Moral Uncertainty

There is a moment in today’s Torah portion that I would like to freeze, as one freezes the frames of a movie.  That moment would show our patriarch Abraham, a distressed look on his face, brow furrowed, uncertain what to do, which way to act.

            Abraham’s wife Sarah had been unable to have children.  But G-d, the Source of all miracles, took note of Sarah as had been promised, and at 90 years old she conceived and bore a son to Abraham, whom he named Isaac.  Sarah was full of laughter at the joy she and Abraham had found in their old age.

            The child grew, and Abraham held a great feast on the day Isaac was weaned.  And then the text says, Sarah saw the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had born to Abraham “metzachek”—playing? taunting? mocking?  We don’t know exactly what the word means, but we know Sarah was not happy.

            Sarah said to Abraham, “Cast out that slave-woman and her son, for the son of that slave shall not share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.”

It is the next moment that I would like to freeze in time:

וַיֵּ֧רַע הַדָּבָ֛ר מְאֹ֖ד בְּעֵינֵ֣י אַבְרָהָ֑ם עַ֖ל אוֹדֹ֥ת בְּנֽוֹ׃

“The thing was very grievous in Abraham’s eyes, on account of his son.”

            There is a world contained in those eight Hebrew words.  It is a moment of profound moral uncertainty in the life of Abraham.  It is a moment when he finds himself caught—between his love for his wife, and his love for his firstborn son, between his responsibility as the leader of his People and his responsibility as a father.

Moral uncertainty is a real and significant issue.   In the book, Why We Should Take Moral Uncertainty Seriously, the authors[1]argue that the answers to the question, ‘Given that we are morally uncertain, how ought we to act in light of that uncertainty?’ are not trivial matters.  Quite the opposite: at times, moments of moral uncertainty are matters of life and death.

For most of the past year, both the State of Israel and the Jewish People have been caught in a profound situation of moral uncertainty.  Like the moral dilemma which Abraham faced at that moment, the Jewish People—

and the nation state which is its homeland—have found themselves, ourselves, in an impossible situation, caught between on the one hand our love and loyalty to our people and our commitment to our survival, and, on the other, our concern for and responsibility to millions of people who are innocent bystanders of a conflict not of their making.  It has been an excruciating year for so many.

This Rosh HaShanah morning, the first day of these eseret y’mei ha’teshuvah, these ten days of repentance, our Tradition asks us to enter into a period of deep and honest reflection.  As uncomfortable as it may make us, I’d like to ask us to spend a few moments looking at that frozen frame: the reality of moral uncertainty.  Not to point a finger of blame or to come to any conclusions whether particular actions taken were wrong or right, but rather, to acknowledge and honor the complex middle that is the place of moral uncertainty in which we have found ourselves for this past year.  If we can acknowledge that complex middle, then, I believe, we can affirm our humanity, the very nature of being human, the reality that sometimes we have to make decisions that are difficult, perhaps even impossible.  Decisions that, like Abraham’s, sometimes come with great and incalculable costs.

Have you faced such moments in your own life?  Moments when you struggled to figure out what to do, which direction to go?  I certainly have.

I’d like to share some of what I learned about moral uncertainty from the book I cited earlier.  I found it helpful, and I hope you will too.

 “Ethics is hard,” the authors write.  Working out the correct moral view often involves being sensitive to subtle distinctions, being able to hold in mind many different arguments for different views . . . .”

Much of the time we are biased in how we see things.  We see things from our particular point of view—influenced by our culture, our religion, our upbringing, among other things.  Typically, these biases are not transparent to us and, unless they’ve been pointed out, we mostly don’t even realize we suffer from them.  And even if we do know, we often fail to adjust our beliefs adequately in response to them. 

In situations of moral uncertainty, it can be extremely difficult to correctly balance all the different considerations.  So “even if we come to a firm stance about some ethical view,” the authors argue, “we should not always expect that our reasoning is error-free.”[2] 

In fact, much of the time it is not.  Research suggests that when subjects claim to be 98% certain about something, they are wrong about 30% of the time.  So it’s important that we understand views and opinions that are different than ours. 

