In these days when hardly a week goes by without the disclosure of the fall from grace of some public figure or clergyman, all of us have become infected with the leprosy of cynicism, which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as “An attitude of scornful or jaded negativity, especially a general distrust of the integrity or professed motives of others.” I would extend cynicism beyond that as well, to a general distrust of the degree to which others can change.
We who are believers in the Living God and in his Messiah Yeshua are caught on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand we are told,” "Can the Ethiopian change his skin Or the leopard his spots? Then you also can do good Who are accustomed to doing evil (Jer 13:23), but on the other we are asked to believe, 9 Don't you know that unrighteous people will have no share in the Kingdom of God? Don't delude yourselves - people who engage in sex before marriage, who worship idols, who engage in sex after marriage with someone other than their spouse, who engage in active or passive homosexuality, 10 who steal, who are greedy, who get drunk, who assail people with contemptuous language, who rob - none of them will share in the Kingdom of God. 11 Some of you used to do these things. But you have cleansed yourselves, you have been set apart for God, you have come to be counted righteous through the power of the Lord Yeshua the Messiah and the Spirit of our God (1 Cor 6). We are obliged to be “wise as serpents” and yet also to be “harmless as doves.” We are called to be wary of the wickedness that is in the world, and yet also to not disbelieve in the redemptive power of God.
Four nameless men are the main characters in this story (2 Kings 7:3-20). They are social pariahs---oustcasts--because they are lepers. Their city had been besieged by Ben-Haddad, King of Syria. This means that the city had been cut off from food, water and supplies, so that the people were starving, and cannibalism had broken out. In chapter six, just before today’s haftarah two women have a dispute brought to the king. They had an agreement to cook and eat their children: one woman had complied, but the other had reneged on the deal. This is how bad things had become.
In the midst of these dire circumstances, our four lepers, already social outcasts are prepared to defect to the besieging enemies, figuring, “We’re surely going to die here: if the enemy kills us, it won’t be any different from what we are facing already. But maybe if we do this we will have a chance at surviving? On a purely moral plane, these are not admirable individuals: already outcasts, they are prepared to defect and save their own necks. But these guys will become the heroes of this story.
After going out to the enemy’s camp, they discover the enemy hordes have fled in haste, leaving behind their food and treasures of all kinds. After stuffing themselves, and “liberating” then burying much valuable plunder, our lepers decide, “‘We are not doing right. This is a day of good news, and we are keeping silent! If we wait until the light of morning, we shall incur guilt. Come, let us go and inform the king's palace.’ 10 They went and called out to the gatekeepers of the city and told them, ëWe have been to the Aramean camp. There is not a soul there, nor any human sound; but the horses are tethered and the asses are tethered and the tents are undisturbed.’” And so they do, saving an entire population from extinction and reviving the life of the City of Samaria,.
We need to remember again that these four men are something of the very definition of flawed human beings--lepers and traitors, every one of them. And yet, they become heroes, icons of their people.
What are we to make of this for our own lives?
First, we need to realize exclusion can contribute to marginalized people becoming anti-social and doing anti-social things, even criminal things. Such people, when they feel hopeless concerning being included in society, will, at times take anti-social action, even criminal action, horrific action, because they feel they have nothing to lose. Of course this does not excuse them for the things they might do, nor does it predetermine that everyone in such a situation would do the same things. Still, sometimes marginalization leads to mayhem. Our lepers felt they had nothing to lose, so they prepared to go over to the enemy. And in Blacksburg, Virginia this past week, Cho Seung-hui, enraged, unbalanced, marginalized, did the ultimate anti-social action—taking thirty-two lives, because he felt he had nothing more to lose. He thought himself a leper—and he took it out on everyone else.
Second, even people who have been excluded, disadvantaged, and marginalized can do extraordinary things. I heard a story recently about a young boy, aged nine, a Navajo, who was sent away from his reservation to go into the city of the White Man to advance the cause of his people. How this young man began peddling on the streets, was taken in by a religious Jewish family where he learned to speak Yiddish, how he eventually went to Law School at a very young age, became involved with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, made arrangements whereby Native Americans could have casinos on their reservations, how he now gets significant percentage of the take of these reservations himself, making him most probably a billionaire.
Excluded, disadvantaged, and marginalized can do extraordinary things. What of Yeshua, regarded as illegitimate, growing up in a small village in a country occupied by a foreign power, his father a workman, a carpenter, his networking group—a collection of fishermen and social outcasts—and yet, he is the most well-known religious leader in the world—with more books written about him, more art featuring him than anyone who ever lived.
Third, crisis is often the crucible of transformation—crisis becomes the doorway to opportunity for great leaps and reversals in life. In AA, when someone hits bottom—reaching a crisis they have long avoided, this can be the beginning of an entirely new life. And these four lepers, facing their last crisis come through heroes.
Fourth, crisis is often the proving ground of greatness. It is at a time of crisis that greatness is revealed, sometimes surprising greatness. Harry Truman was one of those people. When Franklin Delano Rooservelt died on April 12, 1945, this little haberdasher from Independence, Missouri, was thrust into the position of President of these United States. Roosevelt held Truman in such low regard, that he had never even shared with him the existence and progress of experiments with the Atomic Bomb. But the crises Harry Truman faced revealed his greatness.
