Someone called me out.
Well, I have to admit, she called me out rather indirectly.
But I felt like she was talking to ME.
She said that she had just learned that the Latin word for “left” is “sinister.” She thought that was so amusing that she put it on Facebook. It was her way of declaring, once and for all, that people on the left politically are sinister - perhaps even evil.
I have known that “sinister” means “left” since I first studied Latin during my freshman year of junior high school half-a-century ago. The Latin word for “right,” by the way, is “dexter,” which is the root for words like “dexterity,” which means “skillful.”
The “new meaning” of those words in English bothered me then, and I still find it disturbing how these words for left and right gained their connotations.
You see, I am a member of the 10 percent cohort of the human community that is left-handed.
My parents told me the usual story. When I was very young, they tried to put my spoon in my right hand. Every time they did, I automatically moved it to my left hand. My fate was sealed.
In this right-handed world, I learned to bat right-handed in baseball, and when I played kickball, I used my right foot. When I play my right-handed guitar, my left hand forms the chords, and my right hand takes care of the strumming.
But try going into a school classroom and finding no left-handed desks.
Or try having your cursive handwriting on the blackboard of your fourth grade classroom criticized because it was “straight up and down” instead of being slanted right, like a good right-hander should do.
I understand that in Catholic schools, in Jewish Talmud Torah schools, and even in some public schools, the insistent left-hander trying to write with his or her correct and dominant hand often received a strong, stinging slap with a ruler, and a stern command to place the writing implement in the other and correct hand.
I tried to tell my Facebook acquaintance that I was upset at her reference because the word “sinister” likely took on its connotation of “evil” or “suspicious” because there are so few left-handers in the world. It was the fear of someone who is different and OTHER that led people throughout the last 5000 years of human history to see left-handedness in a negative light. She wouldn’t buy it. She replied that she was not talking about being a lefthander or righthander. She had seen something she considered funny, coincidental, and, in her mind, true, in relation to political ideology.
After that response, I still felt called out, and not because of the tendency of my own perspectives to be left of what we might consider to be the current ideological center.
For her, left is “sinister,” negative, evil and wrong, and there was no question in my mind that she meant her original comment in a denigrating way.
From our daily experiences, we know that life is a balance. Left-handers offer an ever-present reminder that there is diversity which is intrinsic to our world and even to our actions. If we ignore these differences, we may fail to understand who we truly are. There is no OTHER. There is just us.
Recognizing who we truly are includes accepting the struggle for living a moral life in which we are engaged every day.
Every Yom Kippur, we take a hard look at how we manage the balance inside ourselves between what Judaism calls the good inclination, YETZER TOV, and the evil inclination, YETZER HARA. At our best, we choose goodness. When we feel most conflicted inside, it may be that the ambition, desire for power, and lack of consideration, which are characteristic of the evil inclination, can all be bridled enough by the good inclination to lead to positive action.
Sometimes, we can’t make that happen.
And that is why Yom Kippur is important. This day is a humanizing experience that can be both challenging and uplifting. This is a day when there is no other. There is just us.
We have just completed the confessional prayers in our Kol Nidrei service. This recitation of what we have done wrong reverberates in our ears and in our souls from one year to the next.
MISHKAN HANEFESH replaces the older translation, “for the sin we have sinned against you” with two different phrases: “The ways we have wronged You” and “the harm we have caused in Your world.” That language introduces a recounting of moral missteps, including careless speech, hardening our hearts, lies, deceit, and gossip.
Besides the familiar confessional prayers, MISHKAN HANEFESH provides what I would call an “antidote” reading. After we declare all of the actions that human beings as a whole might not get right, we proclaim, “God our Creator and Guide, let us speak now of the healing acts by which we bring You into the world, the acts of repair that make You a living presence in our lives.”
In that new reading, we declare that we are able to counterbalance the ways we have wronged God and the harm we have caused in the world. That additional prayer reminds us that Yom Kippur is a time when we can continue to direct ourselves towards the path of goodness, kindness, and decency.
This summer, I was directed to a book by psychologist M. Scott Peck. He was most well known for his popular work, THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED. An article about moral decision-making led me to read Peck’s book, PEOPLE OF THE LIE: THE HOPE FOR HEALING HUMAN EVIL, which was published in 1983. What was most important for me about this book was Peck’s description of personal behaviors which he considered to be dangerous for human relationships. We have, no doubt, witnessed living examples of his portrayal of people’s possible destructive actions. He recommended that we avoid those individuals who exhibit these traits: refusal to take responsibility for individual actions; destructive, scapegoating behavior, whether subtle or overt; excessive intolerance to criticism and other forms of narcissistic injury; and a pronounced concern with a public image and self-image of respectability, which could lead to a denial of one’s hateful feelings and vengeful motives.
Peck noted that people who behave in this way do experience guilt, but they avoid and deny their feelings of guilt as much as they possibly can. He explained, “The evil deny the suffering of their guilt - the painful awareness of their sin, inadequacy, and imperfection - by casting their pain onto others through projection and scapegoating. They themselves, may not suffer, but those around them do. They cause suffering. [Those who are] evil create for those under their dominion a miniature sick society.”