Hmmm.  Sounds like a very Jewish approach to me.  The ancient Jewish model of study, chevrutah or partner study, requires that when we engage with others over moral questions or other matters, we should do so in an open, argumentative mode that attempts to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of all sides of a question. The idea is that the more we understand the many different sides of any situation, the better equipped we are to make just, moral decisions.

            We are fortunate:  Jewish tradition has been a source of moral guidance for thousands of years.  We have volumes upon volumes of texts written by theologians and Jewish thinkers who have long wrestled with all kinds of moral questions.  This is true when it comes to matters of war as well. 

Individuals, including some leaders, may or may not follow this guidance as they find themselves caught in profound moments of moral uncertainty, and as they have too many times since that horrific day of October 7. They may make choices that you or I might not make. 

If only we could pause the film, freeze the frame before any decisions had to be made, any actions taken.  But life is no movie. 

 Let us return to today’s text.  When we unfreeze the frame we learn that God tells Abraham what to do:  to send Hagar and her son Ishmael into the wilderness. 

But: וַיֵּ֧רַע הַדָּבָ֛ר מְאֹ֖ד בְּעֵינֵ֣י אַבְרָהָ֑ם the matter was grievous in his eyes. It was not easy.  He did not like it.  Maybe he wished it could have been different.  As do we.

Sadly, God does not speak to us as clearly and definitively in our day, as God did in Abraham’s.  We can seek God’s guidance by praying and listening, but ultimately, we have free will, and must discern the right course of action. 

We enter into this new year filled with sadness for what has been, but also, perhaps, a sense of humility and awareness of the difficult, if not impossible, situation in which Israel and the Jewish People have found ourselves.  Let us also enter into this New Year with a sense of humility and awareness of how very hard it can be to be human.

And . . . let us continue to pray for peace.  L’shanah Tovah.

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[1] William MacAskill, Krister Bykvist, and Toby Ord

[2] MacAskill, William, Bykyist, Krister, and Ord, Toby, Why We Should Take Moral Uncertainty Seriously, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198722274.003.0002

Rabbi Zari Weiss

Rosh HaShanah Day 1, October 3, 2024  1 Tishri 5785

The Power of a Broken Heart

I wonder what Avraham was thinking as he trudged up the mountain.  I wonder what was stirring inside him as he built the altar and laid the wood on it.  As he tied up his son, his precious son, Isaac, the son that he loved, and laid him on top of the wood. 

The biblical text leaves out these details of the story, of course.  In black letters on white parchment we read only the basic outline of the story.  Abraham rose, he split the wood, he saddled the donkey.  He built an altar.  He reached for the knife.  We read nothing of the inner workings of Abraham’s heart and soul as he trudged up the mountain. 

I wonder:  was he calm with certainty and trust as he lifted the knife, or was his heart breaking inside, as he prepared to do what he believed G-d has asked him to do?

It is possible, perhaps, to imagine that Avraham neither questioned God’s command, nor his own obligation to fulfill it.  It is possible to imagine him moving forward silently, obediently.  His unwavering faith in G-d dictated that as God had commanded, so would he do. But it is far easier to imagine that Abraham never stopped anguishing–from the moment he heard G-d speak to him, to the moment he reached for the knife. 

Would he listen to this G-d, who had told him to go forth and be the father of a great nation, who had blessed him and Sarah with a child in their own age?  Or would he disobey God’s directive and preserve his son’s life, instead?  It is far easier to imagine Abraham crying out as he laid out the wood and reached for the knife: “G-d, why do you test me so?  Why do you make me choose between my love and devotion to You, and my love and devotion to my son?” 

         According to Rashi, Sarah, Abraham’s wife, Isaac’s mother, died from shock when she heard that Isaac had almost been sacrificed.  She died of a broken heart. 

Did Abraham live out the rest of his days with a heart that had also been shattered into a thousand pieces because of the impossible task God had given him? 

I have been thinking a lot lately about what it means to live with a broken or shattered heart. 

