What is Your Hutzpah For?: The Case for Moral Courage

You know the joke about the boy who kills both his parents, then pleads with the court to have mercy because he is an orphan?

It’s the definition of hutzpah – one of those Jewish words that now dwells comfortably in the mainstream American lexicon - used to describe embarrassingly nervy behavior. It is unencumbered audacity – the intersection of over-entitlement and shamelessness. (Prooftext: your favorite, most hutzpadik relative…) Hutzpah is a reflection of arrogance and poor judgment. As Canadian novelist Michael Wex writes: “If [hutzpah] goes to its best friend’s funeral and then propositions the bereaved spouse during the shiva, it’s only because there was no chance to do so at the graveside.”

Indeed, there is a different class of hutzpah – defined not by a toxic disregard and disdain for others, but by a deep, clear-headed insistence that things ought not be as they are – an audacity that transcends social and political hierarchy, that calls us to do better, to fight harder, to manifest our core values. It is this kind of hutzpah that I want to speak about today – the hutzpah that is the great Jewish legacy, which has been woven through Biblical and Rabbinic texts over the past 4000 years and is a standard bearer for a Jewish life of courage and conviction.

This is the hutzpah of Abraham, who refused to acquiesce to God’s plan to destroy Sodom and Gemorrah. Instead, Abraham takes God to task – arguing with deep moral certitude that it is unjust – and unbefitting of God – to punish the innocent with the guilty.

Far be it from You to do a thing such! To kill the righteous with the wicked… Far be it from You! Will the Judge of the entire earth do something so profoundly unjust? (Gen 18:22-25)

This is a classic act of hutzpah klappei sh’maya – hutzpah thrust toward the heavens – the ultimate in spiritual audacity – which seems to charm, rather than enrage God when it comes from a place of humility and love. Later in the Torah, Moses demonstrates the same knack for moral outrage and condemnation of God’s trigger finger. God is apoplectic when the Israelites build a Golden Calf only days after witnessing the miracle of the Sea, and prepares to destroy the entire nation. But Moses pleads for their mercy. According to the midrash, he refused to leave God’s presence until God relented and reversed the decree.

Both Abraham and Moses demonstrate extraordinary hutzpah in their refusal to allow God’s worst instincts to prevail. But there are many others who similarly demonstrate a severe and unyielding posture when it comes to overturning social structures and fighting injustice.

There is Rebecca, who refuses to accept birth order as destiny, and helps Jacob trick his father into receiving the blessing of the first born. There’s Tamar, who refuses to accept her permanent imprisonment under unjust laws binding a woman to the family of her dead husband. There’s the Prophet Natan, who berates King David (the King, afterall!) for having an adulterous relationship with Batsheva and then killing her husband, Uriah. Of course there is Hannah, who we read about on Rosh Hashanah, who refuses to believe that gates of Heaven are closed to her and instead cries out from the depths, redefining what prayer is and ought to be. There is Bruriah, the wise and courageous wife of Rabbi Meir, who refuses to live in a world that dooms bad people to death, rather than compel them to change. There is Mordecai, who refuses to accept Haman’s plot against the Jewish people and instead organizes to challenge the decree.

The hutzpan is ubiquitous in Jewish text and literature. Some of the central moments and characters of Israelite and Jewish history are characterized by hutzpah, a refusal to accede to social norms or their presumed fates. It seems clear that as much as Judaism is about obedience to God and mitzvot, it is also about a legacy of willful defiance against unjust structures, and even at times against God.

Reclaiming this piece of our legacy seems to me to matter more this year than ever. This has been a year in which the most iconic and enduring social structures were radically and dramatically overturned. A year in which a young unlicensed market vendor in a remote town in Tunisia refused to silently abide by the rules of a repressive government and set himself on fire in protest. This, of course, sparked the revolution in Tunisia, which in turn stimulated uprisings across the Middle East, leaving us at the end of the summer with an image none could have predicted and few could have ever imagined: a defeated Mubarak in a cage, on trial for complicity in the killing of hundreds of protesters, and an entire region – previously one of the most stable for its longstanding autocratic regimes – completely upended.

