Welcome to Soulful Jewish Living: Mindful Practices for Every Day with me, Josh Feigelson.
I’m grateful you’re here, and I hope you benefit from our time together.
On a blustery day in the fall of 2013, our family drove to downtown Chicago for a momentous occasion: My wife Natalie was becoming an American citizen. Natalie was born in Ottawa and grew up in Toronto. To this day she still insists on referring to the Colorado Avalanche hockey team as the Quebec Nordiques, despite the fact the team moved over 30 years ago. But, after years of living in the United States with a Green Card, on that day, Natalie and hundreds of other immigrants who were also surrounded by their families, were sworn in as U.S. citizens by a Federal judge.
The way the law was applied at that time, the before and after of the situation wasn’t so different. Having a Green Card allowed Natalie to feel safe and welcome in America. She could work wherever she wanted to, and she could come and go from the country as she pleased. She was required to pay taxes, including Social Security and Medicare, and she would be eligible for those benefits down the road. And, it seems important to say, the thought of deportation never even occurred to us. Basically, she enjoyed nearly all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.
So what changed when she became a citizen? On top of the many other rights she was already granted by her Green Card, it came down to three things: She could vote, she could run for office, and she could serve on a jury. When you boil it all down, those rights were at the heart of the citizenship she gained that morning.
This is the third episode in our miniseries leading up to the 250th anniversary of American independence. As a reminder, we’re drawing inspiration for this series from Professor Jeremy Engels’s book, Mindful Democracy: A Declaration of Interdependence. Today I want to reflect on this idea of rights, which is so central to how we think of what it means to be a citizen in a democracy—or, in this one anyway.
Engels points out that we tend to focus on what we’re entitled to by virtue of our rights: the freedom to live as we please, to pursue happiness in our own way. And while that’s important for a lot of reasons, it can also lead to a situation where we approach society and one another with an attitude of, what can I get out of this? What’s my share? When we think primarily in that lens, we can come to view other people—our fellow citizens and residents—as competitors, each of us trying to extract as much as we can for ourselves. Engels calls that “enemyship,” an approach to citizenship that sees others primarily in terms of their transactional value to us.
In its place, he proposes what is ultimately a deeply Jewish idea: Centering the notion of responsibility just as much as the idea of rights. Look no further than the word mitzvah, which is the essence of the Torah. Mitzvah is often translated as commandment, but as we’ve talked about before on the podcast, the mystical and Hasidic traditions also understand it to be rooted in the idea of connection. That is, a mitzvah isn’t only a good deed or even something we perform because God told us to do it. It’s also an act we do because we have a responsibility—to other people, to the world, to the Creator, to ourselves.
It’s probably easiest to sense this orientation when we think about interpersonal mitzvot, or mitzvot ben adam l’chavero: Returning a lost object, giving tzedakah, caring for those on the margins of society, and the like. Yes, we might enjoy a good feeling from doing them, and there might even be something in it for us, but fundamentally I think we perform these acts because we have an innate sense that we’re connected—and thus we’re responsible.
We’re coming up on 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, and you can kind of see how a rights-oriented framework reinforces it. Rights center in the individual. They rest upon and feed an idea that each of us is unique and independent of everyone else. But a mitzvah orientation centers around the idea of inter-dependence, of mutual responsibility. And that leads right to the subtitle of Jeremy Engels’s book: A declaration of interdependence to heal a fractured world.
What would it look like in your own life to start adopting a mitzvah orientation—not only to the Jewish things in your life, but as a general social attitude? Here’s a practice you can try this week to explore that. It’s not a meditation practice—it’s an accountability practice, so it’ll look a little different.
You’ll start with reaching out to someone to be your havruta, your accountability partner. It could be a friend or family member who you think would appreciate this kind of experiment. You might send them a text to tell them you’re trying out a week-long practice focused on looking outward and practicing mutual responsibility instead of just focusing on your own daily to-do list. It involves sending a single-sentence text check-in at the end of the day. Would this person be open to being your havruta, and doing this together with you for five days?
You don’t want this to feel like a chore or a performance, so here are some suggested ground rules. At the end of each day, both of you can send a text answering the question, “Where did I show up for someone else today, even when it was a little inconvenient for me?” This is not about finding some big, heroic act. No grand gestures here. Keep it small. It could be as simple as letting someone cut ahead of you in traffic, pausing to listen genuinely to a colleague’s frustration, or washing a dish you didn’t leave in the sink.
And, really important: I’d encourage you to agree that you don’t need to offer each other validation. No, “Great job” or heart emojis. “Thanks for sharing” is great, or give a thumbs up. The goal here is to witness, not to evaluate.
And: the goal here is to start conditioning yourself to do these things not just for the dopamine hit of feeling good, but because you’re feeling into the sense of interconnection and interdependence, the sense of mitzvah, that actually links us all together.
Try it out for a week. Maybe you’ll find that because you know you have to send that text tonight, you start going through the world a little differently. When an interruption happens, maybe you can see it less as a frustration that violates your right to your time and more as an opportunity for what you’ll text your havruta partner tonight. In those moments, maybe you can ask yourself, Is this a moment where I can lean into a sense of responsibility and interdependence? Maybe. Let me know how it goes.
Blessings for the journey. Know that I’m on it with you.
Thank you for joining us for Soulful Jewish Living: Mindful Practices for Every Day, a production of Unpacked, a brand of OpenDor Media, and the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. This episode is sponsored by Jonathan and Kori Kalafer and the Somerset Patriots: The Bridgewater, NJ-based AA Affiliate of the New York Yankees. If you like this show, subscribe, share this episode with a friend, give us five stars on Apple Podcasts. Check out our website, unpacked.media for everything Unpacked-related, and subscribe to our other podcasts, and check out the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. Most importantly, be in touch–about what you heard today, what you’d like to hear more about, or to dedicate an episode. Write to me at josh@unpacked.media.
This episode was hosted by me, Rabbi Josh Feigelson. Audio was edited by Rob Pera and we’re produced by Rivky Stern. Thanks for joining us.