Rabbi's Chayva's Chat

NOTE: Originally emailed on November 8, 2023.

Last Shabbat, I shared the wisdom of one of our community members and teachers, Anna Bleviss Whitlatch, who taught the families at Mincha Family Shabbat how we see an increase in compassion from the story of Noah's flood to the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. In Noah's story, the world has become sinful and God wipes the slate clean. But by Abraham's time, Abraham successfully bargains God down: "If you can find 50 innocent people in the cities, will you still destroy them? How about 45? 40?" ... All the way down to 10. I challenged us to expand our compassion, to hold it and grow it. This can be especially difficult if we are feeling threatened or emotionally drained; it forces us to make space in our lives and to refill our cups enough to be our better selves.

This week, I'm thinking about the careful balance between justice and compassion. Sometimes, they seem like opposites. In a popular midrash (Genesis Rabbah 12), a king had a set of beautiful, carefully crafted glasses. "If I pour hot water into them, they will shatter," he thought to himself, "But if I pour very cold water into them, they will crack." So the king mixed the hot and cold water, and thus the glasses held. The story is an allegory for God's creation of the world: "If I create the world with only compassion," God thought, "it will be filled with sin. But if I create it with only justice, how could such a world endure?" So God created a world in which we hold both a sense of justice and a sense of compassion; the two seeming opposites are actually a complementary pair.

What we lack divine instruction for, though, is in what measures to hold both justice and compassion. There is no divine algorithm for every situation. It is upon each of us to divine the balance for ourselves, in each situation that we might face. I hope that this next week, as feel your sense of justice or your sense of compassion rising, you remember to do the holy work of uplifting both.