This past year was one in which the people of South Sudan refused to succumb to a permanent state of war and subjugation. Instead, in a remarkable triumph of diplomacy over violence – in its own right an act of incredible hutzpah – spiritual and political audacity - millions of southern Sudanese went to the ballot box and voted by 98.8 percent for “The Great Divorce” – their independence. This, after 50 years of conflict and 2-3 million lives lost. “Free at last!” the signs said. "We are going, we are going to freedom," they sang.

In Libya, thousands fought every day for six months, until the regime of the world’s most bizarre and longest-serving dictator was toppled. And in Syria – where nearly 3,000 men, women and children have been killed in the streets by government forces, with thousands more tortured and imprisoned. This is perhaps the epitome of hutzpah – thousands marching courageously in the pursuit of dignity, justice and freedom. One has to marvel at the kind of courage, spiritual clarity, audacity required to go out in protest knowing that civilians are being recklessly shot in the streets every day and you or your children really might not make it home that night.

And of course there is Israel this past summer – when one young woman had the hutzpah to say “ENOUGH!” after being evicted from her apartment, launching several weeks of protest that brought nearly half a million people out for a nation-wide action for social justice and democracy, for equality and opportunity.

The Jews are not short on hutzpah, but ours is generally not in the spirit of Abraham and Moses, Tamar and Hannah– who risked everything to challenge unjust social structures and fight for the transformation of society. Our hutzpah manifests itself in kvetching that there’s not enough lox at the Kiddush lunch I didn’t pay for. Or that this sermon is already too long. But real hutzpah is not about demanding an upgrade on your oversold flight. It is about finding your moral courage. In a time of tumult and uncertainty, hutzpah is the realization that the shape of tomorrow will depend on courageous acts today.

After Rosa Parks was arrested in December of 1955, a small group of women set out to organize the Blacks of Montgomery to stay off the buses for one day in an act of protest. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist, the local church, and he and Coretta got up before dawn to nervously peer out the window and see if people would abide by the protest.

The early morning special on the South Jackson line, which was normally full of Negro maids on their way to work, still had its groaning engine and squeaky brakes, but it was an empty shell. So was the next bus, and the next. In spite of the bitter morning cold, their fear of white people and their desperate need for wages, Montgomery Negroes were turning the City Bus Lines into a ghost fleet. King, astonished and overjoyed, jumped into his car to see whether the response was the same elsewhere in the city. It was.

...That Monday evening, a crowd of perhaps 10,000 Negroes gathered at the Holt Street Baptist Church, and the 26 year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered there his very first political address. "There comes a time," King said, "when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. . . . We are here because we are tired now." - Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters

King’s church grew to nearly 40,000 former bus riders, who spent the next 381 days walking to work through the brutal cold of winter and burning heat of summer, though arrests and bombings, through intimidation and violence. Finally, more than a year later, the Supreme Court declared that segregation of buses in the United States of America was unconstitutional.

I often wonder where Parks and King and the Black citizens of Montgomery got their hutzpah. What strengthened them to see through the perils of the present and imagine a “joyous daybreak” at the end of “the long night of captivity”? Something magical happened that first cold Monday morning – bolstered by each empty bus that rolled by - that gave the people the faith to struggle and persist until the whole world changed.

Every movement of social change starts with one person taking one step. There came a time when the Israelites, so habituated to slavery that they castigated Moses and Aaron for trying to liberate them -- glimpsed the possibility of freedom and started to walk toward the Promised Land. There came a time when Tunisians and Egyptians and Yemenites and Syrians and Libyans all decided to cast their lot in the fight for freedom, when Israelis decided to take a stand for human dignity and justice.

