Mr. Rogers' Moment

When I was young, I admired clever people.
Now that I am old, I admire kind people.
—Abraham Joshua Heschel

Mr. Rogers is having a moment: a new movie starring Tom Hanks; a recent book about his life and legacy; and a 2018 documentary about his life about which (it was the law) every liberal pastor and rabbi in the world had to give a sermon.

The new movie, in which Hanks amazingly transforms himself into the legendary children’s TV host, is sweet and critic-proof. I mean, it’s the cinematic equivalent of a Mitch Albom book: it’s not exactly great art, but picking apart something so well intentioned would be churlish and harsh. After all, it’s about kindness, decency of the spirit, forgiveness, and giving people the benefit of the doubt.

And during these sick and unkind times, you have to be pretty jaded not to appreciate such a message. It’s worth remembering the famous quote attributed to Henry James:

Three things in life are important.
The first is to be kind.
The second is to be kind.
And the third is to be kind.

The real secret is that kindness itself is a radical and countercultural gesture. What could be more against the grain of today’s cultural moment than to affirm a stranger’s self-worth, and to receive one another with honest affection despite our differences?

It’s curious that one of the persistent themes in the recent works about Fred Rogers is that “he wasn’t perfect” and “he wasn’t a saint.” It’s repeated so many times that it made me wonder why. Who thought that a gentle and mentoring children’s TV host was a saint? Why is it not enough to be a thoroughly decent and kind human being—and just to leave it at that?

Why is there an expectation that people who do good need to morally perfect? In Jewish terminology, is it not enough to be a Tzaddik—must one also be a Tzaddik Gamur?

That’s a particular pathology that seems to be relevant to our own Mr. Rogers-less age and the world of cancel culture. There’s a cynicism in our society that has been building up for years, that assumes that there is a dark underbelly waiting to be exposed in every do-gooder.

Somebody performs remarkable feats on the athletic field? They’re probably abusing PEDs. A political leader advocates for justice and decency? Surely they’re hypocritical and corrupt. A prominent and compassionate clergyperson? Probably a secret pedophile. And all the well-publicized disgraces of certain athletes, politicians, and religious figures have solidified this point of view in many people’s minds—each scandal is an affirmation that one day all of them will be exposed for what they really are. That’s a secondary part of their tragedy (the primary tragedy must always be their victims).

To be sure, there are real predators and manipulators out there. But it’s tragic to traffic in a culture of cynicism that assumes that everyone’s motives are suspect; that solipsism and self-promotion are at the core of most people’s behavior; that decency is probably a cover for horrible impulses that pervade unwoke culture.

That cynicism seems to me an outgrowth of expecting that a hero has to be perfect, and always in hero-mode; otherwise that person is no hero whatsoever.  Which seems a shame, because if you get rid of all the imperfect heroes, you aren’t going to be left with any heroes at all.

Everyone has their tremors and their doubts. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi told a story about a time, as a young Hasid, when he went to visit his rebbe for counsel. When he arrived, he was denied admittance and told to come back tomorrow. Returning the next day, he was received with the graciousness that he was used to. Forgive me about yesterday, the rebbe explained; “The one you wanted to see yesterday was not here. Today he is.” He didn’t cease being a rebbe because he had an off day.

The new Mr. Rogers movie ends on a fantastic note (so to speak). To understand it, you have to know that Tom Hanks’s Fred Rogers wears the same slight, gentle smile throughout the entire film. Earlier in the film, Mr. Rogers is asked if he ever feels frustrated or angry. Of course I do, he replies. So how does he handle these feelings? He responds: by going swimming, or “banging all the low keys on a piano at the same time.”

In the final shot, the day’s filming has wrapped, and Fred Rogers sits alone at a piano, playing Schumann. Suddenly he stops and unexpectedly slams his fists down on the low keys of the piano.

Then he resumes playing the light, classical melody that had been interrupted.

It’s a great, ambiguous moment. There’s no warning that he was experiencing a particular crisis or having an unusually difficult day. What gave him that moment of anguish? It’s one moment in the film where we get a glimpse that there exist some troubled, churning currents underneath his placid demeanor, and the film doesn’t choose to specify what’s stirring them at that moment.

It doesn’t matter. What matters is the measure of goodness and decency that he brought into the world. So a hero is troubled occasionally by self-doubt. So he is, in fact, un-saintly and complicated. Perhaps that’s the only kind of hero we’ve ever experienced, and we should be grateful enough for that.

