Politics and Policy Archive
Welcome to Politics and Policy where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the important political and public policy questions facing us as Jews and as Americans.
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Balancing Openness and Vigilance
By Shari Cohen
I had always wondered why
“remember the Sabbath” was so important as to be included in the Ten
Commandments alongside “thou shalt not kill.”
I think I have finally realized why. Even
in a democratic society, where multiple views and interests are always on the table, we
are in desperate need of practices or resources that can help us to escape from dominant
mindsets and to imagine alternative ways of thinking about and being in the world.
This has become clear to me in the
ongoing debate about what was known, and by whom, prior to September 11. I agree with those who argue that the problem lay
as much in the inability to imagine that someone could use a passenger plane as a missile
to destroy the symbol of global commerce as it did in a breakdown of bureaucratic
coordination; it stemmed as much from a failure of imagination as from a failure to gather
and share information.
But the readiness of so many to give
up civil liberties for safety demonstrates a similar lack of imagination. In conversation after conversation over the last
weeks and months, friends and colleagues who had great hopes for the collaborative
advances unleashed by new information technologies and by a borderless world have become
profoundly pessimistic about the ability to realize these possibilities.
One of the major challenges of this
moment in history is that of holding together these two impulses at once: How, at a time
of greater vigilance – regarding terrorism and other emerging threats -- do we not
lose sight of the openness that is our strength and might well be our best hope for the
future? Why were we not able, at a time of
openness such as that of the late 1990s, to imagine the needs for vigilance?
Imagination is the ability to
visualize other realities than the one in which we are presently immersed. Imagination is the faculty that saves us from
becoming so convinced of our existing assumptions about the world that we are unable to
escape from them. Imagination enables us to
become aware of our blind spots. And
sometimes this can mean life or death, quite literally, or for the values we hold dear.
Interestingly, Shabbat offers a set
of practices that stimulates this kind of imagination.
As citizens, we ought to take the insights it offers seriously. We should also consider how to bring the spirit of
these practices into our political process.
The basic injunction of Shabbat is to
stop – for twenty-five hours -- engaging in that which occupies our minds and bodies
during the rest of the week. “Remember
the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days
shalt thou labor and do all thy work. But the
seventh day is a Sabbath unto the Lord thy God.” (Exodus XX:8-10) This injunction creates a space for looking at the
world in unfamiliar ways simply by silencing those perspectives that prevail during the
week. It also makes room for other ways of
engaging the world: for being present without acting, for contemplation without planning. Its weekly recurrence allows for constant
reevaluation and a natural pluralism.
Shabbat’s central contention
that there are limitations to what we can know or accomplish is another important element. Imagining the world from a variety of different
standpoints depends on our remembering that the ones that prevail during the week are by
definition partial. “For in six days the
Lord made heaven and earth, the seas and all that is in them, and rested on the Sabbath
day, and hallowed it.” (Exodus XX:11). After
all, even God rested from the act of creating the world.
For people like me, this must be taken metaphorically: as an acknowledgement of the
limits of human power rather than a statement about God’s behavior or power per se. Thus Shabbat warns us against the human
inclination that we can become “God-like” by thinking we know the entire truth
or that we can act in the world without unleashing unintended consequences.
But Shabbat does more than provide a
means to extricate ourselves from our accustomed ways of looking at, or of being in, the
world. Another essential aspect of Shabbat is
its aim to provide us with a “taste of the world to come.” This is a reminder of our utopian ideals and a
renewal of our commitment to strive on their behalf, even as we know that those ideals are
unattainable. This regular recognition of
our potential to deploy human capacities to address our current dilemmas and
understandings ever more effectively, creatively and ethically lifts us out of the
frustrations of our necessarily incremental progress in our day-to-day work.
Can these aspects of Shabbat really
help us overcome our seeming inability to imagine the ideals of openness and the needs for
vigilance at once? Not directly. But at this time of unpredictability, baffling
change and insecurity, we need practices that strengthen our capacity to simultaneously
hold apparently contradictory ways of thinking about the world. Maybe this has always been true, which would
explain the prominent place given to Shabbat in the Ten Commandments.
To view other articles by Shari Cohen, click here.
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