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After the election, a time for healing

Ecclesiastes teaches, “A season is set for everything … a time for slaying and a time for healing, a time for tearing down and a time for building up.”
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November 9, 2016

Ecclesiastes teaches, “A season is set for everything … a time for slaying and a time for healing, a time for tearing down and a time for building up.”

Much has been torn down in the course of the recent election cycle: hopes and expectations, relationships and trust. Recent months have been nasty and brutish for both sides of the political aisle. Now comes the time for healing.

To learn about how Americans can close the political and emotional rifts opened by this election, the Journal called Southern California rabbis in more traditional Republican areas, outside the liberal core of West Los Angeles Jewry, to see what advice they have. Here’s what three of them had to say:

Don’t say that which will not be heeded 

Rabbi Nancy Myers of Temple Beth David, a Reform synagogue in Westminster, east of Santa Ana, knows that some in her congregation have conservative leanings. So when she took the bimah on Rosh Hashanah to speak on the topic of immigration, she was careful not to mention Donald Trump — even during the course of what she described as obviously an anti-Trump sermon.

Her advice for today’s fraught political atmosphere: Sometimes what’s left unsaid is just as important as what’s uttered.

Reached by phone, Myers pointed to a passage in the Talmud attributed to Rabbi Eleazar ben Shimon: “Just as people are commanded to say what will be listened to, they are commanded not to say what will not be listened to.”

In the wake of a particularly divisive election, she suggested, sometimes staying quiet is the best idea.

“If the words you say won’t be heeded anyway, then you have an obligation to remain silent,” she said. “Because then what are you doing? You’re just provoking someone.”

A sanctuary from division

Tucked into the hills south of Escondido in San Diego County is Poway, a small city of about 50,000. Rabbi David Castiglione says that his Reform congregation there, Temple Adat Shalom, roughly reflects the mostly liberal political demographics of American Jewry. Nonetheless, there’s been some friction.

“Because of the extreme political divisiveness of this past 15 months, it has found its way into the nooks and crannies of the most respectable and respecting places, including the congregation,” he said.

Inside the walls of the synagogue itself, however, a sprawling structure set back from the street by a palm-studded garden, the spirit of community rules. Castiglione described his congregation as “very down-to-earth, haimish,” using the Yiddish word for homelike or warm — a place where divisions are set aside.

“Within the walls of the sanctuary, people have respected that this is a place of God and we’re not going to go there,” he said. “Outside the walls, yeah, there’s been a bit of discontent.”

Castiglione suggested that shul-goers could try to repair the damage done in this election by transferring some civility outside of the temple and toning down the rhetoric bandied on Facebook and other social media.

“All I can say, and all I have said, to my congregation is that we as Jews have to be particularly mindful of language and of minding the other,” he said.

Recognizing our shared destiny

Every time he goes to Israel, Rabbi David Eliezrie, the director of North County Chabad Center in Yorba Linda, is impressed by the sense of kinship Israelis display despite their disagreements — which are heated and frequent. It’s a sensibility Americans could afford to borrow from, he said.

“We have to learn to talk to each other like Israelis, who profoundly disagree and love each other greatly,” he said.

Eliezrie believes those bonds arise from a sense of commonality that Jews feel toward one another.

“There’s an underlying feeling that we have a unique destiny together as Jews,” he said. “It’s one of the greatest treasures of all.”

America would be much better off, he speculated, if its citizens could likewise learn to embrace their shared future.

“It’s important to remember that we all have a common destiny as Americans,” he said. “As proud citizens … we have to look beyond our differences for the shared values of this great country.”

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