as a sort of expanded ferry service had transformed into a full-blown rescue. By nightfall, approximately 150 different vessels, crewed by an estimated 800-plus mariners had executed a successful boatlift, again, delivering nearly 500,00, with surprisingly few incidents or

serious injuries. (Quoted from "The 9/11 rescue that we need to hear more about")

These two stories caught my attention for a number of reasons, including the obvious heroism that inspires me to be better. But my primary takeaway, in this historical moment--the exponential & potential power, of a collective: A group of people, either loosely defined by their shared love of boats, or fellow travelers, journeying side-by-side to a common life of service--all realizing, that as individuals, their respective missions will likely falter, but together, with shared purpose--lives can be saved. One, or many thousands.

And I also couldn’t help but wonder, again, especially now, in this historical moment: do we see ourselves, as Jews, as Americans, as Humans, as friends, as strangers, or even foes--potentially interconnected & interwoven with this degree of purpose & responsibility for the others among us? Do we hold ourselves accountable for the ways in which our individual & collective actions, or inactions, might impact others? Are your mistakes, my mistakes? Your sins, my sins? Your successes, my successes? Your wins, my wins?

An often cited rabbinic text seems to unambiguously answer many of these questions. It appears in the Talmud, Tractate Shabbat, 54b:

It’s vast, almost magical, this intricate web that tightly threads us together. We are responsible, accountable, obligated, to not only each known & intimate other, but all others.

It’s also--if we read this text literally--near impossible. To live with this kind of all-encompassing burden--it feels like too much. I can barely convince one of my kids to put his dirty plate within 10 feet of the sink--how can I be responsible for the action, or inaction, of a complete stranger? I like aspirational texts, motivational messages, as much as anyone, but this one feels fully in heaven.

Yet impossible or not, this talmudic passage anticipates a serious, maximalist approach within the modern philosophical study of moral responsibility, both individually and collectively. This maximalist approach, that we are all accountably interconnected, is articulated by the great political philosopher Hannah Arendt. She writes in 1968:

Each act, individually performed, collectively consequential.

We are a human collective, therefore, materially connected--hard as it may

seem to fathom, let alone internalize.

“Nobody's free until everybody's free,” Fanni Lou Hamer said. Your captivity is my captivity, my responsibility, as is mine, yours. Not a cliche. It’s reality.

In 1963, Edward Lorenz made a presentation to the New York Academy of Sciences and was literally laughed out of the room. His theory stated that a butterfly could flap its wings and set air molecules – which could then move additional air molecules – & eventually influence weather patterns on the other side of the planet. For years this theory remained an interesting myth. In the mid 1990s, however, the butterfly effect proved to be accurate, viable and worked every time.

Scientifically speaking: "In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state."

Or, in now speak, and actually understandable words: One black man brutally choked to death by police in MInnesota, caught on tape, and weeks later millions and millions of humans around the world exclaiming BLM with heart, body and soul; as we here have done, loudly and proudly. Polls, mere weeks later, showed a significant shift in American consciousness toward race disparity, thank god, almost 80% now see racial discrimination is a “big problem”.

Or one young lawyer--a Justice to be--discriminated against when receiving being appointed to a Law School faculty -- and due to this, history rewritten & legislated with phrases like - wage gap, equal work equal pay.

At the start of the pandemic, there were roughly 40,000 Holocaust Survivors in NYC. That number quickly dropped to 36,000--of which 40% are living in poverty, exacerbated by the limitations of Covid-19. A non-profit, 333charity—setup by 34-year-old Evan Rosenberg last November—has been donating meals to them, serving the vulnerabilities that we as a collective, Jewish or otherwise, have neglected.

Rosenberg learned of how his great aunt, who hailed from Czechoslovakia, repeatedly told her children at Auschwitz that if they were ever separated, as families frequently were, and somehow survived the Holocaust, they should seek out their uncle at 333 7th Avenue in New York City where his office was located. Even as she was being led to the gas chamber by the Nazis, she held up three fingers to instil the message in her children one final time.

