The gypsy-punk group Gogol Bordello’s first hit was a curious song called “Start Wearing Purple.” Maybe you know the song?
Start wearing purple, wearing purple
Start wearing purple for me now
All your sanity and wits, they will all vanish
I promise, it’s just a matter of time
The lead singer of the group, Ukrainian-born Eugene Hütz, claims the song is about a crazy neighbor who would dress entirely in purple. I have been told that purple is our bat mitzvah‘s favorite color. (It’s something that she shares with my daughter, who, when I asked about it, said, matter-of-factly, “Purple is objectively the best color.”)
Well, I have some good news: purple is an appropriate color for the month of Elul, which we are in right now. Why? Because it is a balance of two other colors, red and blue. It’s a kind of coalition color. And it suggests exactly the way we should feel in Elul. I’ll come back to that.
The fighting in Ukraine passed a grim milestone this past week: one half-million people who have been killed or wounded in the fighting, Russians and Ukrainians. Some among us might take some small comfort, given the nature and origin of the conflict, in knowing that the count is higher on the Russian side, but I think it is always in bad taste to gloat in the loss and suffering of others, and in this case particularly because this seems to be such a senseless war. Furthermore, some of the soldiers who are dying for Mother Russia feel that they have been deceived by their government regarding why they are fighting in Ukraine.
But as much as we may be inclined to be supportive of Ukraine, whether because of the politics of Putin or the Jewish background of Volodymyr Zelensky or because Russia attacked a fledgling democracy for completely selfish reasons, I think that standing up for Ukraine is a fraught endeavor for the Jews.
That is the land that my great-grandparents fled, and probably many of yours did as well. Ukraine, having been gradually captured by Poland in the 14th and 15th centuries, was a place where the local peasants loathed the Jews in particular, because Polish nobles sent Jewish tax collectors to the Ukrainian lands. When the Ukrainian Cossacks rose up against their Polish overlords during the Khmelnytsky Uprising of the mid-17th century, it is not too hard to understand why they massacred Jews as they rebelled against the Poles.
Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, the subject of a biopic which opened this weekend, wrote in her autobiography that growing up in Kyiv she recalled her father boarding up the door to keep out marauding Ukrainians, who regularly attacked Jews. In the film, Golda describes Christmas pogroms as an annual event, and they hid in terror waiting to see if they’d make it through the night unscathed. To this day, rates of native anti-Semitism in Ukraine still run relatively high, despite being the only nation in the world other than Israel with a Jewish head of state.*
Not that things are any better in Russia, by the way. But let’s face it: our shared history makes Ukraine a mixed bag. When my grandmother left her little shtetl in what is today northwest Ukraine in 1921, she and hundreds of thousands like her were happy to be out of that blood-soaked land. They never looked back.
So today, while there is no question that the Ukrainians deserve our support in casting out Putin and his troops, I nonetheless feel a certain ambivalence about standing for people who did not really want the Jews in their land to begin with, and certainly did not miss us after Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen came through. It’s undeniably fraught.
We are of course celebrating today as a young woman is called to the Torah for the first time as a bat mitzvah, an inheritor of the obligation to the mitzvot of adult Jewish life. And a part of that inheritance is of course the imperative to take stock of our lives in the month of Elul.
This is the month preceding Aseret Yemei Teshuvah, the ten days of repentance which go from Rosh Hashanah until Yom Kippur. It is time to take inventory, to reflect on our lives, on the past year, on where we are and where we would like to be. It is a time to consider the ways in which we have failed, the ways in which we might be better, the things about ourselves with which we are satisfied.
And the reality that each of us must face at this time of year is that life has its ups and its downs, that each of us is a complex being. We have our good points and our not-so-good points. And it is our duty in this season, and all the more so during the Aseret Yemei Teshuvah, to think of ourselves as exactly that: scales in balance. Maimonides, in his Hilkhot Teshuvah, his book of law about how to go about repentance, says that it is mandatory at this time to see ourselves as having performed an equal number of good deeds and transgressions; that each pan of the scale weighs exactly equal to its partner. We are all “beinoni,” in-between in these days. And our job is to tip the scale to the good side by striving harder to perform more mitzvot, so that we may be inscribed for a good year.
Your own estimation of your deeds over the past year does not actually matter, because we tend to judge ourselves with kaf zekhut, the benefit of the doubt. We are inclined to think, “Yeah, I was a good husband, a terrific father, a fantastic coworker, an extraordinarily respectful driver (most of the time), a responsible Jew. I shovel my sidewalk when it snows and I do the dishes and feed the cat when nobody else wants to. OK, I’m not perfect, but who is? I’m certainly better than most people, so the mass of my ‘good deeds’ in that scale pan surely outweighs the other one.”
None of that matters, because we like to see the overwhelming good in ourselves, even as we fail to see the same in others. There is a certain amount of self-protective inclination built into all of us; we love to believe that, as Garrison Keillor used to say about the children of Lake Wobegon, we are all above average.
Truth is, we are all in the middle somewhere, in the purple, if you will. We all fail sometimes. We all occasionally give half as much as we should. We all have our strong and weak points. We are all occasionally quick to anger, or blatantly self-interested, or too willing to criticize. It is easy to give ourselves credit for the good, and a little less so when it comes to our less-desirable behaviors.
And the Torah acknowledges the complexity of humanity in many ways. Consider just the opening verse of Parashat Ki Tetse, which we read this morning (Devarim / Deuteronomy 21:10):
כִּֽי־תֵצֵ֥א לַמִּלְחָמָ֖ה עַל־אֹיְבֶ֑יךָ
When you go out to war against your enemies…
The Torah does not even give us the opportunity to consider a world in which there is no war, in which you will not have enemies. War is simply an inevitability. We want to believe that people will prevent war, but lamentably we know that human nature does not always incline to peace. Similarly, in last week’s parashah, Re’eh, in which we read explicitly that even though it is our duty to work for a world in which there will be no needy, there will always be poor people.
So on the one hand, the Torah continues to inspire us to be better people, teaching us (for example) to create a society in which people provide for others in need, as our bat mitzvah discussed earlier. But on the other hand, the Torah reminds us that the ills of war and poverty will always be with us.
Perhaps that is what makes purple so wonderful: that it is a human color, reflecting the nature of our lives and our society. Blue and red are primary colors; they suggest one way or the other. But purple, being in-between, reminds us that to be human is to see our lives as a mixture. We take the bad with the good. We acknowledge that there are no ones and zeroes, no absolutes. No individual is perfectly righteous; and nobody is completely wicked. We are all beinoni, all somewhere in-between.
As we continue to move through Elul and into 5784, we should think purple; we should remember that each of us is in balance, and we want to tilt the scales in our favor, by going a little bit further for those around us, by seeking out the extra mitzvah, by working a little harder to stave off war and poverty if we can, and of course by remembering that we will never be free of either obligation.
Now is the time to start wearing purple.
~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 8/26/2023.)
*The current Prime Minister of France, Elizabeth Borne, has a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother, although to my knowledge is not halakhically Jewish.
The Modern Rabbi 