In the final chapter of his book, M. Scott Peck declared that only love and acceptance can counterbalance the evil within human behavior. He said that “the path of love is a dynamic balance of opposites, a painful creative tension of uncertainties, a difficult tightrope between extreme but easier courses of action. Consider the raising of a child. To reject all of a child’s misbehavior is unloving. To tolerate all of his or her misbehavior is unloving, We must somehow be both tolerant and intolerant, accepting and demanding, strict and flexible. An almost godlike compassion is required.”
That is a compassion that we might apply to others and to ourselves as we struggle to remain on a path of goodness. Our Jewish tradition, our friends, our family members, and our teachers and mentors all give us guidance.
Rabbi Joseph Telushkin wrote his book THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF CHARACTER, published in 2003, as an anthology of responses he had crafted to questions submitted to his column on beliefnet.com. The first chapter of this book presented his new moral prescription of commandments. This list resonates with the “healing and repair” reading in our prayerbook that provides a path to building goodness within ourselves. Here are Telushkin’s Ten Commandments of character:
- Know your weaknesses.
- When ethics and other values conflict, choose ethics.
- Treat all people with kindness, and with the understanding that they, like you, are made “in God’s image.”
- Be fair.
- Be courageous.
- Be honest.
- Be grateful.
- Practice self-control.
- Exercise common sense.
- Admit when you have done wrong, seek forgiveness, and don’t rationalize bad behavior.
If we were to discuss these commandments, I would ask you which of them you believe to be the most difficult. I am sure that, these days, there are those who would name “don’t rationalize bad behavior” as the hardest one to put into practice. As I stated in a recent column in the local press, “rationalizing bad behavior is a personal pardon we give ourselves that relieves us of the responsibility to admit what we have done wrong and to apologize...but it is apology and forgiveness that, together, open the gates of healing in our relationships.”
When we think about exemplars of good character, the people who would come to mind are those who visibly practice kindness, gratitude, self-control, courage, and honesty.
We have all, I am sure, been blessed in our lives with people who have taught us important moral lessons, sometimes in their own special way.
During the summer, Rhonda and I made a special trip to El Paso to see, on its first theater run, the documentary film, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor.”
In the Karol household, we would watch Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood with our son Adam in his early years, as well as the faster-paced Sesame Street. As a family, we once visited the amusement park in Ligonier, Pennsylvania that brought to life some of the characters from Fred Roger’s legendary show.
With a deliberate pace, and Fred Rogers’ unique brand of teaching and engaging his guests, this show made a far-reaching impact. It offered children a feeling of acceptance for who they were. The program tried to teach positive values for living and for interacting with parents and peers. Fred Rogers dealt with intolerance by promoting understanding and openness. He dealt with racism by presenting diversity in his cast and with his guests. Only four months into his long run on television, Fred Rogers addressed the assassination of Robert Kennedy with a special episode that dealt directly with what happened and reassured children that their parents and others would provide for their safety.
Fred Rogers’ “truth to power” moment came when he faced the Senate subcommittee on communications when he heard of their plan to cut funding from public television. Speaking to Senator John Pastore, the subcommittee chairman, Fred Rogers made his point succinctly and clearly: “This is what I give. I give an expression of care every day to each child, to help him realize that he is unique. I end the program by saying, ‘You’ve made this day a special day, by just your being you. There’s no person in the whole world like you, and I like you, just the way you are.’ And I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health.” His appeal was successful and the funds were restored for pubic television’s educational programming.
Fred Rogers taught this important lesson to parents and children about dealing with tragedy: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of ‘disaster,’ I remember my mother's words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world."
Finally, Fred Rogers offered this perspective about the essence of our humanity: “When I say ‘it's you I like,’ I'm talking about that part of you that knows that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch. That deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without which humankind cannot survive. Love that conquers hate, peace that rises triumphant over war, and justice that proves more powerful than greed.”
And so we struggle, every day, to stay on the side of decency, understanding, compassion, fairness and hope. Both our left and our right have their reason for being. Both good and evil can drive us to do the right thing when properly channeled. We can overcome the temptation to go astray by directing our passions towards godliness and divine teachings that can lead us to choose life. We are people who are commanded not only to look for the helpers, but to be the helpers, and when we look for the good, may we continually discover the potential for good inside of each of us.
On the three festivals, we recite a special prayer for the earth, but we can also pray it for ourselves, for our own character, and for our souls, so that what we do each year will bring a bounty of love to the world.
Please repeat after me:
LIV’RACHAH V’LO LIK’LALAH.
L’CHAYIM V’LO L’MAVET.
L’SOVA. V’LO L’RAZON
For blessing and not for curse. For life and not death.
For abundance, not want.
And may God bless the good work of our hands and the good that we spread in this world that needs the best that we have to give. So may we give to one another, to our neighbors, and to the greater human family.
