In the latest edition of his Search for Meaning podcast, Stephen Wise Temple Senior Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback delivers his 2022 (5783) Rosh Hashanah sermon, entitled, “Circles of Concern.” You can view the full video here.
The full transcript of Rabbi Yoshi’s Rosh Hashanah sermon is below:
At the end of the movie, “Schindler’s List,” Yitzhak Shtern, played by Ben Kingsley, presents Oskar Schindler with a ring. On it, he explains, are engraved words from the Talmud that say: “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.”
Schindler, played by Liam Neeson, is clearly moved. As he reaches out to shake Shtern’s hand, he says, “I could have got more out … if I had just …”
“No, no, no,” Shtern says: “… There are 1,100 people who are alive because of you—look at them … There will be generations because of what you did.”
“I didn’t do enough,” Schindler says.
“You did so much,” Shtern tells him.
The survivors whose lives Schindler saved really did give him a ring as a token of their appreciation. The gold was sourced from their fillings which they volunteered to the ring maker.
But the part about the inscription from the Talmud was the invention of the filmmakers and, if you know your Talmud, you might actually think that they got the quote wrong.
The original text that teaches that “whoever saves one life saves the world entire” comes from tractate Sanhedrin and the context is interesting and important.
It’s part of the instructions a judge gives to witnesses in a capital case, warning them to be extra careful with their testimony since a person’s life is literally at stake. To prove its point, the Talmud quotes a verse from the Bible, the one that describes the world’s first murder—a fratricide—Cain killing his little brother Abel in jealousy and rage
In the story from the Torah, immediately after the murder, God says to Cain, “What have you done?!?! The blood of your brother cries out to me from the ground.” (Gen. 4:10) The Rabbis notice though that the word “blood” in Hebrew is in the plural, literally, “the bloods of your brother – דְּמֵ֣י אָחִ֔יךָ.” Why the plural? Because, the rabbis reason, Cain didn’t just kill Abel. He killed all of Abel’s potential descendants—generations that might have come to be had he lived.
And then the Talmud teaches: “Therefore the creation of all humanity began with just one individual soul—the first human—to teach you that whoever destroys one soul …, destroys an entire world. And whoever saves one soul … saves an entire world.”
A person is an entire world because all humanity can descend from that one soul.
But in most printed editions of the Talmud, the Hebrew text includes an extra word:
שֶׁכָּל הַמְאַבֵּד נֶפֶשׁ אַחַת מִיִּשְׂרָאֵל… כְּאִלּוּ אִבֵּד עוֹלָם מָלֵא. וְכָל הַמְקַיֵּם נֶפֶשׁ אַחַת מִיִּשְׂרָאֵל… כְּאִלּוּ קִיֵּם עוֹלָם מָלֵא
“Whoever destroys a life from Israel, destroys an entire world. Whoever saves a life from Israel, saves an entire world.”
“Israel” here means Jew.
If you kill a Jew, you destroy the world. If you save a Jew, you save the world.
This is more specific, more particular, less universal.
It might be read as a text about the primacy of Jewish lives and, perhaps by extension, about the relative unimportance of the lives of others. For some of us, such a sentiment might make sense given our history of oppression at the hands of anti-Semites and those who were simply apathetic about our fate. If we don’t take care of our own, who will? But for others, such a reading of the text smacks of Jewish superiority. It’s one thing to cherish and love your own people but it’s quite another to imagine that their lives are inherently more precious, more valuable than the lives of others.
There is, however, scholarly debate about this text and there are many manuscripts of the Talmud that do not include that word mee’Yisrael. These versions read like the ring in “Schindler’s List”: “Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.”
Most experts agree that the universal version is the original.
Throughout the generations, sages, scholars, and ethicists have asked the question inspired by the tension between these two readings of the text: Should we concern ourselves with the well-being of all humanity or should we focus instead on our own needs, the needs of our family, our community, and our people?
Make no mistake, these variant readings have real-world consequences. Lives can be spared—or not—based on how we interpret this text.
A few years ago, in partnership with “Save the Syrian Children,” a non-profit created by two members of our own community, we sent shipping containers filled with toys, clothing, and medical supplies to help children in Syria caught in the crossfire of a bloody civil war. Our community came together to pack the containers and include messages of support and solidarity. Those supplies saved lives. Had we said as a community, “Some of the parents of those innocent children are our enemies. We don’t need to go out of our way to help them,” some of them would surely have died.
This past spring as a community we raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to help more than 150 refugees from the war in Ukraine journey to Israel. We sent several planes full of medical and humanitarian supplies to Ukraine. Many of those we helped and even saved were not Jewish. Had we not given so generously as a community, some of those people would have perished.
We have saved worlds.
But some Jews though argue that when we focus finite energy and resources on tikkun olam, repairing the broader world, we diminish our own community.
Whose lives, we hear it asked, should we be trying to save? Whose schools and programs should we be supporting? How far should our concern for others extend?
Millenia ago, our tradition wrestled with these very same questions.
When it comes to our obligations to others, we would be wise to learn from our sages. In the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Bava Metzia, Rabbi Yosef offers a verse from Exodus which imagines the situation of someone coming to you for a loan. There’s only such much to go around—how do you decide where to give?
