Walkout

For the second time, and on the same issue, somebody said that they were tempted to walk out of my sermon because I touched on a very, uh, touchy issue: teshuva as a reaction to tragedy.

Rambam, and subsequent Maimonophiles, state that our reaction to tragedy is to do teshuva. The Jewish people suffer tragedy because we sin. What sin? We don't know. The victims' sin? We too cannot say, but for our purposes, no. So, what's the point? The point is to do teshuva, dammit, and not argue. Do you need an excuse *not* to do teshuva? Evidently so!

These concepts sound too much like SFT (Stupid Frummie Thinking) which states that tragedy comes as a direct result of sin, or bad mezuzahs, whatever comes first.

Because it *sounds* like SFT, people think it is SFT. So they wanna walk out.

Naturally, I felt insulted by the insinuation. They think that I'm stupid! Yet, I have to apply the same rules to them as I want applied to me.

That is, I am blaming my listeners for not actually listening. I imagine them sitting there, thinking of cheese, and perking up only intermittently when a strange word hits their ear (or they run out of cheese). If what I say sounds like something they already know about, they assume that I said the familiar and not actually what I said.

But can I blame them for thinking that I'm stupid when I think that they are stupid? I need to be clearer in my sermons. I had a good excuse on Rosh Hashanah - some idiots were making a commotion in the front row (and eventually left the room) which thoroughly threw me off. I had to curtail my talk and I couldn't say what I wanted to say. But when someone misunderstands my sermon, I need to blame myself first.

Bottom line is still the same: tragedy is hitting us all around, do teshuva. Gmar Tov.