“Polarization, conflict…. and dishwashers” (1st day of Rosh HaShanah, 5786 / 2025)

 

“Polarization, conflict…. and dishwashers”

Rabbi Robert Scheinberg, Ph.D.

1st day of Rosh HaShanah, 5786 / 2025

United Synagogue of Hoboken, NJ

“In every relationship, there’s one person who loads the dishwasher like a Scandinavian architect, and one person who loads it like a rabid raccoon.” 

This is, believe it or not, a quotation from one of the more fascinating and provocative articles I read this year.  It was about dishwashers and their role in couple and family conflict. 

(In case you’re wondering, in my family I’m the raccoon.) 

Apparently, this saying resonates in part because of how couples counselors report that a surprising amount of tension and conflict emanates from disagreements about how to load the dishwasher. Including:  Who does it and when?  What goes in the top, what goes in the bottom?  What direction do items face? How do you do cutlery - up or down?  How empty is too empty, and how full is too full?  Does it matter if you rinse beforehand?  And if it does matter, does that mean you should rinse, or you shouldn't rinse?

These disputes get heated in part because people tend to be very, very confident about their dishwasher loading styles, even if they are styles that are remarkably incompatible.  

It turns out that some of these disagreements may be a matter of personal style.  There are some questions on which even the experts and manufacturers were not sure what the correct answer is. And in some cases there’s a correct answer but it’s counter-intuitive.  In some cases, what used to be the unambiguous correct answer just isn't the correct answer anymore.  Like...it used to be that you should rinse.  But if you have a dishwasher from the last 10 years or so, now you shouldn't rinse.

So when you look at the situation more closely, the binary falls apart. Sometimes the Scandinavian architect approach may be extraordinarily deliberate and meticulous but it doesn’t necessarily result in clean dishes.  Sometimes the “raccoon approach” turns out better  -- or at least not appreciably worse.  And sometimes it actually doesn’t matter. except for the amount of conflict it causes.

Now, people tend not to come to the synagogue on Rosh Hashanah for the purpose of hearing dishwasher loading advice.  We come to reflect on the past year and hope and work for a better year. But sometimes there's a particular issue that seems to be on everybody's mind. For example, how do we contend with disagreement? And, especially, how do we contend with conflict with extremely unreasonable people? 

You notice that I had to start out a little light today because everything else is terribly, deadly serious.  Dishwasher loading might be a kind of a symbol for any number of much more serious issues about which we may be completely certain, even though we sometimes encounter people who are equally completely certain, even though their views are quite opposed to ours.

If you're connected to a Jewish community, you know that nearly 2 years later, October 7th continues to cast a shadow over everything.  The fact that the war in Gaza is still going on more than 700 days later.  That we set up this special chair on our bimah for Omri Miran in October 2023, soon after he was kidnapped from his home in Kibbutz Nachal Oz in front of his family. In our nightmares we would not have guessed that it would still be here nearly two years later. Last Sukkot,we had a dear friend of Ziv and Gali Berman come and speak about them, and they remain in captivity in Gaza in presumably unspeakable conditions.  We’ve recited a prayer for the welfare of the hostages well over 700 times just as we did earlier today.

That there's been a devastating war that has cost the lives of hundreds of soldiers, on top of the more than 1200 people of all ages who were murdered, raped, mutilated and dismembered on that day, by Hamas that vowed to repeat it, and which created one of the largest tunnel networks in human history under Gaza civilian areas, specifically for the purpose of pursuing armed conflict with Israel.

And that there's been by this point, tens of thousands of people in Gaza who have been killed, a large percentage of whom clearly are Hamas terrorists, and a large percentage of whom are clearly civilians -- a large percentage of whom are clearly children.  Nobody doubts that there have been numerous people in Gaza experiencing drastic food insecurity and hunger - the disagreements are only about whose fault it is and who could have prevented this humanitarian crisis.

 

And Israeli society is terribly divided.  At this point, serious critique of the government and the war is a mainstream opinion, with more than 70% of Israelis, including the top brass of the military and the security services, consistently saying that they wish Israel would work harder to take a hostage deal that would end the war, and that to do otherwise is probably to consign the remaining living hostages to death with very little positive result to make Israeli society safer. And a right wing segment of Israel’s ruling coalition is urging the annexation and settlement of Gaza. 

Israel is divided.  The world…. well, I wish the world were more divided than it is. To put it mildly,  the world's empathies right now are not  with the Israeli government and the war effort.  I wish there were more people around the world who would both express empathy with the terrible suffering of civilians in Gaza, and express understanding of the challenges of contending with an enemy like Hamas that knows no moral constraints and apparently shows no concern for the welfare of the residents of Gaza.  In the US, harsh critique of Israel is more mainstream in opinion surveys than ever before.  And we have, really for the first time, prominent politicians who don't simply criticize Israel's actions, but proclaim that the idea of Jews considering ourselves to be a people and returning to our historic place of origin after being oppressed or murdered in most other places we have lived in the world, is actually a historic injustice -- that the entire idea of Israel, and Jews living in the Middle East, is a mistake.  That Zionism is a flawed ideology like white nationalism and settler colonialism, that Israel does not belong among the community of nations. That the Jews of Israel should go back where they came from.  (Even though Zionism is actually about Jews going back to where we came from.)

