LEAVING THE STORY OPEN
There is a story our tradition tells about Elisha ben Abuya, one of the great teachers of the second century of the common era. He was a brilliant rabbi, a colleague of Rabbi Akiva, a mentor to Rabbi Meir, but also one of the most controversial figures in the Talmud. His story is often remembered under a different name: Acher — “the Other.”
The Talmud tells us about Elisha in Kiddushin 39b, where he witnesses something deeply disturbing: a father sends his son to perform the mitzvah of sending away the mother bird before taking the eggs (shiluach hakan). The Torah promises a long life to anyone who performs this commandment, as well as to anyone who honors their mother and father. Remarkably, these are the only two commandments in the entire Torah that explicitly state the reward for following them.
So, Elisha observed a father directing his son to climb a ladder to shoo away the mother bird and take the eggs from a nest. The son respected his father’s wishes, and complied with the commandment by sending away the bird before gathering the eggs. And yet, the child fell from the tree and died. Elisha looked at what had happened and yelled: “There is no justice, and there is no judge.” The sages heard those words and gave him a name: Acher. The Other. And eventually, his name was effectively erased from the rabbinic tradition. Even when the Talmud later quotes his teachings, it often does so without naming him directly.
We might focus on Elisha’s conclusion: a terrible event occurred, leading him to decide that the universe itself was unjust. However, there’s another part of the story worth considering. Elisha witnessed one terrible incident and believed he understood the ultimate nature of the universe. Similarly, the community heard one troubling statement from Elisha and assumed they knew everything about him. Both parties
reached their conclusions too hastily.
And perhaps that is one of the great spiritual dangers of being human: our inability to live comfortably with an unfinished story. We want to know who is right and who is wrong, who is good and who is bad, who belongs and who does not. We want explanations. We want clear conclusions. And when the world refuses to give us a clean answer, we often supply one ourselves. We do it with other people. We do it with politics. We do it with religion. We do it with suffering. We even do it with God.
And this is why the story of Elisha feels so surprisingly contemporary. For we live in an age of what is often called “cancel culture.” Sometimes that phrase is used too loosely, and sometimes criticism or accountability is described as cancellation when it is nothing of the sort. There are times when people should be held accountable. Actions do have consequences. There are things that cannot simply be excused.
Nevertheless, in our current culture, there is also a genuine temptation to turn a person into a verdict: effectively cancelling them.
Someone says the wrong thing. Someone makes a public mistake. Someone fails in a way evident to everyone. And suddenly that one single act defines the whole of the person. The person is no longer someone who did something wrong. They BECOME the wrong.
We no longer have a human being in front of us. We have a label. A prejudice takes root, and once we’ve rendered judgment, there seems to be little reason to reconsider.
Judaism, at its best, asks us to resist that impulse. Not because nothing matters. Not because there are no consequences. Not because every position is equally valid. Judaism is perfectly capable of making judgments. But Judaism is deeply suspicious of the claim that we know the whole story.
And perhaps this is where the problem becomes more complicated. Because if we ask ourselves why we are so quick to reach a verdict, we might assume that the answer is that we simply do not care enough. We do not have enough empathy. If only we could feel another person’s pain, we imagine, we would be less judgmental, more generous, more humane.
But I would submit that that is not quite entirely true. What if sometimes the problem is not that we feel too little, but that, in fact, we feel very deeply for the person — or group, or institution — whose suffering we can see, and then mistake that feeling for the whole moral picture?
This matters because empathy has become one of the great moral virtues of our age. We are constantly being asked to empathize: to see the world through another person’s eyes, to listen to their experience, to understand their suffering. And rightly so. But empathy, too, has limits. And those limits can lead us back to the very problem with which we began: taking one part of the story and treating it as the whole.
Elisha’s mistake was not that he saw something that was not true. What he saw was terrible, and his horror was justified. His mistake was believing that what he could see was all there was to see.
And that is precisely where empathy can become complicated. Empathy can bring us close to one person while making it harder to see another. It can open the heart in one direction and, precisely because it opens so intensely, close and become numb to everything outside that frame.
That may help explain something about the culture of cancellation in which we now live. Sometimes people are not excluded because nobody cares. They are excluded because people care intensely about one particular story. I see someone or a people suffering. I identify with that suffering. I feel it so strongly that it becomes the whole moral landscape.
