Habits of the Heart

Like many of you reading this, I expect, the most powerful moment of this week’s Democratic National Convention for me was the speech of Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg, the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, one of the 109 remaining hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. Jon, and especially Rachel, have tragically become the most recognizable spokespeople for the hostage families. Seeing the tears in their eyes and the warmth of the reception for them from the 50,000 people at the United Center in Chicago, just a few miles from my home, was a profoundly moving moment.

“This is a political convention,” Jon said, “but needing our only son and the cherished hostages home is not a political issue. It is a humanitarian issue.” I have been thinking about that line a lot. Because while the cause of the hostages is certainly a humanitarian issue, I find that the question of whether it’s a political issue highlights a different question: What do we mean when we call something “political”?

I think what Jon meant by “political” here is that this isn’t an issue that can or should be politicized, i.e., used as a tool to score points or advantages, to accrue political capital, for a party or an individual. The hostages are civilians, and they should never have been taken in the first place — so they should be released immediately, on humanitarian grounds.

Yet the very fact that Jon and Rachel spoke at the convention, like Ronen and Orna Neutra, the parents of Omer, who spoke at the Republican National Convention earlier this summer, reflects that there is a political dimension to the issue — in a different sense of the word. This sense is more along the lines of another dictionary definition: “Relating to the government or the public affairs of a country.”

In that sense, securing the release of the hostages is certainly a political issue: absent a miraculous unilateral decision by their Hamas captors or a similarly miraculous rescue operation by the IDF, the way the hostages will come home is through governmental decision-making and negotiation; i.e., political action. That is why both these families spoke at these conventions; it is why so many in Israel have been organizing to apply political pressure on the government for months.

This week on my podcast, Soulful Jewish Living, we began a five-part series exploring some of the spiritual “habits of the heart” about which Alexis de Tocqueville wrote 200 years ago, and that I think Oprah Winfrey had in mind when she talked about the “heart work of democracy” during her speech at the DNC. The five we’re looking at come by way of Parker Palmer’s book, The Heart of Democracy. They include: remembering that we’re all in this together; valuing and embracing otherness; holding tension in life-giving ways; finding our personal voice and agency; and nurturing a capacity to create community. I hope you’ll listen and let me know what you think.

For this week, however, I feel a need to highlight the ways in which so many of these habits find expression in the Torah — and in Parashat Ekev (Deut. 7:12–11:25), that we read this week. Ekev is when Moses seems to hit his rhetorical stride in his valedictory address to the people before they enter the land and begin their exercise in self-government. It is full of grand, sweeping evocations to love God and do God’s ways. But it is also all about the work of the heart, perhaps no more centrally than in this series of verses:

Cut away, therefore, the thickening about your hearts and stiffen your necks no more. For YHVH your God is God supreme and Sovereign supreme, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who shows no favor and takes no bribe, but upholds the cause of the orphan and the widow, and befriends the stranger, providing food and clothing. You too must befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Deut. 10:16-19)

This is the essence. We know from our own experience that our hearts grow thick, that we allow ourselves not to see and hear things we don’t want to see and hear. We know that what starts out as an obvious humanitarian cause, clearly rooted in the deepest springs of Divine compassion–remembering those who, like us, were oppressed strangers; caring for those on the margins of society–can become a political football used to accrue and maintain power.

It’s a tendency as old as humanity, which is precisely why Moses exhorts us to be mindful of it and counter it. The Torah, the eternal truth that we aim to live out  through our spiritual practice, calls us to reject politicization without rejecting politics. Because politics–the work of living together–can and should be about making the world a home for the Divine presence, enabling every image of God to live free from oppression, whether those images of God are hungry migrants on the streets of Chicago, kidnap victims in the tunnels of Gaza, or widows and orphans on the bombed-out streets above them.

That work begins and is constantly sustained in our hearts, and from there it touches our minds and our hands. Our politics are only as healthy as our spiritual practice. It is up to renew and sustain them both.