New values for a new year

By GIL TROY

The Canadian Jewish News, September 24, 2003

This Rosh Hashanah, we Jews in North America once again find ourselves in an anomalous position. For most of us, life is grand. We belong to one of the safest, strongest and wealthiest Jewish communities in history, blessed by the security, bounty, and liberty of the United States and Canada. For many of us, thankfully, our central moral challenges have to do with the dangers of decadence, the seductions of excess, rather than the depredations of hunger or fears of attack. As a result, too many of us live unthinkingly in our cozy little bubbles, insulating ourselves from the outside world’s challenges.

And yet, if we unplug our Walkmen and listen just a little bit, we hear screams of pain in our own neighbourhoods, our Jewish community and our beloved Israel, let alone the rest of the world. Most of us who reside in cities live scandalously close to neighbourhoods where children are neglected, families have disintegrated, schools fail to teach and the streets are unclean and unsafe.

Even many Jewish communities are filled with the sick, the poor, and the abandoned elderly. In Israel, 22 per cent of the people face poverty while thousands of families have been shattered by the murderous Palestinian onslaught. And in Africa, millions of people are starving to death or being murdered by organized insanity – up to 3 million people have died in the Congo alone.

We can’t all be Gandhi. We are not programmed to renounce North America’s playgrounds and shoulder the world’s burdens. But especially this Rosh Hashanah, with the unfortunate constants of poverty, disease and social dysfunction compounded by the scourge of terror, how dare we continue with business as usual. Shouldn’t we inconvenience ourselves just a little bit and alter our lifestyles just a whit to help our fellow human beings?

How can we continue planning more and more elaborate birthday parties for our children – let alone more and more extravagant bar and bat mitzvahs for our teenagers – without diverting more resources to the needy? Wouldn’t we feel better about ourselves if we replaced the usual excessive pile of presents at these events with a pile of tzedakah cards – initiated either by the hosts or the guests – sending money to a terror victim we have adopted or to an impoverished Israeli school? Wouldn’t we respect our rabbis, teachers and principals more if they risked our wrath and pushed us to give more generously, more systematically? And shouldn’t we, instead of waiting for leaders to push us in the direction we need to go, lead our peers to the right place?

We have all collaborated in building an upside down world, a twisted world of distorted values and misplaced priorities. We – and sadly this “we” applies especially in too many parts of the Jewish community – buy into the social pressure demanding presents galore for so many occasions, the wearing of the latest fashions, the buying of the fanciest things, the throwing of the most elaborate parties.

Those of us who occasionally deviate from that script, who might give a donation in someone’s honour rather than an unnecessary gift, who might wear yesterday’s fashions and send the unspent money to a worthy cause, are the ones who risk the social opprobrium. People who should feel shame for their excesses feel proud. People who should feel pride for their generosity often feel sheepish.

We are taught in so many ways not to deviate from the consumerist norms, not to appear too self-righteous or judgmental or virtuous. Wouldn’t we be better off teaching our children and ourselves to strive – with all appropriate modesty – for more good deeds and fewer fashion statements, for more acts of charity and fewer shopping trips, for more selflessness rather than selfishness, more altruism than materialism? We need to be doers not just givers, investing time not just money, applying our skills and passions to good works, not just fun sports. True, we probably will not solve the world’s problems, but we can help – bringing some joy to someone in need, alleviating someone’s pain, albeit momentarily.

Let us hope that next Rosh Hashanah we can not only celebrate a worldwide return to sanity, but a new trend, a new set of social pressures pushing us to do good rather than spend wildly.

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University and the author of Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today..