And in the Jewish community, you can find a wide a variety of perspectives about these various issues, from “Israel can do no wrong,” to “Israel is going to make mistakes, like any country, but it’s not our role to say anything about them, especially in a climate of such overwhelming criticism,” to “Out of love for Israel, we need to raise our voices when it feels like Israel is making a mistake,” to “I’'m embarrassed by Israel's behavior, so I better speak up against it, lest anyone think I support anything it's doing,” to “I wish we could talk about something else.” 

Add to this in the United States at least three tragic murders - in Washington DC and in Boulder CO - of people at Jewish gatherings; amid other acts of violence targeting the Jewish community.  I’ve heard people say antisemitism is fundamentally a phenomenon of the left, and our friends are the people on the right, so let’s not needlessly antagonize them.  And I've heard people say antisemitism is fundamentally a phenomenon of the right, and our friends are the people on the left and you’re probably misunderstanding what they’re saying. And I’ve heard people say... It's a phenomenon on both the right and the left, and we need to help to educate our friends about it. And I've heard people say, it’s a problem on the right and the left, and we don't have any friends.

Now, I have thoughts about every single one of these issues. But that's not what I want to talk about today. Because sometimes it doesn’t make any sense to talk about something until you've spent some time talking about how best to talk about it.  And whether we’re talking about Israel, or the United States, or frankly any other issue - even something as mundane as dishwasher-loading - there’s an insight from Jewish tradition that I hope can help us to communicate better in the  new year. 

I had the special opportunity this year to engage in deep study with a group from our community on the book of Jonah. This is one of the shortest books in the bible, traditionally read in its entirety on Yom Kippur. We took several weeks to read and consider every word of the book, and in my sermons over these holidays I will repeatedly be making reference to the book of Jonah and the insights we gleaned from our study. 

The biblical scholar Aviva Zornberg notices that Jonah doesn’t have very many lines in this story -- after all, it’s a very short book -- but of Jonah’s few lines, a large percentage of them include words like yodeia ani, or yadati, meaning “I know.”  And the effect is that throughout the story, Jonah seems so positively sure about everything. This is all the more remarkable when the people that Jonah meets or whose words are recorded in the book - like the ship captain, and like the king of the Ninevites - they never say yodeia ani, or yadati, and in fact in their very few lines they are quite likely to ask a lot of questions, and to say things like mi yodeia, “who knows?”  or ulai - “maybe.” 

And Aviva Zornberg suggests that this makes Jonah into a paradigm of a black-and-white, binary thinker.  “Jonah allows no qualms to trouble his certainties. He seems to find nothing to puzzle him in his own behavior. …. His flight, his death wish, his anger—none of these rouse him to curiosity” about himself or about the world. Like a lot of people who’ve got it all figured out, Jonah has to ignore a lot of complexity, because the more you know, the more you realize that most binaries are false, and most absolute statements are oversimplifications. 

Judaism has been for more than 2000 years a system of belief and thought that says: the world is probably more complex than you know. The Talmud, the classic repository of Jewish religion, has multiple opinions on every page - as perhaps the best possible training for seeing nuance and avoiding binary thinking.  “Two Jews, Three Opinions” is no joke. There’s a famous adage in the Talmud:  לַמֵּד לְשׁוֹנְךָ לוֹמַר ״אֵּינִי יוֹדֵּעַ״,  שֶׁמָּא תִּתְבַּדֶּה וְתֵאָחֵז. Teach your tongue to say ‘I don’t know,’ or else you will end up saying things that aren’t so.

The more Jonahs we have in our society, who are totally sure of their most unalloyed narratives, the more polarized we become, the less of the complexity of the world we are able to understand and address, the more divided we are. And as we know all too well, polarization on one side is likely to breed polarization on the other side. 

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I learned a helpful perspective on this idea from the writings of Rabbi Donniel Hartman, who I first met when I was in my early 20s and I have been continually inspired by his teaching and writing since then. Rabbi Hartman is an Orthodox rabbi living in Jerusalem where he directs a major center for Jewish learning, the Shalom Hartman Institute -- and I know many in our community are familiar with him from his For Heaven’s Sake podcast together with Israeli journalist and author Yossi Klein Halevi.   He says that people sometimes assume that the measure of someone’s commitment to a community, or an institution, or a family, or even to a nation-state, is if they are completely untroubled by everything about that community or institution or family or nation-state.  If you’re untroubled, then you're committed.  And if you’re troubled, then clearly you’re not completely committed. And Rabbi Hartman suggests that this is the wrong way to look at it. Commitment, on the one hand, and being troubled or untroubled on the other hand, are two different things.  They are independent variables.  That means that theoretically, you can put them on a chart, with four quadrants.  (And coincidentally…. I just happen to have such a chart here….) 

