While I was on the plane to Ben Gurion Airport on Wednesday morning, feeling a whole lot of ambivalence about leaving Squirrel Hill, I was fortunate to watch for a second time parts of the recent documentary, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” about our neighborhood’s most famous resident, Fred Rogers, zikhrono livrakhah (may his memory be for a blessing).
When Mr. Rogers testified before a Senate committee in 1969 to argue for funding for public broadcasting, he said that among his essential principles was the idea that children’s feelings were always OK.
… I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health.
We are all filled with emotion today. We are raw, sad, angry, distraught, anxious, worn-out, and a whole range of other feelings. Although I am physically far away from all of you, in Jerusalem, I and the rest of our Beth Shalom group here feel the same things.
Mr. Rogers did not shy away from facing difficult, emotional situations on his show. In fact, in the first week it aired, he tackled the war in Vietnam, by having King Friday XIII declare war on people who “want to change things.” The residents of the Neighborhood of Make Believe were all upset and fearful, and tried to convince the king to back down from his aggression. Daniel Striped Tiger said, “I want there to be peace in this neighborhood. It’s been a hard time for everybody.” Together, they crafted a plan to influence the king: they tied messages like “Love” and “Tenderness” and “Peaceful co-existence” to balloons, and floated them up to the king’s castle, and ultimately the king relented.
Right now, I want all of us to remember that if Mr. Rogers were here, he would tell us that it is perfectly normal to be upset. Let the tears flow; let the emotions run. And think of the balloons that you would send up right now. If all of us take our desires for love and tenderness and peaceful co-existence, and saturate them with those tears, and cause them to radiate outward from Squirrel Hill to the rest of the world, we will all help each other manage that pain. And while we may not repair the hole in our communal heart, we just might help repair the world.
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Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Originally delivered by Rabbi Jeremy Markiz at Congregation Beth Shalom, 11/3/2018.)
The Modern Rabbi 