New Words: Old Problems Yom Kippur Morning 2022 Rabbi Cy Stanway
Let’s start this morning with a little quiz.
What do these words have in common?
Long hauler
Hard pass
Body shame
Overshare
Shrinkflation
The only connection these words to have one another and to a couple of hundred more since last year is that they are now officially considered new words or expressions in English that are taking on a whole different meaning than they did even 5 years ago and made it to the Oxford English Dictionary as authentic words and expressions in the English language.
For example, a ‘long hauler’ 5 years ago was probably a cross country truck driver. Now it’s officially someone with the lingering effects of COVID. “Hard pass” is someone else’s idea that you won’t even consider.
Language changes. It evolves. There is no such thing as a static language. New concepts are given an identity, new words, new compound words and new meanings sprout up to describe an idea. An easy example of this is in Hebrew when they had to come up with a word for ‘telephone’ in modern Hebrew. The original word was a mouthful:
שׂחָ†רָחוֹק†– speak far. It didn’t really work. The modern Hebrew word for telephone? טלפון†!
We have lots of good examples in English, too, and sometimes they are layered with layers of politics or even racism. Think of the whole Ebonics controversy in the 1980’s even though the word itself and its meaning was created in 1973. The controversy was about the linguistic styles that many African Americans use, especially with each other. Mostly white Americans thought it was poor English. It isn’t and it wasn’t. It is different English, that’s all. In the same way that the English we speak today is vastly different than what Chaucer or Shakespeare ever wrote, so Ebonics is simply a version of English that grew out of what many think is standard
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marketplace English. It is probably truer that what was really at the root on the controversy was simple racism.
Language is usually one of the main identifiers of the ‘other guy.’ That’s how enemies identify one another. ‘Oh, he speaks Ukrainian? Kill him!’ – that is how the vast majority of Russians think and act these days.
These knee-jerk reactions are everywhere and when we are knee-jerking all the time, we end up kicking each other. And that’s exactly what is happening these days with the brand-new word for 2022 that is going to be in the new Oxford English Dictionary: cancel culture.
Cancel culture has been going on forever but nowadays it has a label. In America, cancel culture was often associated with some kind of blackmail. ‘Do X or Y will happen.’ Take the story of Frederick Condon. You may not know who he is but he saved your life.
He was in a car accident in 1961 and, in those days, no seatbelts we built into cars and sharp edges in the car were all the rage. In one tragic moment, the stylish car with no seatbelts and sharp edges turned Mr. Condon into a paraplegic for the rest of his life until he died in 2005.
Condon had a friend, a man named Ralph Nader who is, of course well-known and, as you might know, Nader began his lobbying for seatbelts being mandatory. So where is the cancel culture?
The automobile companies hired prostitutes to try to pick up Nader to entrap him in a compromising position because they didn’t want the government telling them how to build safer cars. They hired private detectives to follow Nader around and photograph him with a prostitute. It didn’t work.
And at the end of the day, the story ends in pure poetry: Instead of embarrassing Nader, General Motors was forced to publicly admit what they had done and was forced to apologize. They even paid Nader $500,000 with which he founded ‘Nader’s Raiders’ that led to OSHA, The Safe Drinking Water Act, and even the Freedom of Information Act.
Still the lesson was clear: there was nothing that the auto industry wouldn’t do to shame someone. Cancel culture was alive and well and it only failed in this case because Nader knew right away that he was being set up.
These days, cancel culture has percolated down to everyday people doing everyday things. Because we are so hyperconnected, anything that happens is instantly disseminated and not just to our closest inner circle, but around the world in seconds. There are countless examples where the public censure in social media can mark someone for life. And when that happens, there are often all sorts of negative ramifications. As a colleague of mine noted, “In some instances, a single stupid, insensitive inappropriate comment or posting can derail a person’s career and tarnish their life’s accomplishments. It is not just people who are the subject of such condemnation, but also unpopular or unorthodox ideas, unacceptable political positions or opinions — anything which can be deemed to be beyond the pale or outside the realm of respectability.”
Of course, there is a positive side to cancel culture. Identifying those ideas that are odious, hateful, deranged, violent and so forth need to be brought to the light and everyone needs to know what the person is thinking. When the Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ march took place a few years ago and the tiki-torch bearing men and women were chanting, ‘The Jews will not replace us,’ – yes – everyone of them deserved to be cancelled.
