Blame
and its cousin, responsibility
B L A M E.
It’s everywhere.
The media blames the president.
The president blames the media.
Influencers blame corporations.
Protesters blame the rich.
The UN blames Israel.
Haredim blame the secular.
The secular blame Haredim.
Spouses blame each other.
In our heart of hearts, we blame ourselves.
The common denominator is that when blame goes around, no one takes responsibility.
Blame is so pervasive that it’s assumed when you read someone’s opinion on just about anything, the author will somewhere point his or her finger at some individual or corporate entity that is to blame for things not working as they opine that they should.
Why is blame such an attractive course of action?
This is simple:
Blame makes us feel better about ourselves without having to do anything else about the problem.
If someone else it to blame, it means that we’re off the hook — which is great because nothing feels worse than being blamed.
Even a mere insinuation of blame can make us wince.
To illustrate: recall that early in his political career, Bill Clinton was famously coached to stow away his index finger from pointing at the American people through the camera. It was perceived as accusatory and unpleasant. Thus, the origin of his signature “Clinton thumb.”
The big problem, however, with being blamed about the past, is not how much it stings when you’re on the receiving end.
It’s that it stops anyone from taking responsibility about the future.
This is because the accuser has done his part by directing our attention to the one to blame, and the accused becomes naturally defensive. And the spectators to this whole debacle remain — well — spectators.
We can learn a great lesson about leadership from the greatest leader of all time, whose leadership continues to guide us today: Moshe.
Moshe waited nearly four decades to rebuke people for the episode of the Spies, who deterred an entire generation from entering the Land of Israel. When he finally does, he does something surprising and odd: he omits the role of the Spies.
When he retells the story, he simply recounts:
He then goes on to say:
But you refused to go up, and refused to follow the command of Hashem your God. You grumbled in your tents saying, “Hashem brought us here out of the land of Egypt because He hates us…”
It sounds like he’s saying, “The Spies said such nice things about what life would be like in Israel, but you guys are such ‘Negative Nancies!’ What’s wrong with you people?!”
Of course, this seems like an absurd rewriting of history. When you look back at the actual episode, you’ll find that although it’s true that the Spies made opening remarks about the land being fertile, a moment later, they were the ones who poisoned the well with pessimism, fear-mongering and sensationalism.
These are their words:
We came to the land you sent us to; it does indeed flow with milk and honey, and this is its fruit. However, the people who inhabit the country are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large. Moreover, we saw the Giants there. We cannot attack this people — they are stronger than we are…the land that we travelled through and spied out is one that devours its inhabitants. All the people that we saw in it are massive. We saw the Nephilim there — the Giants are part of the Nephilim. We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves— we must have looked [small and puny] to them.
Why does Moshe leave out this anything-but-trivial role of the Spies when talking about the infamous “Sin of the Spies”???
Moreover, the people he’s addressing were specifically spared punishment because they were kids when the whole thing happened (they were under 20) — why is he shifting responsibility to them when they were ostensibly passive parties on the sidelines?
The answer is that Moshe was not interested in merely feeling better about himself in his last few weeks on this earth by rehashing what everyone could have repeated in their sleep: “the reason we wandered the desert for 40 years was because of those 10 damn spies!”
Blaming the spies would achieve literally nothing.
Moshe did not want these people, now full-grown adults, to walk around with that same pathetic narrative that “we had nothing to do with it.” If they did, they would pass down this narrative to their kids, and their kids to their kids, until it would arrive to us perpetuating a lack or responsibility and self-determination that would certainly doom us to remain an oppressed minority for all eternity.
Moshe’s only objective in this speech was to have as much of a real, positive impact on the people he was leaving behind as he possibly could. He was hoping to awaken in them a sense of responsibility for building a more responsible society.
The reason the Spies were able to poison the well so quickly and easily was precisely because no one seemed to feel capable of pushing back, questioning their claims, demanding more evidence. No one there was responsible. The “responsible parties” were all sent to scout out the land.
This, of course, is a lie. Every member of that society had some responsibility for the atmosphere of distrust and anxiety through which fear spread like wildfire.
Responsibility is the mindset of “if I’m not part of the solution, I’m part of the problem.”
If we allow the belief to persist in our families, communities and society that when 10 men show up and state lies in public, we have no choice but to believe them — we are part of the problem.
If our Jewish identity is primarily about blaming anti-semites, or the secular, or the religious, or leaders, or “people these days,” or “kids these days” — we are part of the problem.
We can all make things better than they are. Blaming others is merely slowing down this process.
With his final days as a truly responsible party for the Jewish nation, Moshe was hoping to get us to take some of that responsibility ourselves.
Rab, so is there a healthy space for blame? if so, where and how?