There will come a time when we too will grow tired, when we will simply no longer be able to abide by the lack of opportunity and lack of hope for so many children living in poverty – and we will feel compelled to help bring opportunity to school children in Uganda. There will come a time in which we will no longer be able to tolerate laws that institutionalize discrimination against gays and lesbians, depriving them of the right to get married. There will be a time in which access to good, healthy food will seem not like a luxury but like a necessity for all people in our city – and we will have no choice but to act, with righteous indignation, to change the supermarket landscape of LA.

A few years ago a Mexican immigrant I know well received word that his father was dying back in Mexico City. Though terrified by the prospect of traversing the heavily guarded border, he knew his duty as a son called him to his father’s side. He spent a beautiful and heartwrenching week in their home, helping to get the affairs in order, saying final words of farewell. Then he prepared to return home to LA. Nineteen years earlier he had crossed into California as a young man with his beautiful and loving girlfriend. In the years since, they got married, learned fluent English and raised three children, two of whom had already graduated from high school in Santa Monica – one now studying to be a nurse and the other a graphic designer. He worked the night shift at a grocery chain for years, unloading fruits and vegetables all night long, and though the work was backbreaking, he was strong and determined and knew that with honest work, he and his wife would be able to make enough to rent a small apartment and buy their children text books for school. Living in a dangerous neighborhood, their priorities were keeping their children safe, holding on to their jobs, going to church and praying that some legislative miracle would create a path to citizenship. They, like 12 million other undocumented workers in the US, lived in the shadows – until he got the call to go see Papa in Mexico City. This time, the border he approached to reenter the United States was littered with fences and border patrol agents and Minutemen. His wife, children, church and friends prayed to God for his safe return and struggled to survive without the second income. He, meanwhile, underwent all manner of humiliating defeats at the border, being caught and sent back several times. At one point his wife, in desperation, paid a mule $5,000 to help get him safely across the border. The money, several months pay, disappeared - she never heard from the mule again. Finally, after 6 weeks of literally living underground, he showed up at home late one night – battered and beaten, having lost over 50 pounds and put through unthinkable degradation, but alive. And home.

There will come a time when we, an immigrant people, will tire of… no, will no longer be able to stand the injustices perpetrated by a broken immigration system that tears families apart and leaves decent, honest people with no recourse and no hope.

But if immigration reform and food justice and global education and gay marriage will not drive you to the streets, I ask you on this Yom Kippur – day of inner wrestling – to consider what will. As we go through our heshbon hanefesh today – confronting all the ways in which we have fallen short, not been the best we could be - when is the last time you were really brave? I don’t only mean staring down dictator brave. I mean, inconveniencing yourself beyond signing on to an email petition, taking a real risk to make the world more fair, just, equitable. There is such a thing as prophetic kvetching. It is kvetching that comes when we can no longer stand the injustices that permeate every corner of our society. Prophetic kvetching and holy hutzpah is the stuff that sparks social movements. It will only happen when we harness the audacity that is our birthright – bequeathed to us by Abraham and Moses and Rebecca and Hannah. And use it to demand social change.

The Polish poet and Nobelist Czeslaw Milosz writes:
      day draws near
      another one
      do what you can.

Last night we spoke about the first question that God asks human beings in the Torah – ayeka. We talked about the religious imperative to ask ourselves where we are, to uncover the truest part of the self in order to live authentically and love deeply. But the first question that human beings ask in the Torah appears only one chapter later. Cain, having just killed his brother Abel, responds to God’s query as to his whereabouts by asking “hashomer ahi anohi?” The Jewish response to that question has always been an unequivocal YES. We are called to realize that we are all caught up in an inescapable web of human connection and responsibility, that social justice is not a luxury or a pastime or a strategy for attracting young people to shul– it is a central, essential, irreplaceable element of the religious and spiritual life.

But that’s not all. The second question is actually the answer to the first - ayeka: where are you? Who are you? What is your life about? Hashomer ahi anokhi: Who am I? I am my brother’s keeper.

Let us find our courage. Our holy hutzpah. Our prophetic kvetch – and use it realize the change our world hungers for.