"It was a simple but powerful gesture that gave strength and instilled hope," Rosenberg writes on the 333charity website. "Those three fingers served as a reminder to her children, that their salvation would be found at 333 7th Avenue, at my great grandfather's office. After the war had ended and much of my family lost, salvation and a new beginning was indeed found there. When so much had been lost, our family was reunited and born anew."

She flapped her wings, lifted her fingers, and 80 years later thousands of survivors are being cared for by her descendants.

Other rabbinic sources also communicate this idea, this reverberative notion of our collective accountability and responsibility. In Shavuot 39a:

In other words, each sin, individually transgressed, latches onto a neighbor, then another, keeps unfolding, multiplying, and then shared among all of us-from which the Talmud extracts the famous principle:

In many ways, or maybe every way, the Torah itself can also be read as a manual for determining both our collective accountability, and our overlapping obligations. Let’s start at the beginning.

“Ha-shomer achi anokhi? -- Am I my brother’s keeper?” Cain asks God, after killing his brother at the beginning of the Torah. Then we wait, until practically the end of Genesis to fully receive an answer. Judah, a key player in part of the plot to rid the family of his younger brother, Joseph, finally responds to this question when addressing his father Jacob, pleading with him to allow Benjamin to make the trip to Egypt, for necessary provisions--to save his family from famine:

I am Benjamin’s keeper, my brother, and my future depends on his safety.

(First heard a version of this point by Rabbi Sharon Brous several years ago.)

Exodus begins with the same set of critical questions, though more broadly:

Yes. Emphatically, yes. I am your brother’s keeper.

Soon after: Am I my brother’s keeper, the Torah hints, even if I’ve never met him before? Even if my brother isn’t like me? Moses encountered this dilemma the very first time the Torah explicitly mentions him leaving Pharoah’s residence:

Yes, the Torah teaches, yes, I am his keeper, too---Moses quickly intercedes, twice, once for this fellow Israelite being physically degraded by an Egyptian, and immediately thereafter, intervening between two Israelites fighting amongst themselves.

Am I your sister’s keeper? Moses confronts this question as well, just a few verses later:

And then he marries one of them, Tzipporah. Great story.

Collectively--as a nation, Are we your sister’s keeper? Yes, the Torah repeats over and over again:

Am I your mother’s keepers? Your childrens’? Yes. The widow and orphan are emphatically communal responsibilities.

There's a subsection of Modern Moral Philosophy called Forward-Thinking Collective Responsibility. As opposed to its backward looking counterpart, in which we are generally assigning blame on a collective for what has already happened, a forward-thinking collective responsibility obligates a collective to both: remedy a current harm, as well as prevent others from happening in the future. Forward-thinking collective responsibility is a matter of being morally charged with—responsible for—bringing about a state of affairs which we as a community consider to be better.

(See Forward-Looking Collective Responsibility -- by Peter A. French (Editor), Howard K. Wettstein (Editor) -- in particular the chapter by Dr. Tracy Isaacs, “Collective Responsibility and Collective Obligation.)

The Torah, I want to suggest, in attempting to construct a non-Egypt, is the paradigmatic guide for Forward-thinking collective obligations. It includes small collectives, like siblings & families, nuclear and extended--It includes larger collectives, like fellow citizens; an entire people--the Israelites; even a human collective, as the 7 Noahide laws demand--and then the Torah assigns a set of outward-facing obligations for which everyone is to be held responsible, and then accountable - to each other and to God.

So this is probably a good time to pause, and ask, again: Despite the extensive sources, can I truly be held responsible for a life, or a death, on the other side of the city, let alone the other side of the world? Once again, I have a hard enough time remembering that what I eat from the fridge will no longer be there for the next person who opens the door.

And no matter how difficult, how burdensome, how heavy--the answer has to be, yes, because our collectivity is consistently proven true, scientifically, and our Torah, our enduring blueprint for holiness, demands nothing less.

