In a feature this past weekend in Yedioth Ahronoth, a seventeen-year-old boy supplied the following astonishing sentence about romantic relationships:
“Global warming is serious. People going hungry in the world is serious. Who do I love? That’s not serious.”
So for the benefit of all the warriors against the extinction of the dolphins, it is important to say clearly: battles for lofty causes thousands of kilometers away from you are a hundred times easier — and less relevant — than the relationships of love with those closest to you.
Why is it that when a Miss Universe-winning model declares at the award ceremony that she will work to advance world peace, we fill with smirks? Because we know the chance she will advance it by a millimeter is nil, and that it is a meaningless statement. That very statement shows she has no intention of doing anything real. Had she said that when she returns home she will pay more attention to the needs of her elderly neighbor, it would have been far more meaningful.
What did they say about John Lennon? He fought for world peace, but no one would have wanted to be his neighbor.
Take me, for example: it would unequivocally be easier and more fun for me to go out right now and demonstrate on Rothschild Boulevard against hunger in Africa than to restrain myself from nagging my child about that issue I’ve brought up with him a thousand times, knowing I’m doing him harm. It is also far easier than asking forgiveness from the guy who has been angry with me for a year and a half, and easier than organizing an event to bring the local community together. And the closer you get, the greater the challenge becomes. That is why the relationships that build — or destroy — the most are those between two partners, who hold up to each other a daily mirror of the hardest character traits that need working on.
Each person’s individual work on their own character, and the call to realize it first of all in your close surroundings rather than look away, is the most serious thing there is. That is where the repair of the world begins. Not for nothing did our Sages rule: “the poor of your own city come first.”
I am in favor of working for lofty causes, as long as they come with a concrete personal demand (say, a person who speaks out against global warming and actually reduces the garbage they produce).
But people who talk loftily and cannot see the person standing right next to them — that scares me.
Professor Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote it so beautifully:
“World poverty, economic inequality, global warming — what these issues share is that they are big, distant, and global. They are problems that require the coordinated action of millions of people, perhaps billions. Therefore they are political issues more than they are moral ones… World poverty or the economics of equality are not matters of personal morality. They do not demand of the individual virtues such as prudence, justice, restraint, or wisdom, nor faith, hope, generosity, or love. They do not touch the delicate, graceful dance of the life between one person and another.”
(The Great Partnership, page 142)
