On Rosh Hashanah, I tried to share words that bring you comfort. Tonight, I attend to the other part of a rabbi’s work: To share words that make you properly uncomfortable. To make you think. And rethink. And maybe even to change.
I had a very vivid dream a few weeks ago. I usually don't remember my dreams with such clarity, but this one pierced my consciousness, and stayed with me long after I woke. I’m going to share this dream with you with some discomfort, but in good faith, as I understand that it may be a bit disturbing.
In my dream, I was in my own home when I found myself walking past a mirror. When I looked into it, I saw myself—and I was Black. I saw myself as a Black man. I sort of looked like myself, but I was undeniably Black. My reaction was immediate and instinctive: I was afraid. It was the kind of fear that comes when you realize, instantly, you are less safe than you once were. I stared at myself with an unsettling, ambiguous fear of my own existence.
When I woke up, the following thought raced through my mind: I need to know more. This dream was my mind telling me that whatever I know, or think I know, about what it means to be Black in America, it’s not enough. My dream was my unconscious soaking in the question of how different my life would be had I been born Black. And this is my confession: I have not thought enough, while awake, of that very question.
Earlier this year, similar thoughts raced through my mind as I visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the newest, and thus most overdue, member of the Smithsonian Institute. I began on the first floor, as most visitors do, and nearly three hours into the visit I was still on the first floor. Of seven. I was still in the exhibit of pre-slavery and slavery, and couldn’t quite escape it, which now seems even more apt.
I was devastated by what I saw, read, learned for the first time. I was shattered by the content in front of me: the imagery, the full horror of the centuries of this American scourge, a terrible blight upon the foundations of this nation, one that has conceptual descendants that still ruinously infect America.
I was overcome by the vicious injustices on display in front of me, but I was also distraught to realize just how much I hadn’t known. I, a rather well-educated, well-read American citizen, who studied history in college, who denounces slavery and celebrates liberation as part of a national holiday every year … I thought I knew more. Knew enough. About the Black experience in our country. But there was so much that was out of my sight line—living large, but in my blind spots.
I thought I knew what I needed to know, which left me at an intellectual and emotional plateau. With no fire burning within me to know more. That’s the thing about plateaus: they are safe, and calm. And there is little chance of a spark catching fire.
Igniting that fire is, of course, the purpose of the museum. We intuit that, in the reverse, when people visit “our” museum, a few blocks away. We might walk by people outside the Holocaust Museum, people who look like folks who are delving into the reprehensible details and enormity of the Shoah for the first time, and hear the voices in our minds, gently taunting them:
“You thought you knew the Jewish story, and how evil the Nazis were. But you don't know how cold it was in the forests. You didn’t know the fear in the eyes of the Jew about to be shot into a ravine. You didn’t know about the children separated from their parents, never to see them again. You didn’t know because you weren’t interested enough to look closely at it and learn the full breadth of what is true. You thought you knew, so you weren’t curious to know more.”
Curiosity. Or, rather, incuriosity. That is what this sermon is about, far more than issues of race or oppression in our society.
I use my dream, an event of my subconscious pushing me to see myself in the skin of a Black man, and my experience in the museum, awakening me to my own distancing from knowledge, as examples of the ways in which incuriosity can infect an otherwise healthy mind. Incuriosity leaves us blissfully, but also deviously, ignorant. We can be so darn comfortable in that ignorance.
There are many, compelling reasons to resist curiosity. Sometimes, it is a defense mechanism, sparing us from the pain of knowing something too painful, too raw or tender, to contemplate. Like choosing not to know whether some difficult physical symptoms you’re experiencing add up to a degenerative, incurable disease—if you can’t do anything about it, why engage with it? Maybe some extended temporary incuriosity, in a case like that, can be a blessing.
But most incuriosities are more denial than defense. We don't really want to know, fully, how the sausage is made. How the country was made. How our wealth is made and maintained. If we knew, what would we be expected to give up? What responsibility would we be burdened with to fix it? This brand of incuriosity breeds an aristocratic ennui. It can be maintained for years, decades, a lifetime. Once it infects the spirit, it becomes its own ethic, and then justifies all that is done to perpetuate it. And then, tragically, it can infect a civilization.
We can walk through our days, our lives, knowing what we already know and looking for more confirmation of that very knowledge. We may not be aware of it, but we are reticent, terrified even, to know that which will force us to change our minds. Yes, about race and power and privilege. But also about a warming planet. About the levers of an economy. About the status of justice in our courts, and on our streets. About how much those chains and those whips really hurt. And so we remain selectively incurious.