So, for example, applying this chart to people’s feelings about being American, there may be people who say “I am proud to be American, I am committed to American values as I understand them, and I am concerned and even troubled by some aspects of the direction of this country.”  Such a person might then be in the Troubled Committed quadrant. And these (untroubled committed) are the people who think everything is fine and are not in tension with any of the ideals of the country and its government right now.   (My sense is that they would tend to be people age 10 or younger.  Everyone else can probably think of at least some point in the last ten years when they were deeply concerned about the direction of the United States.)   And these (troubled uncommitted) are the people who are so uncomfortable with this American experiment that they seek to replace the American form of government with something else, or to move somewhere else, and these (untroubled uncommitted) don’t care.  

Now if the prophet Jonah were here, he probably wouldn’t like this chart, because it’s too complicated. Jonah might say: Either you’re proud to be an American, or you’re not. Either you’re a patriot or you’re not.  The people who are “troubled” really aren’t “committed.”  Being “committed” means being “untroubled.”  But Rabbi Hartman would disagree. All the time we’re connected to institutions, families, friendships and nations about which we have at least a little ambivalence.  It’s perfectly possible to be both troubled and committed.

Now as you might have guessed, he designed his chart to be about people’s feelings about Israel, including his own. He said, in essence:  I am a life long resident of Israel, a veteran of the IDF as are all the members of my family,  and yet I am troubled by various things about Israel. He wrote this long before the Gaza war, so some of the things that he mentioned were a lack of religious freedom for non-Orthodox Jews in Israel (which bothers him even though he is an Orthodox rabbi); an ascendant Israeli right wing and not infrequent episodes of violence perpetrated by members of these far right wing groups; and most of all, lack of resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and lack of progress on the project of Israel living up to the vision of equality spelled out in its Declaration of Independence.  These are some of the reasons why he called himself “troubled committed,” and from his perspective, being “troubled committed”  is quintessentially Jewish: “To be a Jew is to be troubled, to view one’s life, and one’s society, through an aspirational lens, always striving to be more.”

He suggests:  If you’re not troubled, that’s fine for you.  But we do no one any favors by suggesting that the only way to be committed is to be untroubled.  Because what does that accomplish?  People learn some uncomfortable fact about Israel and they become troubled, and then they say - oh no, I’m troubled, I guess that means I’m uncommitted.   Or, it buys into a stereotype that some people have about Israel or about the Jewish community, that the Jewish establishment labels any criticism of Israel whatsoever to be antisemitic. That’s a canard! There’s plenty of criticism of Israel happening all the time, including in Israeli newspapers and in the halls of the Knesset, where a lot of the post-October 7 sense of unity has quickly dissipated and there’s as much disagreement as ever, as Israel seeks to address its very serious challenges. 

I agree with Rabbi Hartman that being at least somewhat “troubled committed,” or validating the “troubled committed,” is a quite typical Jewish posture regarding connection with almost any organization, any group, and certainly with any national project.

I say “committed”  -- How could we not be, when the plurality of Jews around the world live in Israel?  There are so many people in our community who have close relatives who live in Israel, including me - and an even larger number with dear friends in Israel.  There are people in this room right now who live in Israel but are spending this holiday here in Hoboken with their relatives or friends who live here.  The safety and welfare of people in Israel is, for me and for us as a community, top of mind all the time, which is why Israel occupies such an important place in our synagogue’s calendar and programming.

And the necessity of a safe place for Jews in an often hostile world has to be non-negotiable. A powerful quotation about this comes from a quite left-wing Israeli journalist, Gershom Gorenberg, who is a very harsh critic of the Israeli government but even more so, of Jews who seem to take pride in a posture of complete disconnection from Israel. Noting that Jews who have this posture are overwhelmingly American, and that overwhelmingly they are American Jews because they have Jewish ancestors who managed to come to the United States before the 1924 immigration restrictions that closed the doors to most Jews, he says:  “claiming that Jews don’t need a state because you personally are doing fine outside that state is the ultimate in unthinking entitlement.” [Note:  I found this quotation in the new book by Sarah Hurwitz, As a Jew, p. 214.] 