A Torah of Kindness

For Rabbi Larry Raphael, and His Torah of Kindness

I’m writing too many eulogies for teachers of mine these days. But when I heard that Larry Raphael had died on Sunday, I wanted to put some thoughts into writing, for he was truly special.

Larry was a dean at HUC-JIR when I arrived at the New York campus in the early ‘90s. He published a few anthologies of Jewish mystery writing (his great passion), and it was fun to talk books with him. He taught professional development classes to rabbinical students, but those are not the lessons that I most cherish from him. There are two that I want to share here.

The first is that Larry was the constant champion of the school’s soup kitchen, which I ran for a few years, each week feeding about 200 people who came in off the city streets and into our school. Yet the soup kitchen was not universally embraced by the administration or the students at the time; it was big disruption to the operations of the building on Monday afternoons. But Larry worked tirelessly behind the scenes to make sure that it was funded and that it thrived. He regularly came to join in the cooking and serving. And he was personally supportive of me, helping me navigate the grant money, for instance.

The soup kitchen really was his baby for many years. It endures today, thanks in part to the strong foundation he laid when he was an administrator at the College.

The second thing for which I’m grateful to Larry is more intensely personal.

Did you ever have the feeling of not being sure if you belonged? The sensation that wherever you were, everyone except you seemed to know exactly where they were supposed to be going and what they were supposed to be doing? I can remember feeling that way at distinct moments when I was a kid in elementary school, sort of perpetually when I was in high school, and many other times since then. I used to think I was the only one who ever felt that way, but I’ve come to learn that I’m not alone.

Well, I sure felt like that the day I interviewed at HUC in New York – “what in the world am I doing here?” I was a senior at Colgate getting a degree in philosophy and religion, not the most pragmatic of majors. I made the decision to go to rabbinical school. There was no Plan B. So I applied and showed up one winter morning at One West 4th Street for my interview.

I walked into the building and sat in the common area with another prospective student. She didn’t seem nervous at all; she seemed right at home. We made small talk. Then another prospective student came into the room. And the two of them—well, their eyes just lit up. “J, is that you?” “D, is that you? I haven’t seen you since…!” And they fell into each other’s arms, two reunited old friends from Jewish summer camp who were now all set to become colleagues together.

As for me, I just sat there with a growing sense of imposter syndrome. I didn’t go to Reform summer camps, I didn’t like NFTY, and I sure wasn’t feeling like this impending interview was a big family reunion. Why would they accept me and not these two, who were obviously “naturals”? In my mind, I started figuring my options in fast food or in the gas-pumping industry.

And then Larry, the Dean of Students, came out and sat beside me. He made the perfect kind of small talk: he asked me about the musicians I liked (I exhaled, “Coltrane!”) and the books I was reading (I had Borowitz’s Renewing the Covenant with me). He put me at ease. More important, he made me feel like I was qualified and deserved to be there, at just the moment that my self-confidence was dissipating. Larry had a gentleness, inherent kindness, and good humor that were so precious to me that day and many times afterwards. I’ll never forget it.

In recent years, those old bad feelings have occasionally returned with renewed fervor. And I’ve wished I had a Larry Raphael nearby for some self-esteem booster shots. Once in a while, an email would arrive from him out of the blue, usually after I’d published an essay or Dvar Torah someplace and he’d want to let me know that he’d read it and liked it. Those notes meant a lot.

Look, I fear that in our world these days, celebrating a person’s kindness may seem banal. I want to be clear: there is nothing banal about being a kind person. It is irreplaceable. I’ve met brilliant academics, dazzling rabbis, and forceful advocates for social justice who were not personally kind people; who lack warmth, or compassion, or a sense that they care about you as an individual. And frankly—it mitigates their success in other realms. Their lack of personal kindness is a character flaw, and while we’re all imperfect creations, somehow their work is less admirable, less whole, because of this missing piece.

Not so with Larry. He consummately lived the Mishnah’s urgent prodding:  וֶהֱוֵי מְקַבֵּל אֶת כָּל הָאָדָם בְּסֵבֶר פָּנִים יָפוֹת / “receive every person with a cheerful countenance”.  There’s a Torah of kindness that emanates from certain kind souls, and he was one of them. May his memory be a blessing.