Good morning, and l‘shanah tova to everyone here. JFW member families… former members… friends… family… first timers and long timers. It really is a joy to see so many people all coming together every year.
For those of you who I haven’t met yet, my name is Shawn Peters, and it is not just a new year for me… it’s a new experience in terms of addressing this group. For the first time in half a decade, I don’t have an official “position” on the Jewish Family Workshop board. After a year as Member at Large, another as Vice President, and three more as President, I stand here with fewer responsibilities… except to speak what is truly in my heart. So that’s what I’m going to do.
I’ll admit, when I saw certain events unfold in the past year, and thought forward toward giving a High Holiday sermon this year… I was ready to deliver a really different speech than in years past. I didn’t feel like I could reprise themes like “Acceptance” “Gratitude” and “Forgiveness,” then toss in a handful of pop culture references and Talmud quotes and wrap it all up in a kitschy metaphor… a combination that had served me well in the past.
It just felt inauthentic. The sum total of what I had witnessed, what we all have witnessed since last year at this time… and the fact that I was no longer an “elected” official who needed to represent his entire organization… I was ready to draw a line in the sand.
I wrote four pages of a sermon that was a call to arms. I was prepared
to tell this group that we don’t have time to debate what or who might be “better for Israel” or “better for business” or “better for you 401k.” Not when there were neo-Nazis dressed in riot gear, toting shields and rifles and flags, chanting “Blood and Soil” in American streets while our commander in chief refused to condemn their actions or even hold them responsible for the violence that ensued.
I was ready to come here today and ask you all to fight, as Jews… as Americans… as people of conscience who will never let our country take a step backward into history’s darkest hours.
And then I took my own step back, and tried to think about it from your point of view. Maybe you voted one way… maybe you voted the other… maybe you didn’t vote at all… I have no idea. But I do know that if I had given that sermon I had written, right now you all could very easily be looking up at me on this Bimah and thinking, “Who the heck is this guy to tell me what I should do or how I should vote or feel? He’s not a rabbi… he hasn’t dedicated his life to following the Torah or leading a congregation. Why should I listen to him?”
And you’d be right. You’d be justified. I do not have the religious, moral or even political street cred to tell you what to do. I always felt like the least Jewish guy at Brandeis, as a president, I let plenty of things fall through the cracks. Truth be told, I still use unrecyclable plastic bags from time to time… so who am I to judge anyone else? If were to deliver that sermon, the best I might do is earn the praise of the people who already agree with me, and forever turn off the people who don’t. It would literally change nothing. It was obvious when I put myself in your place... and it was even more obvious that at a time like this, when the easiest thing to do is accuse each other of being monsters, or racists, or a thousand other things, what I should be talking about… is empathy.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who was active in the civil rights movement up until his death in 1972 said, “First and foremost, we meet as human beings who have much in common: a heart, a face, a voice, the presence of a soul, fears, hope and the ability to trust, the capacity for compassion and understanding, the kinship of being human.”
And while I’m sure that quoting Maya Angelou will just reinforce some of your views that I’m a bleeding heart moonbat socialist… the good Rabbi was saying the exact same thing she did when she wrote, “We are more alike my friends than we are unalike.” We know it’s true… but it’s just so hard to see how much we all have in common when every talking head and viral social post is telling us how inhuman the other side is.
But we are alike, my friends, and the thing that might surprise you is the thing we truly all have in common. It’s that we are all heroes… more specifically, we’re all the hero of our own stories.
It’s a lesson I learned first as an actor in 1987. I was in high school, and I was playing a bad guy in a play for the first time. Maybe not a killer or worse, but a charismatic philanderer, a liar who relied on a few catch phrases, a dirty businessman and someone who did indefensible things. I promise you, this was a fictional character and not peek into the political future. So I asked my director whether there was any trick to playing a “bad guy.” I figured he’d tell me I needed to get in touch with my dark side or read Dante… or at least kick a few puppies. Instead, he told me, “You’re not a bad a guy… you just have to come up with the story your character tells himself every day to justify the things he does.”
He was telling me that to play the part, I had to empathize with the character.
At first, I looked at it just in a dramatic-slash-fictional context. So… Darth Vader isn’t a villain. He’s just a hard-to-please dad who was trying to suck up to his manipulative boss while reclaiming a relationship with his estranged son. Sure. And Captain Hook wasn’t so awful. He was a poor shlub who had to be the only adult in a world where he was surrounded by obnoxious happy-go-lucky boys who never had to grow up… plus, losing a hand will make anyone a bit salty.
