There was a big controversy about the movie, Schindler’s List. The advertising for the movie contained the teaching from the Talmud, “If you save a single life, it is as if you have saved the world entire.” Many of us know this teaching, and we’ve heard it many times before.

The controversy comes for people who claim that the movie edited this Talmudic teaching. They say that the Talmud really says, “If you save a single life in Israel, it is as if you have saved an entire world.” See, these folks claim that Judaism doesn’t really care about all lives, and all people. It’s only Jewish lives that matter to Jews. That’s what these words, “in Israel” mean, they claim. By omitting these words, say the critics, Spielberg was hiding the Jews’ selfishness, their ethnocentrism, their disregard for anyone but themselves, their lack of humanity, their evil!

So, was this true?

Of course not.

See, here’s the real story. As many of you know, there are actually two versions of the Talmud. The first is the Talmud Yirushalmi – a version of the Talmud thought to have been produced in the Galilee and completed in the first half of the fifth century. The second is the Talmud Bavli – the Babylonian Talmud completed in the area of modern day Iraq a century or two after the Talmud Yirushalmi. The Babylonian Talmud is twice as long as the Talmud Yirushalmi, and contains several significant differences in the text. But both are considered authoritative, and their differences are a source of commentary and discussion by later sages.

One of these differences is the line from Schindler’s List. The movie uses the formulation from the Talmud Yirushalmi that I recited a moment ago. The Babylonian Talmud adds the words “in Israel.” Spielberg didn’t edit the text to make Jews look better. He merely chose one text with the more appropriate quote for the film over the other.

How do we know that the critics who claim that Jews only care about other Jews are wrong? It only takes a quick look at our sacred Scripture. Our Scripture teaches that we shall have one law that applies both to Jews and to the strangers, the non-Jews, among us. (Ex. 12:49) We are admonished to love our neighbors as we do ourselves, even if they are strangers. (Lev. 19:34) And Hillel taught us, “What is hateful to you, do not do to another,” with no restriction to Jew or non-Jew. The idea that we Jews need not care about the lives of other people is contrary to our ethical teachings.

How can we explain the Talmud Bavli formulation of the passage when it refers to lives “in Israel” and not to other lives? I think the answer lies in not jumping to a false assumption. The Talmud Bavli says that Jews should care for other Jews in this passage. That does not mean the Talmud Bavli is saying that Jews should not care about non-Jews.   Actually, if you look at the statement in the Talmud Bavli alone, it is silent on the subject of non-Jews. One cannot make such a huge moral conclusion about how we Jews consider non-Jewish lives from mere silence, especially considering the other teachings in our texts on this subject that I just mentioned. The idea that the passage in the Talmud Bavli is exclusionary does not rest on sound logical principles, and does not make sense in the context of the entirety of our Scripture.

So, why does the Talmud Bavli specify that Jews should concern themselves about saving or destroying other lives “in Israel.” I have some theories. By the time the Talmud Bavli was nearing completion, the Babylonian community had gained ascendancy over the remnants of the Jews in Israel. In fact, the community that had produced the Talmud Yirushalmi was dying. It could be that the powerful Jews in Babylonia were watching their fellow Jews still in the Holy Land suffer, and were doing nothing to help them. Could the addition of these words in the Talmud Bavli have been meant to encourage and admonish the Babylonian Jews to care for their brothers and sisters in Israel? Could these words have been meant to remind them of their obligations to their fellow Jews which were being ignored?

Or, maybe there were times that the non-Jewish peoples among whom the Jews lived were persecuting the Jews. Maybe the inclusion of the words “in Israel” was meant as a challenge to both Jews and non-Jews that Jewish lives mattered too.

I can’t prove that either of these theories is true, but either makes a lot of sense to me. And we are left with two beautiful teachings. We should care about the lives of other Jews, and we have a responsibility to each other as the Children of Israel. And, also, equally, we should care about the lives of all others. There are times when we need to focus more upon the needs of our own people, and there are other times when we need to focus on the lives and needs of other people. In essence, in this way, we are just like every other moral and ethical people on earth, caring both for ourselves and for others, simply changing our focus based on the pressing circumstances. When there is a crisis in Israel or the Jewish community, we focus upon ourselves. When there is a hurricane in the Caribbean, or an earthquake in Asia, or almost any other crisis, we respond to save the lives of others outside our people as quickly as we can.

I was reminded of all of this when I heard about a church in a community in Florida. The church had placed a message on its outdoor sign – Black Lives Matter. Well, someone took some letters off the sign, and changed the message to say, “Lives Matter.” And I saw an immediate parallel to the two formulations about saving a life in the Talmud, one emphasizing a life “in Israel,” and one not.

The Black Lives Matter movement rose out of a clear and specific problem. African Americans are disproportionally stopped and arrested, given harsher penalties for the same crimes as whites, and most serious, shot and sometimes killed by authorities while unarmed. According to a Washington Post study, of all suspects killed by law enforcement, blacks and Hispanics were two and a half more likely to be unarmed than whites. African-American mentally ill people were 11 times more likely to be killed by police than white mentally ill people. Black teenagers are 21 times more likely to be killed by authorities than whites. Even though marijuana use rates are the same in the black and white community, blacks are up to ten times more likely to be arrested for this crime than whites. Whatever happened to Michal Brown in Ferguson, a Department of Justice report found that the local police had arrested people, mostly American-American, without cause, routinely used unnecessary force, and levied fines for unfounded charges as a revenue source.

When I lived in Cincinnati fifteen years ago, my wife’s boss’s son, an African-American college student, was stopped by the police on campus while on his way to class. The police car ran up on the curb in front of him, and the officers got out of the car and forced him to the ground. A faculty member saw this and intervened, and the police said he was acting suspicious….because he had a backpack.   And then there would be a story on the news just about every month about the police shooting an unarmed black man. Finally, the community had had enough, and they mostly peacefully protested. It’s fourteen years later, and we’re still dealing with the same issues.

Some have now raised the claim that “Black Lives Matter” is racist, because, really, don’t all lives matter? And don’t the lives of police killed in the line of duty matter? Shouldn’t we say, “All Lives Matter?” All lives do matter, especially those by our brave police officers, but this is a particular time in our history where we need to deal with a specific problem of racism. Saying “Black Lives Matter” does not preclude the idea that “All Lives Matter,” and aside for some notable exceptions, I don’t think the Black Lives Matter movement disregards the value of all lives. It’s just that they have a real and legitimate concern for members of their community right now, and they are trying to focus attention to this problem. If this were happening in the Jewish community, we would do exactly the same. After all, it says in our Talmud, “If you save a single life in Israel, you have saved the world entire.” And it also says, “If you save a single life, you have saved the world entire.” Both are true. Sometime we need to say one, and sometimes the other, but neither means that we only care about ourselves. And the same is true when African Americans say, “Black Lives Matter.”

But, words also do matter. And so I hope that those in the Black Lives Matter movement clearly address their critics without becoming defensive. It would be good to hear them say that, yes, all lives matter, but we as a society need to focus on the pressing issue of what is happening in the African-American community right now.

Because the problem persists. After that church in Florida restored its sign to the original message, “Black Lives Matter,” someone changed it again. This time, they took letters from other places, and they made the sign read, “Black Lives Matter….Less.”

May this be a sweet year of life and peace for all of us, and for all our neighbors, our country, our spiritual homeland Israel, and all the world.

Ken y’hi ratzon – may this be God’s will.

(Delivered as sermon at Boston University, Rosh HaShannah, 5778)