
By Rabbi Eric S. Gurvis
Just a few weeks ago, as we reckon our secular calendar, we entered the New Year 2025. For our Jewish community, our New Year of 5785 was welcomed at Rosh Hashanah in early October. If we look at Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 1:1, we learn that in our Jewish calendar we mark four different new year’s. Another arrives in just a few weeks as we celebrate Tu B’shevat – the New Year for trees.
Whatever the occasion, marking the start of a New Year is an opportunity for reflection and the sense that we can embrace a fresh start. As Americans, in the coming days we are also marking a new start as we mark the transition between two Administrations and welcome a new session of Congress.
In our time, public discourse has been chaotic, and divisive. Depending on your perspective, it may be encouraging or concerning. Every day, every week seems to bring more fractious debate. As our Jewish tradition views it, debate can be a valuable commodity when it serves to inform, shed light and bring us closer to understanding one another. Alas, much of the discourse in our nation today is filled with vitriol and venom. In my ideal, our candidates (and we as a public) would argue and passionately debate the great issues of our day. However, my dream is that we could approach the challenges we face from a stance of humility, rather than bluster and arrogance.
As members of the Jewish community, Torah is core to our faith, and for each of us, in our way, how we live our lives. I am a firm believer that Torah is all around us. I do not confine my learning to the broader understanding of Torah as it has been refracted through the prism of Jewish teachings as they have been passed down through the ages, with each generation seeking to understand its meaning for its age. When I say, “Torah is all around us,” I mean that we can learn from a wide diversity of sources. The core ideals and values of Torah are reflected in the world around us, if we but open our eyes, ears, and hearts to learning from sources beyond the literal confines of our faith community’s boundaries, or our chosen political perspective.
A case in point: Some years ago, I attended a leadership conference with a team from the congregation I was serving at the time. We were introduced to the work of John Dickson, musician, TV presenter, historian, and Anglican minister. His talk was based on his then new book, Humilitas: A Lost Key to Life, Love, and Leadership, in which he explores the origins of humility as a value, and the many ways in which we understand and strive for humility in our lives. Dickson debunks the broadly held misconception that the value of humility originates with Jesus and in Christian Scriptures. He writes: “I just want to point out that the peculiar Western meaning of ‘humility’ derives [first] from the usage of the Hebrew-speaking Jews; [then] Latin-speaking Romans, and the Greeks . . . In all three languages the word used to describe humility means ‘low,’ as in “low to the ground. . . Used negatively [humility] means to be put low, that is, ‘to be humiliated.’ Positively, [it] means to lower yourself or ‘to be humble.’”
Let’s face it. In our time, humility and humiliation are huge issues. We know that disagreement is as old as humanity itself. A famous passage in the Babylonian Talmud records that the two leading Rabbinic schools of thought in first century Palestine had a running series of disputes for over three years: “There was a dispute between the School of Hillel and the School of Shammai. The former asserted, ‘The law is in agreement with our views,’ while the latter contended, ‘The law is in agreement with our views.’” As the two sides vigorously disputed their claims a Bat Kol, “a Divine voice,” came forth from heaven, announcing, “These and these are the words of the living God.”
I was both surprised and delighted to see this quote from the Talmud, “These and these are the words of the living God” rendered over the stage during the Berkshire’s Theatre Festival’s 2011 production of My Name is Asher Lev. I saw the production just days after returning from almost a month of study at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. The founder of that Institute, my late teacher, Rabbi David Hartman, taught that the force of ‘these and these’ interrupts the debate to proclaim, “no one owns the truth. No single idea ends the discussion.” In the words of Rabbi Hartman, “Dialogue creates possibility for more fruitful discussion.”
In our contentious times, can we not demand of our leaders, as well as ourselves, that our discourse be predicated on more humility and far less humiliation? Wouldn’t that be an ideal worth pursuing?
Rabbi Eric S. Gurvis was ordained as a rabbi from Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion in New York and is a Senior Rabbinic Fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He also serves as Director of Community Programming and Public Engagement for The Mussar Institute and facilitates Mussar groups in the Greater Boston area and at Hevreh of South Berkshire, where he and his wife, Laura Kizner Gurvis, are members. He has served congregations in New York City; Jackson, MS; Teaneck, NJ; Newton, MA; and Ashland, MA.