Maybe you’ve heard this story before.
About a hundred years ago at a yeshiva school —where young men study the Torah and the Talmud — the students were being not a little testy and combative. Nasty arguments became a daily occurrence. Cliques were formed and denunciatory campaigns were waged. There were many “sides” — each of which presumed the “others” were motivated by wicked desires. Rude signs were posted. Crude vulgarities were splayed out beside the bathroom mirrors.
Needless to say, the warp and weave of the community were being ripped to shreds.
The school’s headmaster was an elderly rabbi who had survived his share of pogroms in Russia. He had seen firsthand what happens when society falls apart. So he gathered the young men together in the hall. He called for silence.
Then he asked them this riddle: “How can you tell when it is night?”
“By looking at the sun go down,” the smartest (at least he thought so) student said. “When it sinks below the horizon, that is when it is night.”
“By looking at the calendar,” the most spiritual student (who had the biggest phylactery) said. “When the listed time comes, it is night.”
“By looking at the house down the street,” said the handsomest student who was sure the young girl who lived in that house would eventually marry him. “When the chandelier is lit in the parlor, then it is night.”
“By looking at the sky,” said the yeshiva resident bully, whose argument consisted solely of mind-numbing bluster, “and when it is as dark as Schlomo’s black eye, then it is night.” He laughed, of course, since he was the one who administered poor Schlomo’s thumping.
And there were many other propositions called out from the student assembly. Most if not every suggested answer to the rabbi’s riddle carried at least a smidgeon of self-congratulation and more than a dash of grievance and a whole ladle of provocation.
The exercise was, shall we say, diagnostic. The symptoms were definitive. The rabbi rose then to administer the prognosis, maybe even the medicine.
“You know it is night …” He paused for effect. A hush fell on the room. The young men leaned forward in their seats to listen, and to wait.
“You know when night falls …” The old man’s voice softened nearly to a whisper. He had seen too much night in his many winters.
“ … The night falls when you look at your fellow student and do not see the face of your brother.”
Ah, yes. Lately, we’ve had our share of court cases and dismal debates, expectorating speeches and yard signs galore, hard comics and cruel jokes and petulant talking heads filling the airwaves, and a doomsday election looming on the horizon. Everyone seems to be “othering” everyone, just like the yeshiva school. Even the smart and the religious, the handsome and the bully, have jumped into the fray.
The old rabbi still speaks in a still, small voice. There is no “they” or “them.” There is only us. It is only night when we look at another human being and fail to see the face of a brother, a sister.
We all walk between the earth and the sky. We breathe the same air. We rejoice in the same rain that God lets fall on the just and the unjust. We hear the same thunder, we endure the same storm seasons. We gaze at the same moon and stars. Every flower we see and touch and breathe reminds us poignantly of our common Edenic heritage.
We live in the same Creation because of the simple fact that there is only one Creator, who is, as St. Paul said to his philosophical skeptics on Mars Hill, “the Father of us all, and in Him we live and move and have our being.”
Let no man tear us asunder. Put not your trust in mortal princes. Don’t let the sun go down on your sister and your brother.
After all, there is no “them.” There’s only us.
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