Famous people are easy to cancel when they are caught. Obviously there is a measure of Schadenfreude when Bill Cosby – who paraded around as America’s perfect dad – only to be convicted of sexual assault and, even though his conviction was overturned, everyone knows who he is and what he did and any biography of him will always include those chapters of his life and the lives of his victims. The same is true with Harvey Weinstein and so many others. And, recently, a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan, “Proud Christian Nationalist” is being sold by certain political personalities. By the way, Proud Christian Nationalist is simply a whitewashed version of ‘Proud American Fascist.’ Tell me they don’t deserve to be canceled!
Yet, cancelling someone has become something of a hobby for too many of us. When we are out and about gossiping and telling stories about people and events that we know nothing about, we are engaging in cancel culture where we think we are the arbiters of morality and the judges of someone else’s character when more often than not, we have no idea what we are talking about.
This kind of cancel culture was known to the Talmud. In fact, it seems that everyday cancel culture where judgments are made without any basis in fact was so problematic in 2nd Century Babylonia that the Talmud writes, ‘this defamation is akin to murder.’ And it is.
Think of the story of the Canadian psychologist who was denied a research fellowship at the Cambridge University School of Divinity after someone found a picture of him standing beside someone wearing a T-shirt with an offensive message. It was an old picture and no one knows if the doctor endorsed the idea on the T-shirt or even knew it was there in the first place! But that didn’t matter. Time to cancel. And he was cancelled.
And, frankly, in these days of Photoshop anyone with minimal skill can publish a picture of any one of us doing anything anywhere that looks as real as anything your $5 Kodak camera took in 1973. And with the incomplete information comes the cancel.
The irony of cancelling everyone you disagree with is that it is itself a form of cancel culture. We end up cancelling honest debate, the honest exchange of ideas, opening our minds to different perspectives. In a recent survey, 85% of students reported that they have stopped themselves from expressing an opinion on “sensitive political topics to avoid offending other students” at least “occasionally”, with 20% doing so “often.” What they are identifying is the belief that ‘my Orthodoxy is right – everyone else is wrong and there is no need even listen to anyone else.’ This, by the way, is the root of the banned books movement, the anti-LGBTQ speech restrictions, and, of course the so-called ‘Christian Nationalism’ that many politicians are now so proud of. People may be comfortable with all these restrictions now, but will probably have a change of heart when what they care about is cancelled. By then, though, it might be too late.
Judaism loves disagreement. There is truth in the joke that where there are two Jews, there are three opinions. We argue with ourselves. We talk to ourselves trying to figure out God, trying to figure out tradition, trying to figure out what it means to be Jewish. We have sources, for sure, but sources have a voice and vote, not a veto.
I had an adult pupil some time back who studied Talmud with me. He said something very instructive that I will never forget. He said, “Just give me the answer to what the halacha – the Jewish law – is already!” Gently and lovingly, I had to explain that that is not at all how Jewish law works. In fact, I make the joke that Jews can never have religious bumper stickers that you see anywhere you drive. And why not? Well, if you put a bumper sticker on with a bible verse, you need a bumper sticker with the Rashi commentary, another one with the supra-commentary, and then the midrashim that all conflict with one another and that is just to start! That’s too many bumper stickers in anyone’s book and on anyone’s car! In other words, no one word, no one verse, no one tradition is forever. Like language, it is always evolving whether we like it or not.
The Bible says that iron sharpens iron. There’s one wonderful commentary that interprets it to mean that a good study partner brings out the best in the other when they argue and are open to the other’s idea and vice versa. The four words you will never hear in an authentic learning experience are, ‘Don’t ask that question.’ As a teacher nothing makes me happier than having students argue with me, tell me I’m wrong and then proving it to me. And they learn to listen too, because if they respond to me, I will respond to them. This is not confrontation. This is not war. This is not cancellation of my ideas or anyone else’s. This is growth and this is good. Want ignorant children? That’s easy: just tell them you are right and the argument is settled and they better not bring it up again. In other words, cancel them. Want independent, strong, and wise children? Respond to criticism with ‘That’s interesting. Tell me more.’ Yeah, they’ll put us on the spot but they will never accuse us of cancelling who they are or what they believe.
