It happened on January 10th, 2012, at a concert of the New York Philharmonic. The Philharmonic was playing Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, an intensely stormy piece that contains, in its last few moments, peaceful, quiet, even otherworldly music. Considered by many scholars as having been written by Mahler with his own mortality in mind, these final moments are almost as though the composer is accepting and even embracing his death with peace and equanimity. It was at this moment, as the orchestra was playing these ethereal notes, that someone’s phone went off, playing the iPhone marimba tune. Normally, when things like this happen, the orchestra continues playing, but this time, conductor Alan Gilbert stopped the orchestra and turned around. Audience members pointed at a couple in the front row who may have been the source of the disturbance, so he asked them to turn off the phone. Still, the ringing persisted, with the couple in question staring back at Maestro Gilbert intently. The crowd was going wild; people were screaming- “Thousand Dollar Fine!” “Kick him out!” A blogger who was present described the audience as wanting blood. Finally, someone put his hands in his pocket, and the phone was silenced.
In describing the proximal causes of the devastating flood that forms the central narrative of this week’s Torah reading, our sages are emphatic. The Talmud tells us
“לא נחתם גזר דינם אלא על הגזל”,
The action that sealed their fate was theft. And not just any kind of theft. The Torah says that the world was awash in חמס, a kind of theft the Medrash describes as petty larceny:
חמס אינו שוה פרוטה וגזל ששוה פרוטה. וכך היו אנשי המבול עושים: היה אחד מהם מוציא קופתו מליאה תורמוסים, והיה זה בא ונוטל פחות משוה פרוטה, וזה בא ונוטל פחות משוה פרוטה
Chamas refers to theft of an item that is not worth much at all, less than a few cents. A person would leave his house with a basket of fruit, and everyone around him would surreptitiously purloin small amounts of it. Even though each individual only robbed the person of very little, the aggregate effect was to rob him of his entire yield. This is indeed a serious offense, but is that a reason to destroy a world? Is theft on a small scale really enough to sentence the world to utter oblivion?
I’d like to suggest a simple lesson from this statement, based on a comment of the Kli Yakar.
כלי יקר בראשית פרק ו פסוק יא
(יא) ותשחת הארץ לפני אלהים וגו’. אלהים היינו הדיינים כי היו גוזלים פחות משוה פרוטה שאין מוציאין בדיינין ועיני הדיין רואות ואין לאל ידו להציל דמעות העשוקים לכך נאמר לפני האלהים, לפניהם ממש
What was so egregious about these actions was not that people were stealing small amounts. It was, rather, the very fact that these amounts fell below even the threshold of a small claims court. The victims were not only violated, but they had no recourse to redress their grievance. In these acts of theft, people were robbing one another not just of small items, but of intangibles, of those essential ingredients to a stable life. Losing those items doesn’t alter the net worth of the victim, but may change people irrevocably, robbing them of a sense of security and their ability to trust others. And the worst part was that it was socially acceptable; because none of these feelings have any monetary value, they are easily rationalized, callously ignored and flagrantly violated. Indeed, the theft that precipitated these traumatic feelings was viewed as perfectly normal; if someone were to chastise the thief for his actions, he would respond, “Lighten up! Everyone does it- it’s all in good fun!” as if the victim should be silent or the upstander should just look the other way. There was no awareness of the pain these actions were causing others, and if there was, there was no sense that it was anything actionable or worthy of change. That is why the #metoo campaign that has exploded this week has resonated so strongly- I know it has with me, as a man, as a husband, as a father (of boys) and as a Rabbi. Honorable men who strive to treat women with respect and dignity had no idea of the degree to which the women in their lives are subjected to constant unwanted attention of all kinds, often in ways that take nothing of monetary value but leave the recipient feeling completely violated- behavior that is enshrined in a corrosive and misogynistic male culture in which these offenses are not considered a “big deal.”
When we broaden the definition of חמס or “intangible theft,” we can readily see the slippery slope that leads to a society’s corruption. There are many ways in which we steal pachot meshava perutah, and which we rationalize as “no big deal.” Oscar Wilde famously observed that a cynic is a person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. In a broader sense the cynic is the one who steals from others that which is special, but has no price tag. The Shem MiShmuel often speaks of three levels of kedusha which permeate virtually every arena in Jewish thought: מקום זמן ונפש. There are three areas in which we deal with intangibles, which demand reverence, and yet are vulnerable to cynical profanation: Place, Time, and Person.