To be fair, I was only 16… but as I got older, I realized that this empathetic insight was much more important in real life than it was on stage. Because when you’re talking about actual human beings… it’s takes a special type of jerk to wake up every day thinking, “I wonder how much misery I can cause in the world today.” To pull this off, you have to be a sociopath or a sadist or the commissioner of a professional football league in North America.
The rest of the so-called-jerks and villains you face in your day-to-day probably are telling themselves a story where they are 100% justified for cutting you off in traffic or laughing when your coffee spills on your shirt or making you look bad in the middle of a presentation at work. In their stories, they’ve been abused and mistreated by someone or many multiple someones for so long, that today is the day they aren’t going to take it anymore. They aren’t being awful, they are standing up for themselves in their story.
Now… is that story true? Who knows? It’s tricky…
But there is one rule that isn’t tricky about stories… and that is this: you can only hear someone’s story if you listen. If you scream and shout them down, you’ll never know the story they are telling themselves. Moreover, you’ll never earn the right to share your story with them, because why should they care about someone who is screaming at them?
There is a movie out right now about an African American musician named Daryl Davis. He played with Chuck Berry and Little Richard and grew up with the overt racism of South. And he has just made a documentary about the fact that over his years touring, he has started relationships with dozens of white supremacists and Klan members and asked them the question “How can you hate me if you don’t even know me?” Just asking the question has opened the door for him to talk to people who aren’t like him. He talks about giving people a platform to tell their stories, and that leads to many of them wanting to know his. I won’t pretend he always changes his counterpart’s mind… but the man has a collection of hoods and robes and flags that suggest he has had more of an effect than you might guess.
Now to be clear, I am NOT suggesting that this group of Jewish and Interfaith families go out into the world in search of sworn anti-semites and sit down with them for a little Manischewitz and sympathy. The task of seeing the world through someone else’s eyes doesn’t have to be that extreme or all-encompassing. You can use empathy to find common ground with anyone you’re not seeing eye-to-eye with, whether they’re on the other side of the family dinner table or across the political aisle from you.
But since right now, the most obvious division seems to be around the future of our community and country, I think there are two things all of us could do that requires less danger than seeking out skinheads, and would make the world a more civil, empathetic place.
First, find someone who is scared of the way things are going. I mean really scared. Scared for their safety… scared for their family… scared that something they have is on the verge of being taken away in a way they can never get back, and believe me, there are people of all races, ages, genders and ethnicities who feel that way right now, and listen to their story. Really listen. Genuinely care about their story and know that even if you don’t see the story the same way, they believe it and that belief is what’s guiding the things they do.
President Theodore Roosevelt, who no one would accuse of being a bleeding heart moonbat socialist, said, “No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.”
So care about it enough to put yourself in their shoes and think about how you’d feel if you were the hero of their story. See how that changes you.
And then find someone who you know who disagrees with you. Someone you believe is, at heart, a good person, but whose views are different from yours. We all probably know several who are at our work, or in our town… or in the next row at services today. And then offer them a platform for them to tell their story. Not about a specific candidate… or law… or news-cycle headline. Let them tell the story of why they believe what they believe. Again… listen fully. Listen truly. Listen in a way that makes their story yours… because that’s what a story really is. It’s a way to share an experience in a way that makes the person listening feel like they were there.
And once you have listened, ask to share your story. If that goes well, maybe even share the story of that person you know who is afraid. Give them the opportunity to care… to replace hate of someone they don’t know, with empathy for someone they do.
And when should you do this? Well… I feel like I’ve already preached enough and told you all what to do more than I usually do. So I’ll leave it to Anne Frank to give you a timetable.
She wrote, “How wonderful is it that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
I think we all know her story, and as beautiful and inspiring as it is, none of us want to live in a world where it could be repeated. But that will take a show of love, not hate. It will take a willingness to listen before we speak. It will require us to replace apathy and antipathy… with empathy.
Only then can we all be the heroes of the same story.
Putting myself in your shoes once again… I can see that I have said enough. Maybe even too much. As Rabbi A.Y. Kook once said, “I do not speak because I have the power to speak. I speak because I do not have the power to remain silent.” He was talking about his moral obligation to stand up for his fellow man… not of his inability to shut up, and so I’m going to use that excuse too. In fact, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
I thank you for the honor and opportunity to share my thoughts, and I wish all of you a happy, healthy, and harmonious year.
L’shanah tova!