Ironically, Yom Kippur is a day dedicated to cancellation. Only it is not God cancelling us or we cancelling one another. For Jews, cancel culture ought to follow the idea of Yom Kippur, literally the ‘day of covering up.’ What are covering up? We are covering up each other’s mistakes, missteps, sins, shortcomings. Instead of harping on them forever and pointing them out any chance we get we turn toward something better, something holier.
God has shown us how to do this. How many times did God get frustrated with Jews during their 40 year shleppfest in the desert? Off the top of my head, I can think more than 6 times God wanted to destroy us after having been so frustrated with us. That’s the epitome of cancel culture.
And yet, it never happened. God ended up judging on the side of mercy and on more than one occasion God basically responds to Moses, ‘I never thought of it that way, you are right.’
We ought to be able to do the same.
And sometimes we do and the results are quite amazing because what we allowed to happen was teshuvah – repentance. Cancel culture kills repentance because it kills dialogue. The thinking goes, ‘if I don’t want to hear from you, I don’t want to hear anything from you, good, bad or indifferent.’ But when we stop cancelling, things once thought impossible because probable.
You may know who Nick Cannon is. He is an actor and, for some, a social influencer. Anyway, a couple of years ago he said some really anti-Semitic stuff on his podcast. You know, the usual kind of stuff: “the Rothschilds, centralized banking, the 13 families, the bloodlines that control everything, even outside of America.” It would have been easy to cancel him.
Many outlets did. And for good reason. Just a couple of days afterwards Cannon was all hyper-defensive about his words and how the corporations are suppressing him and how he ‘wouldn’t be bullied.’ You would think the Jewish world would be delighted that he got canceled. But remember, getting cancelled may mean you’re satisfied that somehow someone else will suffer but at the moment of cancellation the door closes on education, inspiration and reconciliation.
In fact Simon Wiesenthal Center reached out tohim and demanded an apology – but that is not all that they did. They went further, not to cancel but to teach and learn. They opened a opened a dialogue with him – and he was receptive. Maybe it was because of his education – he has a doctorate in divinity. In any event, they shared perspectives on Jewish texts and history and learned what we all know: the things he thought were based on fact turned out to be hateful propaganda.
Cannon did not offer some formulaic text of contrition written by his publicist. Rather he spent much time beginning the process of undoing the damage he has caused.
His apology, too was widely respected. He wrote, “First and foremost I extend my deepest and most sincere apologies to my Jewish sisters and brothers for the hurtful and divisive words that came out of my mouth during my … They reinforced the worst stereotypes of a proud and magnificent people and I feel ashamed of the uninformed and naïve place that these words came from. ….I used words & referenced literature I assumed to be factual to uplift my community instead (it) turned out to be hateful propaganda and stereotypical rhetoric that pained another community. For this I am deeply sorry, but now together we can write a new chapter of healing.”
That was teshuvah. He did not cancel the Jews who reach out to him. The Jews who reached out to him were not canceled. Was he embarrassed? Sure. But embarrassment is a tiny price to pay for peace.
Yom Kippur is primarily a day of peace: peace between ourselves and peace between us and God. It is a paradoxical day of remembering and forgetting at the same time. We
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remember the other’s humanity as they remember ours and we cover up their sins, shortcomings, foibles and even their ignorance. We give them a chance to learn and, at the same time, give ourselves the same chance.
Someone once pointed out a scene from the show Ted Lasso who plays a football coach who is supposed to coach an English soccer team. One of his players was upset for missing an easy shot. The coach replied in the most Jewish manner: “The happiest animal in the world is the goldfish, because it has a memory of ten seconds.”
This is a time for teshuva – not a time to dwell on past grudges or relive perceived slights, not a time to cancel out those in our lives who have offended us, but a time to give to another the respect and honor we ask for ourselves.
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Respect and honor. Let’s all remember that as we move forward into a new. Oh yeah….and be a goldfish.
Shanna Tova!
2 Cancel Culture: Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt, The American Rabbi: What Does Judaism Say About Cancel Culture? – by Stuart G Weinblatt | The American Rabbi
