Open Letter to My Students 89: Ambassadors of God

Behind all the apples and honey, beyond even the prayers and the shofar soundings, there is the demanding side of Rosh Hashanah, the side that spells “responsibility” — especially so, this year. In the 80+ years that I have been alive, responsibility has never weighed as heavily as it does now.

How do we negotiate, let alone solve, the issues facing Israel?  How can we even keep up with the headlines that present an imminent and real threat to America’s democracy? What will happen if right-wing (or even neo-Nazi) parties win elections in Europe? Is there any way to stem the tide of antisemitism from both the right and the left; to defuse the culture of anger and hate that corrodes our body politic? Can we extricate ourselves from the social-media logarithms that control the way we think? Can we save our very planet from destruction? And how about those AI data centers that are taking over the country? “But what can we do?” people ask. “How can an ordinary person like me make a difference?” 

I won’t belabor the usual answers, things like: Vote; take your neighbors with you; drive others to the polls; leverage your influence by donating money to organizations that can make a difference on your behalf. I support all such strategies. But I have something to add, not any particular thing to do, but a thing to be; and it begins with responsibility.

When we think of responsibility, we normally mean “being responsible for.” We are “responsible for” taking care of the people who love us, fulfilling our moral duty, doing the right thing. 

But there is a prior consideration: not “responsibility for” but “responsibility from” – by which I mean where we get the responsibility in the first place. The moral problem is not simply, “Have we been responsible for…” because everyone, more or less, thinks they have. Take the case of a White Nationalist who thinks America should overhaul its culture to enforce a particular brand of Christianity on everyone. For such a person, the “responsible” thing to do is to expel all people of color. Or consider the Jewish case, the settlers who are religiously committed to owning the entire biblical Land of Israel. For them, a terror campaign to evict Arab farmers from their West Bank land is exactly what responsibility demands. In a way, even a murderer for hire is “responsible for” carrying out the killing. 

So just telling people to act responsibly is relatively useless without the prior question of what they think their responsibility is in the first place. What really matters is where they derive responsibility, and in that regard, we individuals can make a difference.

It helps to think of ourselves as ambassadors to the world. The minute we suit up and show up, we automatically do so as someone who embodies a certain set of values, values that define our character and determine how we behave. What makes us “ambassadors,” however, is our conscious understanding of our role in living those values. Unlike people who go through life relatively unselfconsciously, ambassadors regularly evaluate how their actions reflect upon themselves, and, by extension, upon the source of the values they espouse.

Ambassadors are ordinary people who go about their affairs as usual, but who do so knowing every moment that everything they say and do portrays the kind of person they are. What matters is not just how we act in the world, but how we consciously act so that others will admire what we stand for. 

It is not too much to say that ambassadors have been “called” to be exemplars. The Bible calls such people prophets, selected by God to declare a message of what God wants from us; and it makes no bones about the courage needed to accept such a role. Jonah actually tries to escape that responsibility. For good reason, the Book of Jonah became the Torah portion for Yom Kippur: not just because Jonah tried to avoid responsibility but because we might too.   

If being a modern-day prophet sounds too daunting, consider a more modest example from a talmudic attempt to array various negative behaviors on a scale of consequence (Yoma 86a).  The worst behavior entails “Anything we do that would cause our friends to be ashamed of us.” It is called “the desecration of God’s name,” because what we do reflects upon where we get our values from. Showing up as ambassadors carries the additional weight of knowing that we do not just represent ourselves; we represent a far deeper cause and calling. 

A country’s ambassadors know that what they do inevitably reflects upon the country that sends them. We should consider ourselves no less than ambassadors whose behavior reflects on God.

Ambassadors of God deliberately act so as to exemplify the ultimate source of value that is divine. The Talmudic discussion provides an example. When one rabbi (Abaye by name), buys meat from a butcher, he pays him promptly, lest the butcher suspect that a pious Jew might try to avoid paying; and conclude that God, therefore, is a cheat as well.

Everyone is potentially an ambassador of something, not just the “good guys” – which is why we cannot abandon the field to the “bad guys” who consciously exemplify those causes and callings that we deplore. My High Holy Day lesson this year is the urgency of our prophetic calling, the need to show up in the world as exemplars of what we believe to be truly dear. 

By ourselves, we may be unable to impact national policy, decide an election, and combat the macro forces of hate and despair. If, however, we suit up and show up as conscious ambassadors of God, if we consciously act in such a way that our friends would never be ashamed of us, we can make a difference in the micro world where we live our daily lives.