Consider place. Picture the scene: You are at a wedding; it is the holiest moment in the life of a couple as they stand under the chuppah. Perhaps it has been long in coming, too, a couple who has spent years looking for their bashert. And as the groom gets ready to shatter the glass in a symbolic act of mourning and severity- an act described by the Talmud as a drastic act designed to halt excessive levity- you turn to your Chuppah buddy, the one you sit next to at every wedding, and whip out the tired cliche we always think we are the first to utter- “that’s the last time he’s putting his foot down!” Much like the phone that goes off in the middle of a transcendent piece of music, that sacred moment can never be reclaimed. Or we try and tell a funny story at a shiva house, when the atmosphere becomes too heavy, even though a sense of gravitas is exactly what a shiva house calls for. We are uncomfortable with moments of intense emotion and extreme holiness, so we rob others of feeling them when we make jocular remarks to lighten the mood.
Or consider the way we rob people of time. On a most basic level, we do this when we are late. I freely admit that I struggle with punctuality, and when I am late, I will sometimes rationalize that “it’s no big deal.” And often, it isn’t. But when you are late, you are showing another person that you consider your time more valuable than theirs, or that you consider their time not to be valuable at all. But it’s not just robbing people of a few minutes of their day, that they will never recover. Sometimes, we rob people of their memories of a special time. Twenty two ago, my first cousin in Israel his bar mitzvah. All of his cousins on all sides came together from all over to a hotel in Israel for Shabbos, and it was an unforgettable weekend. One of the reasons it was so remarkable was that my grandmother and all eight of her siblings were there as well. It was the first time they were all together at an event, possibly in decades, even they all grew up in Israel and almost all of them still lived there. It was also unforgettable, at least retroactively, because it was proved to be the last time they were together: one of my grandmother’s younger brothers succumbed several months later to the leukemia he was suffering. Everyone laughed, sang and told stories, which was amazing because- as is common in the Yerushalmi family my grandmother came from- both prior and subsequent to this weekend, several of my grandmother’s siblings were usually fighting and often not on speaking terms. But everyone behaved that weekend, and all we remember were the happy moments. A family reunion plagued by petty arguments undermines the weekend, but more upsetting is that the argument can mean that the memory of the gathering has been irreparably sullied, leaving nothing but a bitter aftertaste. Of course, we rationalize- she started it, it’s not a big deal, we made up afterwards, it was all in good fun. But we have no idea how much these memories mean to the elderly, to the family matriarch who has been looking forward to this for months. For the family members who may not see everyone together again in this life, or the grandchild who is meeting everyone for the first time, that tarnished experience will linger for a long time.
Finally, we rob people of their nefesh, of their soul and their sense of self. How many times have we been at a Shabbos meal where a husband or a wife makes a callous and deeply insensitive remark at the expense of his or her spouse? Maybe the husband makes fun of his wife’s spending habits, jokes he thinks are innocent about the way she spends “his” money at the mall. I’m sure the husband loves his wife, and if he were pressed on it, he would say “It’s no big deal! She thinks it’s funny!” Is it any wonder men treat women awfully later in life- is it any wonder that there have been countless #metoos- if, when they should be learning to be mentches, young men are instead taught that treating women like this is “no big deal”? This kind of remark can be easily brushed off, but can rob the victim of his or her dignity and sense of self in just one or two short sentences. And we rob our children, too, of intangibles in millions of ways that are not classically abusive. When we talk about the personal lives of others in their presence, we rob them of their refinement. When we initiate contentious political discussions in their presence, we rob them of the sensitivity needed to see when something is painful for others to talk about. When we let them watch movies with violence and other mature content, we rob them of their innocence. And nefesh, a person’s sense of self, is not just their personal dignity but their beliefs as well. When we make cynical remarks about religion, or the way others practice it- someone takes on a chumrah in earnest devotion and we think it is misguided, someone is seeking an avenue of spirituality we think is silly or someone espouses a hashkafic view we find too conservative or too liberal, or we express our views about organized religion and its practitioners- we have no idea who is listening when we express our views. Maybe someone is listening who is struggling with emunah, and instead of learning more and seeking inspiration, they will now take the path of cynicism and apathy instead.
When all of our most sacred realms, place, time and soul are threatened by petty theft and cowardly rationalization, we need to double our efforts to reinforce the honor which has been damaged. We need to tell the world why it truly is an extremely “big deal”. The antidote is reestablish value where it was previously undetected- to honor the time, the space, the sense of self and the belief of others is to give the respect that is so sorely lacking today. Noach had a daunting task before him- to rebuild a world from scratch, to teach a new generation what to value, and what their values should be. May we succeed at doing the same.
Many thanks to Rabbi Shaanan Gelman for his partnership.
© 2017 Rabbi Ariel Rackovsky
shaarerabbi 