Accountability

By: Yochanan Gordon

People often conflate Elul and Tishrei, when in truth they are very different months. Still, the sound of the shofar each morning unmistakably signals that Rosh Hashanah is approaching, and with it comes one of the central demands of this season: accountability.

To that end, we as a newspaper need to be accountable for an error in judgment. Over the past couple of weeks, we ran an advertisement for a cannabis dispensary. We understand why that decision upset many of our readers. It represented a breach of the trust that we have worked hard to establish over more than two decades of serving this community.

There is a serious substance-use problem in the world at large and, sadly, within our own community as well. As a family newspaper, we should have exercised greater caution and sensitivity—not only toward parents confronting the painful reality of children struggling with substance use, but toward the young adults themselves who are struggling to navigate life without turning to substances, psychedelics, or other forms of escape.

We should have known better. For that, we are sorry.

What follows is in no way intended to minimize our responsibility or diminish the seriousness of that apology. But if this moment is really going to be about accountability—and particularly if we are going to invoke the spirit of Elul—then accountability cannot end with the easiest problem to identify and the easiest one to fix.

It is relatively easy to remove an advertisement from a newspaper.

It is considerably more difficult to ask why the advertisement speaks to so many people in the first place.

The communal outrage over our decision has been intense. Some of it is entirely understandable. But watching the reaction unfold has left me wondering whether our eagerness to identify and condemn the immediate offender risks becoming a distraction from a much more painful question.

Why are so many of our young people searching for escape?

Why, in a community overflowing with Torah, shuls, yeshivos, kollelim, organizations, programs, shiurim, rabbanim, and educators, is there nevertheless such profound loneliness, anxiety, and spiritual emptiness among some of our young people?

Those questions are considerably harder to answer than the question of whether a cannabis advertisement belongs in a Jewish newspaper.

And they require accountability from more than the newspaper.

There was something else about the response that troubled me. In certain corners, the instinct did not seem to be merely to criticize a bad decision or demand that it be corrected. There seemed to be an eagerness to condemn, shame, and even damage the people and institution responsible for it.

That should trouble us too.

Because our children are watching not only what we prohibit. They are watching how we respond when somebody fails.

They are learning from us what Torah looks like when a person makes a mistake.

Does our Torah produce people who know how to correct wrongdoing while preserving the dignity of the person who committed it? Does it produce leaders whom struggling young people feel safe approaching with their confusion, anxiety, and failures? Or have we sometimes created an environment in which vulnerability is dangerous, mistakes are defining, and admitting that you are struggling carries the risk of judgment and rejection?

These are not questions directed only at rabbanim or rebbeim. They are questions for parents, educators, communal leaders, institutions—and certainly for us.

But those charged with teaching and representing Torah carry a particular responsibility to ask them.

Last week’s parashah, Shoftim, contains the Torah’s prohibitions against various attempts to penetrate the unknown: menachesh, chover chaver, kosem kesamim, ov, yidoni, and others.

And then the Torah responds with an extraordinarily simple directive: “Tamim tih’yeh im Hashem Elokecha”—“Be wholehearted with Hashem your G-d.”

Human beings have always struggled with uncertainty. We want to know what tomorrow will bring. We want relief from fear, pain, trauma, and the parts of ourselves with which we are uncomfortable. The methods change from generation to generation, but the desire to escape the unbearable aspects of human existence is very old.

The Torah’s answer is not merely: Don’t.

It is: “im Hashem Elokecha.”

Be with Hashem.

There is somewhere to bring your uncertainty. There is somewhere to bring your fear. There is somewhere to bring your loneliness. You do not have to escape consciousness in order to survive the discomfort of being alive.

And perhaps that is where our communal accountability needs to begin.

It is not enough to tell our children which substances they may not consume. We have to ask whether we have given them something compelling enough that they want to remain fully present.

Have we given them a Torah that speaks to their anxiety?

Have we given them relationships in which they can reveal their weaknesses without fearing that those weaknesses will define them?

Have we given them rabbanim, rebbeim, teachers, and parents who don’t merely tell them what not to do, but can sit with them when life hurts?

Have we given them an experience of im Hashem elokecha—of never having to confront the uncertainty of life alone?

There is an irony here that we should have the courage to confront.

We are understandably frightened by substances that promise our children refuge from their pain. But perhaps part of our accountability must be asking why some of them did not experience us—and the Torah we represent—as a refuge first.

None of this excuses our decision to run the advertisement. Accountability that begins by pointing at somebody else isn’t accountability at all.

We ran it. We should not have. We apologize.

But neither can the conversation end there.

Because removing an advertisement takes a phone call.

Creating homes, schools, shuls, and communities in which our children feel sufficiently loved, understood, enriched, and spiritually alive that they do not constantly need to escape themselves—that is the work of a generation.

And if the sound of the shofar means anything as Elul approaches, perhaps it is precisely this:

Before looking around for someone to hold accountable, we should first have the courage to ask what is being asked of us. 

Yochanan Gordon can be reached at [email protected]. Read more of Yochanan’s articles at 5TJT.com.