(We begin with this reading by Sidney Greenberg in Mishkan T’filah on page 6)
MAY THE door of this synagogue be wide enough to receive all who hunger for love, all who are lonely for friendship.
May it welcome all who have cares to unburden, thanks to express, hopes to nurture.
May the door of this synagogue be narrow enough to shut out pettiness and pride, envy and enmity.
May its threshold be no stumbling block to young or straying feet.
May it be too high to admit complacency, selfishness and harshness.
May this synagogue be, for all who enter, the doorway to a richer and more meaningful life.
As I walked today in the Sunday School wing of St. Albert the Great Catholic Church to attend an interfaith book group, I noticed children’s drawings on the wall. It appeared that the assignment called on the students to put the Ten Commandments and other biblical principles into their own words and to illustrate them.
One child assertively declared:
Don’t cheat. Don’t be disrespectful.
Another proclaimed:
Treat all human beings well. Share stuff.
Be nice. Don’t be rude. Be Kind
Don’t be mean. Do NOT be a bully.
What these children were doing was not dissimilar to the Torah readings for last week and this week. Both portions deal with an appearance of a growth on a person or a house that renders a person or the space ritually impure In this week’s portion, the section about a house outlines the prescribed treatment for unwanted colored streaks on a wall that would render the home unlivable for a time. It’s not unlike how we might deal with mold and mildew in a home today.
I believe that this portion is about more than its literal sense. On the level of DRASH, a deeper explanation, we could say that it is about “getting our house in order.” That phrase means to “arrange one’s affairs” and to solve one’s problems. It can apply to an individual, an organization or a nation.
The “may the door of this synagogue” reading openly declares which behaviors represent the best a community has to offer, and which actions and attitudes should be left outside a holy space. And, of course, we could see all of life as a holy space, as well as our homes and our workplaces.
Robert Sutton is a professor of Management Science and Engineering and Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford University. He has been writing for many years about the behaviors that best serve a workplace and those that don’t. In one of his books, he cited the findings of studies done with students in which they played a game where they could choose to cooperate and treat it as a “win-win” game or compete and treat it as an “I win, you lose” game. If both parties were honest and cooperative, both were rewarded well and equally. If both were competitive, they inevitably ended up with a low score. If one person competed but the other cooperated, then the competing person won big with a big score and the cooperative person ended up with a low score. People who don’t cooperate in these games often lie, telling their partner that they are going to cooperate but then turning against their partner in the end to grab all of the goodies for themselves. Lee Ross, a Stanford University researcher, once told half the players in his experiments that they were participating in the “Community Game” (conjuring up images of shared fate and collaboration) and the other half were told that it was the “Wall Street Game” (conjuring up images, in Sutton’s words, of a dog-eat-dog world). People who played the Community Game were dramatically more cooperative and honest about their intentions than those who believed they were playing the Wall Street Game. Researchers at the United States Air Force Academy came up with the same results in experiments with cadets there. They found that when people are first exposed to or “primed” with words like enemy, battle, inconsiderate, and vicious, they were far less likely to cooperate than when first exposed to words like helped, fair, warm, mutual, and share.
Sutton has presented countless examples in his articles and books of how people who are “inconsiderate and vicious” tend to bring more people just like them onto their team. He also noted how many businesses and corporations have created rules for behavior that directed employees to gravitate to fairness, warmth, mutuality, and cooperation.
In recent interviews, Sutton has identified the behaviors that he would define as the most problematic in the workplace and in any community. The first is when everything you do is constantly challenged, critiqued, or responded to by a co-worker or boss with some kind of put down or non-verbal behavior like sneering or glaring, where the person is hassled for small things. The second kind is treating someone as less of a human-being, where someone makes clear that you are beneath them or treats you as if you are invisible. The third is backstabbing. Sutton told of one worker who flattered her boss to his face, while at the same time, she was spreading lies about him to a friend who worked in the Human Relations office.
Workplaces and organizations often have set rules that can place parameters on destructive behaviors and reward and reinforce cooperation and positive attitudes.
We have the Torah to guide us. It still reminds us that we are created in the divine image, all of us, and that we should love our fellow human beings as ourselves. Those rules are sacrosanct in the ways we treat each other, in the words we address to one another, and in our attempts to monitor ourselves to follow these teachings.
Like the streaks on the house that must be watched by the priest, we have the opportunity to set the standards for our interpersonal relations in our friendships and in our collaborative relationships in the community.
Our entire tradition points us in that direction.
And so does that one student who listed the most important rules to follow:
Don’t be rude. Don’t be mean. Do NOT be a bully.
Share stuff. Be nice. Be kind. Treat all human beings well.
Word to live by - today and always.
(References to Robert Sutton’s works include one subtitled BUILDING A CIVILIZED WORKPLACE AND SURVIVING ONE THAT ISN’T and this article:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2017/09/12/bob-sutton-how-to-deal-with-difficult-people-at-work/#ea5c5a36d832