Judaism rejects incuriosity outright. By elevating the yearning to know more to a religious value, our tradition urges us to inquire about everything. The Nobel-winning physicist Isador Rabi credits this Jewish ethos with spurring him to a life of science. When he was young and returned home from school one day, his mother, a Jew who was born and raised in the old country, would not ask him “Did you learn anything today?” Rather, she asked him, “Izzy...did you ask a good question today?”
What a profound question to pose to children, to embed curiosity in their mind, to inculcate in them a thirst to know more, to staunch incuriosity at the root.
We’ve all read Curious George. We all need to be Curious Jew.
When I was a rabbinical student at JTS, the chancellor was Rabbi Dr. Ismar Schorsch. A stellar scholar of German Jewish history. He was anything but a mystic. His academic acumen would suggest a defiance of, say, a Hasidic or kabbalistic understanding of Judaism. Therefore it was a surprise, and thrill, when Dr. Schorsch taught a wonderful seminar at the first rabbinic conference I attended after ordination. I saw his name on the list of presenting scholars, and figured I could predict the basic topic of his class: something having to do with Wissenschaft des Judentums, that wonderful original German phrase that describes the modern/academic approach to studying Judaism and traditional texts.
I was wrong. He was teaching four classes on a book called the שני לוחות הברית, “the two tablets of the covenant,” written by Rabbi Isaiah Horowtiz, a 16th and 17th C. mystic, who lived well before Wissenschaft des Judentums was conceived of and developed and would have likely considered it heresy. But Schorsch, apparently, did not consider Horowitz’s writings to be heretical. Far from it.
He delighted in exploring the mystical theologies and religious mores in this work. He opened up that tome to us as a treasure, both venerating Horowitz by teaching it so lovingly, and defying the very sort of closed thinking, and calculated or dogmatic incuriosity, that Horowitz almost certainly would have evinced had he been exposed, anachronistically, to what Schorsch taught and believed. According to Schorsch, a Jew is forbidden to be incurious. About parts of the inherited tradition. About anything, for that matter.
He said as much when explaining why, for him, Orthodoxy had its beauties but could never be a spiritual home. He wrote, “What Conservative Judaism brings to this ancient and unfinished dialectic are the tools and perspectives of modern scholarship blended with traditional learning and empathy. The full meaning of sacred texts will always elude those who restrict the range of acceptable questions, fear to read contextually, and who engage in willful ignorance.”
“Willful ignorance.” A phrase yet more damning than incuriosity. And Schorsch had no problem accusing parts of the Orthodox world, themselves inheritors of an endlessly curious rabbinic tradition, with taking a willfully ignorant stance about some parts of Jewish tradition that might shatter some faith foundations, and which could asunder the power dynamic that keeps men in charge of discerning God’s word. Schorsch taught that our faith commands that we not descend to incuriosity. Schorsch was scolding us: Don’t you dare be too comfortable in what you already know. Instead, he urged us: be Curious Jews.
I learned that lesson in a profound way during one of the most excruciating and also exquisite role-play exercises I ever participated in. This was a college, in the early ‘90s. And let’s just say that a generation ago our society was in a very different place regarding LGBTQ issues. And the Jewish community, even more so. And the observant Jewish community, much more so.
On a Shabbat afternoon, the Jewish community met for an extended seminar, aimed at sensitizing the Jewish students to the plight of their gay and lesbian peers. Straight students were asked to do the following role-play: come out, as a gay person, to your parents. This is the dramatic version of dreaming you are Black. It was a profound thing to do, and to observe others do. Watching frum Jews, who had been taught, religiously and communally, to be willfully ignorant of the reality of gay Jews in their midst, say these words: “Mom. Dad. I have something important to tell you. And I hope you will love me just as much after I tell it to you…”
Well, it was watching a heart open. It was observing piercing knowledge, both eminently accessible and yet, for this group, so new...pry open the doors of one’s mind, allowing curiosity to replace incuriosity. There is no claiming you don’t know after you have tried to tell your orthodox parents you are gay.
Jewish values say that there are things you simply must know, or at least try to know, even though you’d rather not.
That brings me to Palestine. A place that does not, politically, exist. At least not yet. But a place that, on a conceptual, cultural, and human-interest level, very much exists. As many of you know, I spent four days on a trip called Encounter, designed to expose American and Israeli Jewish leaders to Palestinian life, narrative and experiences. This trip was a painful experience of challenging my own incuriosity.
There are certain things about being a Palestinian Arab, going through checkpoints, suffering indignities that are not justified by any political or religious argument, observing rank inequality doled out to one’s own community and self compared to one’s Jewish neighbors...there is some of that I will admit I had, for years, preferred to be willfully ignorant about. So much so that I rejected several invitations before this to participate in Encounter. Because, again, that incuriosity was so darn comfortable.