The Talmud begins by quoting a verse from the Bible: “If you lend money to My people,” the verse from Exodus states, “to the poor who are with you—do not act toward them as a creditor; exact no interest from them.” (Ex. 22:24)
Rabbi Yosef interprets the verse as follows:
The term “My people” teaches that if … a Jew and a gentile both come to borrow money from you, My people, the Jew takes precedence.
The term “the poor” teaches that if a poor person and a rich person come to borrow money, the poor person takes precedence.
And from the term: “Who is with you,” it is derived: If your poor person, meaning one of your relatives, and one of the poor of your city come to borrow money, your poor person takes precedence. If it is between one of your city and one of another city, the one of your city takes precedence.
These are our circles of concern: first our family, then those of our own city, then those further away. First those in greatest need and then those whose situation is less dire.
Rabbi Dov Linzer summarizes the wisdom of our tradition as follows: “The greater the degree of connection, the greater the obligation towards that person.”
We can also learn how to navigate this tension between helping our own and helping others from studying the behavior of our people’s great moral exemplars.
This summer I read a biography of one of them: Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah.
Born in 1860 in Baltimore, Md., the daughter of Rabbi Benjamin and Sophie Szold who had immigrated to America from Hungary the year before, Henrietta Szold was a brilliant writer, editor, and teacher. Though new to this country, her parents involved themselves in the politics of the day, opposing slavery as abolitionists, not a popular thing to be in Maryland at that time.
Learning her parent’s lesson about “circles of concern,” Henrieta devoted her energies as a young woman to the thousands of immigrants who were streaming into Baltimore at that time.
She created a model that spread throughout the United States: night school. These immigrants—Jews and non-Jews alike—toiled during the day to support their families. There was no time to study in regular classes. The night school model enabled them to learn English and other skills that would help them succeed in their new home.
Later in her life, Szold focused her efforts almost exclusively on Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel. But even as she turned her attention inward to Jews and the nascent Jewish state, she took her parent’s lessons to heart.
She devoted her energies to health care, recruiting nurses and doctors, raising funds for infrastructure. From the very beginning she decided “that the doors of the clinics and hospitals she helped to establish … would always be open to Arabs and people of all faiths, races, and genders. All would receive the same medical treatment as Jews—a principle later adopted by the Israeli healthcare system and upheld to this day.” Through her leadership, Hadassah built hospitals, a medical school, dental facilities, x-ray clinics, infant welfare stations, and soup kitchens.
To be sure, the focus of Szold’s lifework was most certainly to protect and nourish Jewish lives and Jewish community in order to secure a more vibrant future for her people. But as Hadassah’s leader, she never ignored her duty to others in those more distant “circles of concern.”
I know that we must take care of our own. As Hillel famously said, Im ein ani li, mi li?—If we are not for ourselves, who will be? Who will take care of Jewish day schools, synagogues, and Holocaust survivors if we don’t?
But if we are for ourselves alone—u’che’she’ani l’atzmi, ma ani?—what kind of people are we? Our circles of concern must include others who need our help.
And by the way, we certainly want this to be reciprocal, don’t we? That is, we want the nations of the world to care just a little about us, our plight, our fate. We don’t want them to stand idly by or look away when our lives are in danger.
If we expect this from them, we should do the same for them.
The filmmakers of “Schindler’s List” might have taken a small liberty by adding that Talmudic inscription to the ring, but I do believe that they got the quote right.
“Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.”
Had the non-Jewish Oskar Schindler not embodied that teaching in his actions, more than a thousand of our fellow Jews and their descendants—generations, literally— would have perished from this world. But because he could see beyond himself, beyond his own family and his own community, he was able to save entire worlds.
Look, I’m a father, a husband, a brother, a son. I understand deeply the weight of my own responsibilities to those closest to me. There’s almost nothing I wouldn’t do to protect them.
And, more expansively, my sense of duty to Am Yisrael, to the Jewish People near and far, is tremendous. It has been the primary focus of my life through more than three decades of service to Jewish communities around the world.
But I am also part of a broader, human family to whom I owe something material. This family has a claim on me as well.
I am called by both of them.
Admittedly, there’s no perfect formula, no algorithm I know of that can neatly solve for the sometimes competing demands on our attention and resources. What is clear is that our tradition asks quite a lot from us.
We are required to devote ourselves to our own people. We must worry about the Jewish future by supporting the physical, intellectual, and spiritual needs of Am Yisrael: day schools, synagogues, homes for the aged, welfare programs for those in need, support for people battling addiction and mental illness.
But we must devote ourselves to the needs of others as well—especially those here in our own city, especially those whose suffering is most acute.
This is a tall order, an extraordinary obligation.
But it’s a task that we are well-equipped to tackle. We have our 3,000year-old tradition that calls us and guides us in the work of tikkun olam—the repair of the whole, wide world—and tikkun atzmeinu, self-repair for our own souls and those dearest to us. And we also have our exemplars, our heroes, some of them right here in this congregation today, who can help show us the way.
In this New Year of 5783, may God grant us compassion and empathy so that we might embrace these obligations, wisdom so that we might navigate them properly, and generosity of spirit so that we might see this nearly impossible task as the greatest opportunity imaginable.