And then someone comes along and complicates the picture. They tell me that there is another person suffering, or another history, or another truth that I have not yet considered. Rather than broadening my perspective, I might perceive this complication as a threat. This is what Dr. Kira Stein has called “empathicide”: empathy itself becoming an instrument of exclusion. The pattern is subtle. Someone suffers, and I care. Their pain becomes vivid and immediate. It becomes the prism through which I understand everything else. Consequently, anyone who challenges that narrative becomes suspect. The suffering of others fades into the background, and what started as a moral virtue –compassion– morphs into a form of tribalism.
We have seen versions of this on university campuses, in political movements, on social media, and in the way people speak about conflicts that have become almost impossible to discuss. The lesson is not that empathy is bad. The lesson is that empathy is not the same thing as moral vision.
The Yalkut Shimoni, a midrash collection compiled between the 11th and 14th centuries, commenting on Psalm 62, makes a remarkable observation about human beings. It says: “A human being, mere flesh and blood, cannot hear the cries of two individuals who are crying simultaneously. However, the Creator can. Even when all of the world’s inhabitants cry out at once, God hears every individual cry.” There is
something deeply human about that limitation. Our hearts have their limits. When we hear a single cry, that cry can consume our entire focus.
Paul Bloom, the American psychologist and author, makes a similar point from a psychological perspective. We respond much more powerfully to the suffering of one identifiable person than to suffering that is vast, distant, statistical or dispersed. One child stuck in a well can move us more immediately than millions affected by a slow environmental catastrophe. The individual collective face has a power that numbers simply do not.
But if our hearts are finite, what do we do with that? We can’t force ourselves to feel everything equally or produce endless empathy. The Jewish answer isn’t to become something other than human — it’s to recognize our limitations and refuse to mistake our perspective for the entire truth.
The Babylonian Talmud gives us a beautiful image of this in Ta’anit. The rabbis discuss Moses during the battle with Amalek. The Torah tells us that Moses stood on the hill overlooking the battle, and that whenever he raised his hands, Israel prevailed. But after some time, his hands became heavy. Aaron and Hur took a stone, placed it underneath him, and Moses sat upon it, while they supported his hands.
The rabbis notice the stone. Why a stone? Why should Moses, the leader of Israel, sit on a hard stone when surely a cushion or something more comfortable could have been found?
The answer is extraordinary. The Talmud says that Moses was saying, in effect: “Since Israel is in pain, I will be with them in their pain.” Moses cannot fight the battle himself. He cannot remove the suffering of the people below him. But he refuses to make himself comfortable while they are suffering. His body will participate, in some small way, in the condition of those he leads.
And the Talmud concludes with a principle that reaches far beyond Moses: “Whoever shares in the distress of the community will merit seeing the consolation of the community.” (TB Ta’anit 11a).
This is a different kind of response to the limits of empathy. The rabbis are not asking Moses to feel everything. They are asking him not to remain outside the suffering. He cannot fight the battle. He cannot end it. But he can refuse the comfort of standing apart from what his people are enduring. That, I think, is one discipline empathy’s limits demand of us: not the impossible task of feeling everyone’s pain
equally, but the refusal to let our comfort outrun someone else’s suffering.
But there is a second discipline, harder to locate in the body and easier to hide from. It has to do not with where we sit, but with what we think we’ve seen. Moses had the clearest view on the hill. Elisha thought he had it too.
So the question is not simply, “Whose suffering do I understand?” It is also: “What am I not seeing?”
Because teshuvah begins with the recognition that my present understanding of myself is not the final truth about myself. If I were completely certain that I am right, that I have nothing to change, that my motives are pure, that my judgments are complete, there would be nowhere to go. There would be no need for teshuvah.
Teshuvah requires something very small but very difficult: the willingness to believe that I may not yet see the whole story — even about myself.
That is why Yom Kippur is not simply a day for feeling guilty about what we have done. It is a day for loosening our attachment to the certitude that we already know who we are. I am not ONLY the worst thing I have done. You are not ONLY the worst thing you have done. The person who hurt me is not necessarily ONLY the person who hurt me. And the person I have judged may still have a story I do not know.
This is where the avaryanim of Kol Nidre become so powerful. Before we recited Kol Nidre, we asked permission to pray together with those who have transgressed — people whose actions may have been serious enough to put their place in the community into question. We are not saying nothing happened, or that actions don’t matter. We are saying something much harder: a human being is more than a verdict.
That is not sentimental. It is demanding. It asks us to hold two ideas together at once: accountability and possibility. A person can have done something wrong, and still not be finished. A person can have caused real harm, and still be capable of teshuvah.