But -- a world that wants to put everyone in binary categories might not really have a category for someone like Rabbi Hartman, a veteran of the IDF with close family members serving in the IDF, who is so obviously, absolutely and resolutely anti-Hamas that it sounds offensive even to point this out, but also has serious concerns about the presence of far-right political parties in the Israeli coalition and is concerned about Israel’s standing in the world, and is concerned about civilian life in Gaza and whether the war is causing tragic additional suffering to civilians in Gaza without accomplishing anything to make Israel safer. According to some, Rabbi Hartman is a left-wing anti-Israel extremist because he is sometimes out in the street protesting against the Netanyahu government and is terribly upset about the suffering of civilians in Gaza.  While according to others, Rabbi Hartman is a right-wing extremist because he thinks that the largest Jewish community in the world has a right and responsibility to exist where it is, in the historic homeland of the Jewish people.  You might agree with Rabbi Hartman or disagree, but I really hope that you would not regard him as an extremist at all.  

I am also guided by the words of Yossi Klein Halevi with whom I have also studied at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, who wrote this recently with reference to the current war in Gaza:  “There are those among us, on the right and the left, who have no questions. One camp insists on our total innocence (“the IDF is the most moral army in the world”). Another uncritically adopts the libels of our enemies. I fear those Jews without ambivalence who, no matter how wrenching the dilemma, always offer a simple narrative that resolves our inner conflicts.”

I also like how my colleague Rabbi Joanna Samuels of the JCC of Manhattan notes that there’s also a tactical reason to avoid the use of binary categories in discussions and arguments with people we disagree with, which is that it usually doesn’t work.  She says:   “We may think we are convincing others with our passion and certainty. More likely, we are hardening their pre-existing opinions—and our own.”  Genuine conversations begin only when people move off of their talking points. 

We often talk about the difference between debate on the one hand, and dialogue on the other hand, and which one is the ideal from the perspective of Jewish tradition. Clearly there’s a time and a place for each of these, though they are different.  In a debate everyone chooses the talking points that fit their perspective and seek to de-emphasize the other side’s talking points. The adversaries in a debate will walk away at the end of the debate with the same positions they had at the beginning.  They are almost certainly not going to convince each other -- though maybe they’ll convince the spectators.

But in a dialogue we don't assume we know everything already.  We listen carefully. And when we’re in dialogue with someone who we trust to be acting in good faith, we're willing to engage with the other side’s talking points that we know are true but that are inconvenient for us, knowing that the other person will do the same with us.

 

Obviously,  no one thinks you can dialogue with everyone. For example, you obviously can’t dialogue with someone who is indifferent to your safety and well-being. You can’t dialogue with someone who is not going to come to the dialogue in good faith. You can’t dialogue with the people that author Amanda Ripley calls “conflict entrepreneurs," who are invested in conflict and exploit it for their own purposes.  And obviously you can’t dialogue with someone who won’t talk with you on principle because they’re boycotting you for your views or the group that you belong to.  But the larger the circle you can’t talk to, the more dangerous the world and society we create. 

Many of us learned the tragic story of Sarah Milgrim of blessed memory - Israeli embassy staffer in DC who was shot and killed outside the DC Jewish museum this past spring, together with her fiance Yaron Lischinsky.  Sarah had a passion for this idea, that when people come in contact with those with whom they disagree, it builds empathy and peace.  he wrote her masters thesis as an analysis of an Israeli-Palestinian initiative called Tech2Peace that encourages young Israelis and Palestinians to work together on technological questions. It’s painfully ironic but also revelatory that an assassin's bullet ended her life and the various dialogue initiatives she was working on or that could have taken place in her future. 

And there are many other examples.  As just one example, I have recently started listening to a podcast by Rabbi Dovid Lewis - and Orthodox rabbi in Manchester in England - and Imam Nasser Kurdy- an imam originally from Jordan who also serves an islamic center in Manchester. They are each passionate about their beliefs, and they model empathy and the capacity to listen deeply to each other even with their significant disagreements.  It takes remarkable courage to hold that kind of conversation.  

Rabbi Rolando Matalon has taught about how in the Book of Exodus, almost immediately after the reading of the Ten Commandments, there’s a passage (Exodus 20:18) that says ומשה נגש אל הערפל אשר שם האלהים. “Moses went into the thick cloud which is where God was.”  Rabbi Matalon teaches that you’re not going to find God in a place of complete clarity and visibility.  Idols reside in well-lit rooms.    But God dwells in a thick cloud.  The search for God is a quest for complexity. 

This fact doesn't relieve us of the responsibility to make decisions and hard choices. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be passionate about our beliefs and values, God forbid!  But it does mean we ought to remember that sound bites and memes are oversimplifications, that we ought to strive to listen and to learn.

The Talmud (Shabbat 31a) suggests that one of the questions people are asked by God at the end of their lives is הבנת דבר מתוך דבר?  Were you able to understand one thing from within another thing?  Were you able to think on a multi-dimensional level?

 
May we know what to answer.

Shanah Tovah!