For almost a year, we have been living with so much pain in our own hearts—from the knowledge of what happened on October 7 to innocent men, women, and children, to young people at a music festival, as well as from the knowledge of what has happened since—the bombing of villages and schools in Gaza, and more recently in Lebanon—leaving forty thousand people, most of them innocent Palestinians, dead, millions more displaced, their homes and lives destroyed. Whether you believe that the tactics of the Israeli government and military have been right or wrong, the reality of the death and destruction is heartbreaking.  How could we be in touch with our own humanity and not feel heartbreak? 

So I’ve been thinking a lot about how Abraham was able to go on, how any of us are able to go on—with the broken hearts we carry inside.

There have been so many times in this past year, and truthfully, in the years preceding this one, that I felt something happen. . . in my heart.  It felt as if my heart was breaking.

One response, of course, is to ignore it all.  To continue living our lives despite what’s going on.  As if we are somehow separate from those in Israel or Gaza, or Lebanon, or the Ukraine.  We are not. 

This is, I believe, the essential insight of the Shema:  Shema: Pay attention, Yis-ra’eyl:  you People Israel, Adonai Eloheinu: there is a Oneness, an Allness, that encompasses all of reality; Adonai Echad: Adonai (the Mystery we call God) is One—the Unity that underlies all creation. 

And we humans, we are all a part of that Oneness.  As one beautiful interpretation of our Aleynu prayer says: “. . . how we hope. . . that all the many gods of divisiveness and distortion [that divide us from one another], that all these gods, broken pieces of the whole, will find their way back into the single vessel of life, that the One might become truly One.

Bayom ha’hu, y’hiyeh Adonai echad, u’sh’mo echad:  On that day, the Source will be known as One By all the faces of its glory!

On some level, we are not separate; quite the opposite:  ultimately, we all connected with one another.  And yet . . .if we were to truly allow ourselves to feel the pain and suffering of everyone and everything with whom we are connected, we simply could not function. 

The question, then, is:  Is there a way to feel it, and respond to it, but not become weighed down by the immensity of it all? 

Engaging in political action to bring about change is one way.  Crying out, is another.

Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav, the great Hasidic teacher, taught that when we bring our sorrow to God’s doorstep by crying out, or simply crying, our broken hearts become a point of connection not only to those who suffer, but also to God.  Not the God that sits in a big throne up in the sky, but the God that is HaShechinah, the mysterious Presence that we sometimes sense even though there is no rational explanation. 

Rebbe Nachman felt that brokenheartedness is different from depression.  Brokenheartedness is “. . . rooted in the humble awareness that all beings experience sorrow and pain.   A broken heart is simply a sign of our deep humanity.”  (Rabbi Nathan of Nemerove, Likutei Moharan II 282.  Collected teachings of Rabbi Nathan’s teacher, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov). 

When we bring our broken hearts and offer them up to God, to the Universe, something miraculous can happen:  our hearts can break open.  The layers of protection and fortification that we’ve built around them can fall away.  Our broken hearts can experience healing and can be transformed. 

         So how do we do it? In a time and culture in which we’ve learned to fortify our hearts, simply to function day after day, how do we allow them to break open and experience healing?

Rebbe Nachman taught that even when the gates of prayer aren’t open, the gates of tears always are.  Tears, he taught, have a direct connection to HaRachamanah, the Compassionate One, from the Hebrew root rechem, womb.  The Source from which the universe was birthed.

         Friends, these Days of Awe are a time when we come before G-d, and bare our hearts and souls, in the most honest and real way possible. Particularly as we move toward Yom Kippur, all pretense falls away.  We stand naked and exposed, nothing to hide behind.  We confess in the collective: “We have sinned.”  We do so on behalf of our People, on behalf of our society.  We as humans have fallen short of being all that we could possibly be. 

         As we seek to atone for our collective wrongdoings, let us bring our sorrow to God’s doorstep and cry out.  Let our broken hearts be a point of connection to all those who suffer sorrow and pain, as well as a point of connection to God, the Allness that encompasses all of reality.  Let our brokenheartedness be, as Rebbe Nachman said, a sign of our deep humanity, and may we hope and pray that we—flawed human beings that we all are– will do better as we go forward. 

         L’shanah tovah.

The Power of a Broken Heart

Rabbi Zari M. Weiss

2^nd Day Rosh Hashanah 5785