Maimonides, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, the 12th-century Jewish philosopher and legal scholar who lived in Spain and later in Egypt, is very clear about this in his laws of teshuvah. Genuine teshuvah is not simply saying “I am sorry.” It involves recognizing what one has done, changing one’s behavior, and demonstrating that change when faced with the same situation again.
In other words, Judaism does not ask us to pretend that the past did not happen. It asks us to leave open the possibility that the past does not have to dictate everything that comes next.
And that brings us back to Elisha — and to God. Because Elisha did not merely make a judgment about suffering. He made a judgment about God. He saw something terrible and concluded: “There is no justice, and there is no judge.” Perhaps the spiritual challenge is not to tell Elisha that he should not have been horrified. He should have been. Nor is it to offer some easy explanation for the death of that child.
Judaism has never had a satisfactory formula that makes suffering disappear.
The challenge is what comes after the horror. Can I say, “I do not understand”? Can I say, “I cannot reconcile this”? Can I say, “I am angry with God”? And still leave the story open?
That is a very different religious posture from certainty. I remember reading a text on an internet blog that I follow by the Jewish thinker Yitzhaq Feder, where he wrote: “Only an atheist can believe in God.”
At first, it sounds absurd.
But what he means is that a genuine relationship with God requires us to confront the possibility that God may not be there. Not theoretically. Not as an intellectual game. Really.
For much of Jewish history, belief in God was not necessarily something people had to choose. God was part of the atmosphere. God was the language of the world. God was woven into the structure of Jewish life. But we live in a different world.
Today, unbelief or nonbelief is entirely available to us. We can walk away from religious tradition. We can explain the universe without God. We can build lives in which God never needs to enter the conversation. And therefore, religious confidence has to mean something different. Confidence in God is not the same thing as certainty about God. Certainty says, “I know.” Relationship says, “I trust; I have emunah.” And a relationship with God can survive questions because a relationship is not a mathematical proof.
This is why I find the Elisha story so fascinating. The problem is not that Elisha asked a difficult question about God. The problem is that he believed he had arrived at the final answer. There is a difference between saying “I cannot understand this” and saying “therefore there is nothing to understand” — between struggling with God and closing the door on God.
Feder’s point is that religious confidence, faith as some would say, is not the elimination of that possibility. It is what happens when, having confronted it, we still turn toward God. Our religious confidence does not come from having eliminated every question. It comes from having lived honestly with the questions and continuing to turn toward God.
And perhaps that is the deepest connection between Elisha, teshuvah, and God. The opposite of certitude is not confusion. It is relationship. When I am certain, the story is finished. When I am in relationship, the story itself remains open. That is true of our relationship with God. It is true of our relationship with other people. And, perhaps most painfully, it is true of our relationship with ourselves.
Which brings us, almost incidentally, to forgiveness. There may be someone you are carrying with you in your head this Yom Kippur. Someone who hurt you. Someone who never apologized. Someone whose name still produces negative energy in you.
You do not have to decide tonight that what happened was acceptable. You do not have to forget, or restore a relationship that should remain broken. But perhaps you can refuse one kind of certainty: the certainty that this is the only story this person will ever have in your life.
Sometimes that is all forgiveness needs to begin. Not absolution. Not reconciliation. Not forgetting. Just an opening. An opening large enough to say: I know what happened. I know that it mattered. I know that it hurt. But I do not know that this is the final chapter of the story.
And perhaps that is what Yom Kippur asks of us: to become people who know the limits of what we can see. Elisha saw a terrible thing and thought he knew the final truth about God. The sages heard his words and thought they knew the final truth about him. We know that temptation ourselves. We see one action and decide we know the person. We see suffering and decide we know the whole story. We see one moment of our own lives and decide we know who we are. And sometimes we see one terrible thing in the world and decide we know what God must be.
Yom Kippur asks us to resist that finality. To leave room for another human being. To leave room for ourselves. To leave room for God. Because perhaps the holiest thing we can say tonight is not, “Now I know.” Perhaps it is simply: “I do not know the whole story.”
They called him Acher. The Other. They cancelled him. They tried to close his story with a name. But even Acher was not finished — his teachings are still in the Talmud, unnamed but unerased, still being studied, still being argued with, still alive. If his story could stay open after two thousand years, so can ours.
G’mar chatimah tovah
Rabbi Tom Cohen