One is given very clear and important instructions when one participates in Encounter. The most important one may be this: Suppress, at least for four days, your urge/preference not to know. Your instinct to fight back before first truly hearing and considering. Just listen. Patiently.
It is not a willful exercise in self-abnegation to know another’s story, another’s truth, another’s indignity and pain. And, I can testify, they were right—and it was hard. I spent four days trying not to squirm, not react or reject. Squelching the counter-arguments that welled up in my cortex. But I am so glad I did.
Later, I was ashamed to think that I’d been so resistant. What price did I expect I’d have to pay for being curious? After four days, I wasn’t “converted.” I had not betrayed myself or my Zionism or my people. The wrenching experience proved to me that I don't lose me by hearing you. I don't surrender territory by surrendering ego and certitude. I just grow. And I become, more deeply, Curious Jew.
In early September, hopefully kicking off years of meaningful relationship and social justice work, TBA hosted a Zoom event that brought us together with some local Black communities of faith. A night of listening and learning. After the main presentation, during which we heard from a variety of White and Black and Jewish and Christian voices, I hosted one of the breakout rooms.
One of the people in my room told this story. She, a white woman, had been confused and saddened by so many events this past summer. She wanted to do something, but didn’t know what. Someone suggested that she simply ask a Black person how they are doing. So she sought out someone in her neighborhood. A face she recognized, but a life and story she really didn’t know. She asked this person how she was doing. And then she listened—for two hours.
It seems like such a banal, easy thing to do. Go listen to someone. But it is not. It is everything. We think we know who they are, what they experience, what world they live in. But so often we don't. We don't if we are white and they are black. We don’t if we are straight and they are gay. We don't if we are blue and they are red. We don't if we are wealthy and they are poor. We don't if we are happy and they are depressed. We don't ask. But we must, in order to be curious. Curious Jews.
Einstein valued curiosity above all things, saying “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” To me even that quote was improved upon by Jiddu Krishnamurti. He was a 20th century Indian speaker and writer, a product of a culture of castes and divisions who famously said he was enslaved by no allegiance to nationality, religion or philosophy that would stem his zeal to be constantly learning and growing.
He once said “The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.” He was not saying never to evaluate. But if you are always only evaluating, defending your flank, protecting your group, forming your retort, willfully ignoring the possibility that the other person, idea, or stance has merit, then you are wasting human intelligence and poisoning human society.
Above all, be curious.
I read the Torah, religiously. I also read the LA Times opinion page, religiously. Every editorial. Every letter to the editor. Every op-ed. Even and especially when I know, from the headline, that the content will boil my blood. One of my favorite writers is Nicholas Goldberg. I love reading him because I never know, in advance, whether I will agree with him. He seems to be a polymath and, wondrously, hard to pin down and put in a single ideological box. In a recent piece, in which he critiques President Trump for what, I will admit, seems like a pathological incuriosity about so many things, he wrote what I think could and should be a manifesto on American civics:
“Unsurprisingly, there are those who write about the United States as a consistent force for good and others who are deeply critical of it. That’s because some focus on the long, slow expansion of rights, the broadening of liberal democracy, the growth of a giant middle class, the commitment to political liberty — while others emphasize the evils of slavery, the genocide of the Indigenous population and the centuries-long denial of rights to marginalized people.”
Notice in your mind how few people you come across who valorize and give full ear to both of those approaches to America’s story. He goes on, perhaps unwittingly invoking the Talmud and Bet Hillel and Bet Shammai, “History is richer and more complete because of these competing factions.”
Put that on Pinterest. Tweet that out. In addition to our slogans and signs for this candidate or against that one, how about cheering the notion of reading widely, against one’s grain, against the orthodoxy of one’s comfort zone and ideological community? How about we all look in the mirror and try to look past ourselves, to others? Who has beauty, and stories, and realities that we sometimes elect, willfully, not to consider?
If you take a Conservative approach to America, read Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” Not to convert yourself. But to know some important stuff you don't yet know, and might prefer not to know. It will make you a better American. It won’t kill you, and it might grow you. If the American and Jewish left is your home base, read the Wall Street Journal or the Algemeiner, and assume its authors are neither moronic nor monstrous. Your iconoclastic curiosity, pushing against today’s currents, will ennoble you.
We must, as Jews and Americans poised at this precarious moment, with fissures threatening to tear all of our tentative unities asunder, we must take responsibility for at least trying to know what we don’t know. Trying to know whom we don’t know. And see what shared humanity we have with “the other.” To learn even from them.
Let us dream not only of ourselves as we are now. Let’s bring others’ faces into our mirrors. Others’ narratives and pains within our hearts. Thus broadening the people we are still in the midst of becoming. This year, when you look in the mirror, try to see someone other than yourself.
I wish you a shanah tovah, and a meaningful fast.