If we benefit, or suffer, from the same budget, we are a collective, and inextricably obligated one to the other. If we, earthlings, share common resources, which of course we do--We are a meaningful collective. Mariners in wait.

• Whether we vote the same way, blue, red, green(!? - we should talk),

• whether or not we work the same collar color, blue, white, rainbow,

• whether we say black, or all, or blue, before we say “matters”--and

  you know I have strong feelings about this...

• whether or not we believe one another, or believe in one another,

We cannot escape the delicate, ever-potent flap of each other’s wing.

The Hannah Arendt passage I cited above, again, arguing for an invisible and expansive web of accountability, & in large part due to her theory on post-Holocaust, ordinary German-citizen culpability, continues like this:

These past 6 months have generally proven both our collective capacity, & inability, to recognize this deeply sown interconnectedness--and it has saved, and cost, so many thousands of lives. If there was ever living proof for the ways in which our small acts have residual consequences that extend far past the two of us-- exponentially causing either care or harm, like the simple act of wearing a mask when in close proximity to others--this pandemic is the proof.

But this power works both ways. Be it a small indoor gathering of friends, or a large, maniacal motorcycle meet up, or, still, somehow, indoor, maskless, crowded with no distancing political rallies--time and time again, a butterfly effect with no appreciation for collective responsibility, produces immeasurable loss. James Baldwin, just 11 months before his death said this to the National Press Club:

The language, today, that needs liberation? We are on our own. Our actions die with us.

The reality we must live up to--our only future? Aravim zeh ba-zeh, all of us--interconnected. Each individual, part of THE collective--exponentially.

Without the awareness of this truth--we Jews with different worldviews, we Americans who see, well, who experience, two different countries, we humans who’ve never met, and won’t ever meet--without the awareness of this truth--the obligations we do share one-to-the-other become too murky, too easy to deflect, and too quick to ignore with misguided fantasy.

On December 6, 1987, I made my first trip to Washington, D.C. I was very young years old. I have, I think, three vivid memories of the trip. I remember that I thought the plane was going to crash--won’t ever forget that feeling. I remember that my then best friend’s dad, now my dad, got lost. At least, lost from us. Won’t ever forget that feeling.

And I remember, like it was yesterday, the energy of over 250,000 Jews who traveled from around the world to yell and scream about the plight of our sisters & brothers a million miles away, none of them known to me by name. I can still, to this day, conjure up the palpable energy, the effervescent excitement, of the collective and its shared purpose on behalf of life, of a lasting freedom. Won’t ever forget that feeling.

It’s the opposite of an unintentional and elusive herd immunity, or herd mentality, this purposeful collective responsibility. Intention matters, awareness gathers.

This is why we are here, now, embedded in these days of awe. To assess the posture of the individuals, you and me--in front of a sacred mirror reflecting back our full, magnificent and flawed selves. You and me, together, who make up the holy collectives that we are called lift up.

I wish I could tell you there’s an out clause, that somehow we can find the vacuum to hide in, an escape hatch, a bunker. I wish I could tell myself that so much of the time. That where we buy our homes, or how we pod up our kids, or from where we purchase our goods, or how we invest, or to whom we respond when called upon, or whether or not we show us as an extra body, a number in the crowd--I wish I could us each action or inaction stands on its own.

But it’s not possible, because it isn’t reality. And the thing is, we all know it. Intuitively. And so we cope with the weight of it, all of us, by pretending when we can that it’s not true, locking it away...because, life is hard, as it is. So this isn’t about collective guilt, lord knows we have enough. I guess what I’m asking is that we stay as awake as we can to what’s always just ahead of us.

A reality in which each of us is, in any moment, figuring out how to get everyone off the island, to safety. Together.

Strangers keeping Strangers. Strangers keeping Sisters. Sisters keeping Brothers. Brothers keeping Foes. You keeping me and me keeping you.

Ken Yehi Ratzon--Soon, please.

Shana Tova.