Consider the example of Liviu Lebrescu, the Romania-born Israeli Professor who gave his life to save his students in the massacre at Virginia Tech. In her article in a Philadelphia newspaper,
Phillyburbs, Elizabeth Fisher writes:
Librescu, 75, was a native of Romania who survived the Nazi death camps during World War II. He immigrated to Israel before moving to the United States to teach engineering. He’d made a name for himself at Virginia Tech, where he taught for 20 years.
On Monday, Librescu did not survive after a deranged gunman carried out his gruesome mission of mass murder on the campus of 14,000 students. As Seung-Hui Cho tried to force his way into Librescu’s lecture hall, the professor locked the door and put his body in the line of fire so some of his students could escape the room by jumping from the windows.
. . . Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, called Librescu’s actions brave and remarkable, and memorialized him on the center’s Web site.
“When evil stopped at his door and he saw this murderer was going to kill his students, he decided he would not be a bystander,” Hier said on a site posting.
As Holocaust survivors age, their ranks are thinning out. One of the greatest tragedies of Librescu’s death is that, as a professor of engineering, he was still an energetic educator who lived a simple life dedicated to family and his students, his colleagues said.
Another survivor who has remained active by educating young people about the realities of the Holocaust is David Tuck, a member of Temple Shalom in Bristol Township.
“What [Librescu] did was courageous. That’s human nature, but a sharp contrast to how we were treated in the concentration camps. He gave his life and I give him credit,” said Tuck, who survived four years in Auschwicz.
. . . Rabbi Eliott Perlstein, spiritual head of Ohev Shalom in Northampton, said that Librescu was about 14 years old when the war ended and was one of a few Jewish children who survived the Nazis.
Camp guards usually sent young children directly to the gas chambers because they weren’t strong enough to perform heavy work, the rabbi said.
Perlstein suggested that some adults in the camps might have protected Librescu and, in a split second on the day of the tragedy in Virginia, the professor repaid the debt by giving his own life to save a new generation.
In another article from Canada, this time, William Miller, a professor from the University of Michigan, who has studied acts of courage, speaks to the issue:
When considering a tragedy like Virginia Tech, people naturally wonder whether they would be "perfect in courage" if confronted with similar circumstances. Would they have reacted like Mr. Librescu? Would they have risked their lives to save others?
William I. Miller, author of an acclaimed book on the topic, The Mystery of Courage, believes that for most of us, the answer to those questions is no. "That's just classic grand, heroic behaviour," Prof. Miller, a historian and law professor at the University of Michigan, said of Mr. Librescu's deeds. Such heroic acts are "pretty rare," he said.
He wonders whether such acts will be come only rarer, whether Western society has become so risk-averse that we are increasingly incapable of heroism. He despairs when he sees kids in his Michigan neighbourhood wearing "armour at the level of a medieval knight" as they learn to ride a bicycle and hears that touch football has been banned at the local elementary school because the ball is pointed.
"We so shield our children and ourselves from any encounter where we're called on to deliver," he said.
His research into courage led him to study soldiers' memoirs, particularly from the U.S. Civil War, and what he found is that it is difficult to predict who will behave courageously under fire. "One of the things that features very prominently in these memoirs is that people are always sizing up everyone else in the unit: 'Who's the courageous guy, and who's the coward?' There are some tendencies but they can never quite predict. The little nerdy accountant turns out to be a great soldier and the barroom brawler turns out to just crack when he hears gunfire."
Another interesting finding was that courage is not inexhaustible. Valiant soldiers can only be asked to go to the well so many times before cracking under pressure. But, by the same token, someone who fled battle in one instance could "deliver in spades in the next one because he was so ashamed,"
Because grand heroic acts such as Mr. Librescu's are so rare, Prof. Miller prefers to focus attention on people a little lower down the bravery scale. "What do we call just the ability to be there every day and not run, like these poor guys in Iraq?" he asked. "They see guys every day get maimed and sniped and roadside-bombed, and yet they just go and get in their Humvee every day and discharge their duty. They're not doing anything that's going to get mentioned in the papers, but they're showing up doing a dangerous, terrible crappy job, right? At some level you want to say that takes some sort of moral quality that is to be admired." (Graeme Hamilton, “Uncommon heroes.” National Post Published: Saturday, April 21, 2007).
May Hashem grant to all of us the wisdom to prepare our hearts and minds for those times when, in matters great and small, it takes courage to take a stand. This might be standing up to prejudice in the workplace, it might mean standing up for defenseless people when they are being bullied, it might mean reaching out to someone whom others reject just because it is right to do so. Or it might mean putting oneself in the line of fire to save the lives of others.
Of course, for Messianic Jews, the ultimate reason we should do this is that we know ourselves to all be debtors to Yeshua, who gave his life not only for his friends, but even for his enemies and those indifferent to him.
If we would be Yeshua’s followers, and followers of simple saints like Liviu Lebrescu, we must learn to cultivate in ourselves and in one another the quality of courage, even if it is only in the small things.
Even in the small things, it is great to show courage.
Instead of being part of the masses that cower in the corner when injustice, cruelty and danger raise a wicked fist, may God grant us the courage to be great
And may he grant to us the greatness to be courageous.
Amen.
Helsinki Interview
