Rabbi Yair Robinson

Parashat Tzav—Shabbat HaGadol

April 11, 2025

I have been reading this book at the gym, which is a history of the Lollapalooza tour back in the 1990s. From Perry Farrell (born Peretz Bernstein) of Jane’s Addiction wanting to put on a cultural festival, something really that didn’t exist in the US at the time, and one final tour for Jane’s Addiction, to its last summer when there was a sense it had ‘sold out’, it’s been a fascinating and wonderful read, and takes me back in all kinds of different ways to my Gen X cultural experiences. Part of what makes it wonderful is that it’s an oral history, mostly a series of interviews with a variety of stage hands, band members, music executives, managers, and the like, which makes the experience incredibly dynamic, as, say, one person shares something, and then there’s back and forth as to whether that thing actually happened. There’s a lot of the typical stories you’d expect of rock-and-roll excess, but also a real sense that these folks were trying to move the culture forward: make LGBT folks more accepted, getting young people more politically active, fighting racism and sexism, and so many of the issues we seem to still be fighting for and about today.

Among all the various quotes, there is a fascinating one from the 1995 tour; one musician said something that really affected me as I read it. It probably was not meant to be as impactful as it was, an off-hand comment about the ultimate fear of any musician: that of a jaundiced, indifferent audience. “You can’t be cool if nobody cares.”

You can’t be cool if nobody cares. It’s a remarkable thought, and perhaps a contradiction in terms. What is being cool if not trying to affect a kind of diffidence, a kind of posture of apathy. And here, the response is the opposite: to be cool means to care a great deal, and to make sure other people care too. To be cool is to challenge others to give a damn. I am reminded of a colleague who was arguing with one of his congregants who was posting stuff online about the current political situation but wasn’t doing anything, and my colleague, perhaps in a moment of pique, said, “get off the fence and get in the fight.”

Rarely will I try to describe Judaism as a monolith or with broad strokes, but in this case, I feel safe in saying that Judaism is not interested in apathy. Judaism’s coolness is, in fact, in its insistence that its adherents give a damn, that we get into the fight. As an aside, it’s worth noting how many founders of punk rock in America are and were Jewish. I have always found it disorienting when I speak with others who voice some version of the idea that other people’s problems are just other people’s problems. That they don’t somehow affect us, that we’re not responsible for them, when the Jewish approach is one of chiyuv, obligation. Torah reinforces that, of course, throughout the text, including in surprising ways. Think back to our parasha that I just read. When we read—twice—that the fire on the altar should not go out, and burn perpetually, we might think this is purely a ritualistic idea. But what if the altar is our own heart? What if the fire that burns isn’t a literal fire—after all, that fire hasn’t burned in 2000 years—but is a metaphorical fire within us? The Sfat Emet tells us that the fire that burns must be the reverence for God that comes forward in our daily prayer, or our love for the divine that cannot go out. I would suggest that it’s both: our reverence for life, our love of humanity, of this world, our desire for others to have a life of dignity. I would even go as far as to amend the quote to “you can’t be Jewish if nobody cares.”

But how can one care at a moment like this? And what about? The internet and the news seem to present to us an unstoppable torrent of just stuff that seems beyond our control. It would be easy, at this moment, to go into ‘internal exile’ as Milan Kundera speaks of, focus on our friends, our own lives, and tune out everything else as a distraction. And I know that there are many who feel overwhelmed, or don’t know what to think in this moment, and are happy to shut down in the face of everything. Which is what made this past weekend so profound. This past weekend we saw protests in cities all over the country, in all fifty states. Some with tens of thousands of people, some with a handful, all lifting their voices up affirming the kind of care we have for the most vulnerable, those most impacted negatively, despite a great deal of concern for hostile action. I know many people here went to the protest in Newark, which was widely promoted. There was also one in Wilmington, put together just a few days before by a teenager, one of my son’s classmates, that probably got a couple hundred folks (and it was good to see some of you there too). Older folks pretty heavily attended it to be sure, but a lot of teens were there to be supportive and spoke, including one who talked about her teen pregnancy and the importance of reproductive rights in a profoundly vulnerable way. It was a profound reminder of the importance in this moment of caring, of giving a damn, of getting off the fence and into the fight.

Now, not all of us need to go out there with a placard, and there are lots of ways to care. And we do not have to do all of it. We can make calls to our legislators—national and state level—and we can look at the Religious Action Center for ideas. We can focus locally on programs that make a difference in people’s lives and support vulnerable individuals and groups, and many of us do and should be commended for it. The goal is to make a difference and not just show that we are making a difference. And we should not let this moment cause us to withdraw. We cannot, we SHALL NOT, choose to become indifferent or apathetic to the needs of the vulnerable. Let that fire of love and concern and obligation burn on the altar of our hearts, get off the fence and into the fight for our values. Because there is nothing cooler than that.