The best rabbi I can be now is a journalist

(RNS) — As a rabbi/journalist, I am part of two complementary but ultimately incompatible professions. Where one speaks from a place of love and compassion, the other prioritizes the relentless pursuit of justice and truth.

For the first 40 years of my rabbinic career, I leveraged my journalistic training primarily toward rabbinic ends, as an advocate for Torah, Israel and spiritual matters. Despite that, I worked hard not to compromise journalistic integrity. But still, it was rabbi first, and journalist second. Like the medieval kabbalists, who saw justice and love as divine forces forging a precarious balance in the universe — but with love just a little stronger — my messages consciously leaned in the direction of compassion, comfort and hope.

But last week I became rabbi emeritus, and everything changed. Now, released from my pulpit responsibilities, I get to flip that script.

Over the past few years, the one-two-three punch of COVID-19, Jan. 6 and Oct. 7 forced me to write differently, seeking words to convey greater consolation rather than sharper truth. Clergy everywhere were forced to make hard choices. While the country was fighting sedition, we were called upon to provide sedation. Democracy under attack? Time for a group hug. Corpses piling up at the local hospital? Let me shift my virtual Zoom background to a sunset-in-Cancun. 

Even before COVID-19, clergy relentlessly strove to dull their pain and others’. There was Charlottesville and then the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh, which occurred a day after my mother’s passing, a series of gut punches that left me shaken, wondering what purpose I was serving. At a loss for words, I found myself echoing the banalities of other lost rabbis, some of whom spoke with greater authority and even with soaring poetry, but I saw in their formulaic talking points hints that they too were lost. We all played the role we felt we were assigned — to keep things together. We kept on “teaching to the test,” preaching what everyone expected us to preach — all as we were being taunted by the right and betrayed by the left. 

A million Americans died of COVID. Say that again. I get paid for words — what words can address that reality? I was too spiritually fatigued to find them, so I fell back on scripted words of comfort, seasoned by a dollop of denial.

Seven million human beings have died of this plague — a million more than the Holocaust. But let’s move on.

Speaking of the Holocaust, 80 years after Auschwitz, we prayed the last of the survivors would be able to pass from this earth in peace and dignity, and an era of intense grieving would give way to a less intense but ineradicable memory. But suddenly, on Oct. 7, we all became instant witnesses to a pogrom so horrific, so immediate, so televised, so in-our-face as to leave an indelible mark on our souls and revive our darkest nightmares, thereby resetting the clock of Jewish suffering to here and now.

My whole career has been an orderly progression from darkness to light, from Shoah to rebirth. I narrated that heroic journey. I helped mythologize it. That’s what I did, in essay after essay, sermon after sermon, column after column, class after class. I got to scribe all the achievements of an unparalleled age in Jewish history, from June 6, 1967, to now, as a believer, an activist, a triumphant witness, a breathing stanza of “Hatikvah.”

Then it all came crashing down in a single day.

Still, I rabbi-wrote, ceaselessly, day after day, as best I could, seeking to forge order out of the chaos. The situation cried for comfort. My congregants begged for it, and that’s what I gave them. After Oct. 7, I soothed their souls.

People appreciated it, but I knew I was, in the words of Jeremiah 8:11, “Crying ‘Peace! Peace!’ where there is no peace.” I was conjuring hope where there was very little. I was living in a world that no longer existed, an illusory tableau where we could blithely hop into kayaks and row down the Jordan from now-abandoned northern kibbutzim, dance horas in the Gaza Envelope or walk unselfconsciously down Broadway near Columbia wearing a yarmulke.

Sometimes I could bring comfort, sometimes not. Sometimes I could inspire activism. Sometimes not. Sometimes I could help people empathize with Israelis, Palestinians or Black Lives or immigrants or trans folks. Sometimes, I could even help them sense the divine as we waded through each thousand-year rainstorm relentlessly pounding us, one after another, week after week, with increasing ferocity.

Sometimes, when I was most inspired, I could help people to love one another more. To love the stranger, to love their neighbor, to love themselves. But sometimes, the price we pray for love is truth. I always tried to balance the two in my messages; but as a rabbi, I needed, like the kabbalists, to have a bias toward love.

My reservoir of love has not run dry. Far from it. But it’s become too daunting for me to continue to be an apologist, to split hairs between what is genocide and what is not, or ethnic cleansing, or antisemitism, or Judaism or God. I don’t know how many years I have left, but I can’t spend them all making everyone else feel better — even when they shouldn’t.

I can’t sugarcoat the evils of antisemitism and hate, the immediate dangers of rising fascism in America and Kahanism in Israel, the negation of science, the degradation of women and the Othering of refugees, simply for the sake of keeping congregants soothed. I can’t say “This too shall pass,” when in my ear Jeremiah is calling out, “‘Pass? Pass? There is no ‘Pass.’”

And that’s why it is time for me to transition to journalist-first. The rabbi will still be there but receding to the background a bit. You may not even notice. I won’t take it off my stationery letterhead. It’s a big part of who I am. But so is the truth teller. 

From here on, I speak for no one and nothing but the truth, as I see it. Not for God, not for Torah, nor for any political party.

At a time when the world is crashing, and with no indication that it’s going to get better anytime soon, right now the world needs truth tellers far more than it needs a big hug. I can’t be saddled with the role of priest-comforter when I need to be a prophet echoing the cry of my rebbe-of-truth, Jeremiah.

The best rabbi I can be right now is a journalist.

(Rabbi Joshua Hammerman is the author of “Mensch-Marks: Life Lessons of a Human Rabbi” and “Embracing Auschwitz: Forging a Vibrant, Life-Affirming Judaism That Takes the Holocaust Seriously.” See more of his writing at his Substack page, “In This Moment.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)