Parshas Terumah 5782
Barry Bonds is not a Hall of Famer. This past week marked the former star’s final appearance on the ballot of the Baseball Writers Association of America, and he fell short of the 75% threshold necessary for induction. The debate surrounding Bonds—as well as other players known to have used performance enhancing drugs during their baseball careers—has raged for years. Should a player known to unequivocally be one of the greatest to ever have played be kept out of the Hall because drugs made him even better than he would otherwise have been?
In an especially poignant take, Doug Glanville—former player turned analyst—weighed in with a sigh of relief. No, Glanville argues, Bonds is not a Hall of Famer. And what Glanville has brought to the conversation that heretofore has been missing is a face.
While the argument against Bonds and other PED users has classically been one of defamation of the game and cheating the institution of baseball, Glanville offered a personal perspective that only someone who actually played in that era could: Cheaters altered the performance and the lives of anyone who didn’t cheat by making it impossible to keep up. How could a clean player stand a chance when competing against others who have unnaturally quicker reflexes, superhuman strength, more easily bounce back from injuries, and circumvent the body’s natural aging process?
Glanville does not suggest that he’d have enjoyed an all-star career if not for the Barry Bondses of the game, nor that Bonds could not have put up Hall of Fame numbers without using PED’s. He argues only that this group of players did more than damage the game—that faceless institution. They damaged real people and real lives and sowed immense frustration and pain in the wake of their juiced-up play. And players like that do not deserve to be enshrined.
With the campaign to fund the construction of the Mishkan, the Torah is introducing the Jewish People to the concept of an institution. The Mishkan will serve as a communal hub and a center of national spiritual life. And all without a face. Which is the inherent problem with institutions, one that persists to the institutions we construct and maintain til today.
When we interact with public institutions, we can easily slide into the trap of “they.” That is, referring to the powers-that-be—those who run, operate, and lead those institutions—by a convenient, amorphous pronoun that blurs the presence of real human beings. But those human beings exist. They have given their time, they have sacrificed, they have skin in the game. They are Doug Glanville. And just as an assault on the game is an assault on him, an assault on an institution is an assault on those who manage it.
Imagine someone entering the newly constructed Mishkan with korban in hand, ready to make his first sacrifice. He stands waiting his turn, in a long line of fellow Jews who have all arrived to do the same. And he grows impatient. “Why can’t they move this along more quickly? What’s taking them so long?” Those hurtful words are spoken within earshot of a certain Kohen, who feels like the rug has just been swept out from under him. He’s been working since dawn without letup, processing the korbanos of the people, moving as fast as he possibly can. He is tired and sweaty and is feet hurt. And he goes home crestfallen, distraught that for all his hard work, it wasn’t enough to please the people.
The fellow who made those comments didn’t mean it that way. He didn’t mean for it to be directed toward that Kohen. He wasn’t speaking about him, he was speaking about “them”. But of course, there is no “them”.
There’s also no “them” who run a shul, or a school, or a restaurant for that matter. There are only actual people who are the real-life recipients of the criticism launched at those institutions. Leaving a negative review on Yelp about a dining experience impacts the owners, managers, and waiters, who are real people. A post to facebook about where an organization is falling short is a public call-out of the individuals who serve at the helm.
This issue looms particularly large on social media. Psychologists have coined the term “online disinhibition” to describe the phenomenon of people acting with far less restraint in online communication than they would in face-to-face interaction. This is a reality even when engaging with other individuals online, but is heightened significantly when it comes to institutions. In the online arena, the human faces are even less distinct, and there’s the false sense that comments made come without any casualty of human emotion.
This is not to say that there is no place for criticism and that every disappointment with our institutions should be met with a mere turning of the other cheek. But there is a degree of callousness present in our critique of institutions that I believe would not exist were we to be mindful of the faces behind the institutional facade. Remembering the actual people who absorb our criticism can help to temper some of the vitriol and invite direct conversation that would likely prove more productive—and certainly more polite—than public denouncements.
It is interesting that the first institution the Jewish People ever construct—the Mishkan—is so done through funds that were collected from the full spectrum of the Jewish People. Perhaps here we find a key to helping change our perspective. Become directly involved and change the narrative from the institution being a “them” to being an “us”. When it’s your own, you know that the institution is not robotic; it’s human. You know that words about the institution land at the feet of real people who work hard to support it. And you hopefully can extrapolate and apply that knowledge to the full landscape of institutions with which you interact.
Barry Bonds didn’t only trample on the institution that is Major League Baseball. He trampled on Doug Glanville. Perhaps he knew this full well and was simply too selfish to care, or perhaps he was encumbered by what we all are at some level: the difficulty in perceiving the real people that our actions and words effect, even when they’re standing right beside us on the baseball diamond. How important it is that we not lose the trees for the forest.