There is an exercise I have done many times at church camps, family reunions, and especially in the classroom. Sometimes I just use it as an icebreaker, and when it’s done, we say “That was fun” and move on. Sometimes I follow it up with a little talk about the implications of a seemingly harmless game.
Here’s how the game works. I ask people to all walk up to the front of the room, and then I start calling out different criteria, and depending on your answer, you move to one side of the room or the other. So, for example, I could say “If you live east of the Mississippi River, move over to this side of the room. If you live west of the Mississippi, move to the other side.” Then I call out a new criteria: “If you are currently a pet owner, move over to the left side; if you’re not currently a pet owner, move to the right side.” “If you’re a morning person, move here; if you’re not morning person, move there.” “Would you rather be hot than cold, or cold than hot? Do you call it “pop” or “soda”?” “Do you squeeze the toothpaste tube from the end, or from the middle?” And I might end with the most controversial one of them all: “Should the toilet paper go over the top, or under the back?”
When I do this exercise with graduate students, I just add one more instruction before we begin. I say, “During this exercise, pay attention to your internal reactions.” After it’s over, I’ll ask them what internal reactions they had. Some say it was interesting to see who was in which group, how big the groups were, etc. But then I’ll ask: “At any point during the exercise, did this thought ever flit into your mind? The thought is: ‘What’s wrong with those people over there?’”
Some students deny it, but I know it’s true. Maybe you didn’t let that thought dwell in your mind for long, but I know it popped into your head. Because it’s human nature. Sometimes I’ll hear students say things out loud that reflect that reaction: they’ll cheer for their side, or say something disparaging about the other side.
I’ve also done the exercise enough to observe how people behave when they do it. When they walk to one side of the room, they glance around at the people in their group, but then they’ll turn and look at the other side. They’ll stare across “the great divide.”
Then I have them ponder the question: what if I made one of those divisions permanent? What if I said, “Morning people move to this side of the room, and stay there for the rest of the semester; evening people move other to that side and that there permanently.” Even if it was a trivial criteria, I think I know what would happen. Each group would start talking obsessively about the other group, arguing why they are wrong, speculating about them, analyzing them, criticizing them. It’s human nature. They wouldn’t spend much time talking to the other group, but they’d spend a lot of time talking about them.
If you know Dr. Seuss stories, you might remember a story about this sort of thing: the Sneetches, with Stars Upon Thars. It was a kind of creature that was friendly enough, but some Sneetches had a big star on their belly and others didn’t. This led to prejudices, and the Sneetches without stars felt inferior, until a man came along with a machine that could put stars on their bellies. He made a lot of money, but a new problem arose: the Sneetches that already had stars on their bellies didn’t like everyone having them, so the man adapted his machine so it would take the stars off, and now the Sneetches without stars would be the cool ones. The man made a lot of money with his machine!
Even if the criteria was completely meaningless, I think eventually this pattern could lead to war. I used to live in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, which was a small enough community that everyone’s phone number started with the same three digits (947), so when they printed the phone directory, the phone numbers only had four digits in them. But eventually those numbers got used up, and some people got a different three digit start to their phone number. Do you think it led to prejudice and divisions? Yes, it did. So that’s why a fun little icebreaker exercise can have profound implications: it shows you the seeds of war. When people divide into groups, they start to judge.
That’s why there are criteria I would be afraid to try, even for a second. I wouldn’t want to say “People who vote Democratic move to the left side of the room; people who vote Republican move to the other side.” “Gun lovers move here; people who don’t love guns there.” “People in favor of defunding the police, move here; people against that idea, move there.” My students might remember who moved where, and it could lead to divisions and separation, which I don’t want in my classroom.
So we have that story from Judges 12, where there was a war between the Gileadites and the Ephraimites, and at the end, some Ephraimites just wanted to cross the Jordan river to go home. But the Gileadites asked them a question: “Can you say ‘Shibboleth’?” If they pronounced it wrong, that meant they were in the wrong group of people and they were killed: 42,000 of them.
That idea has come up numerous times in history, by the way. If you look up ‘Shibboleth,’ you will read about the Frisian Rebellion, where if you pronounced a word wrong, you were beheaded; or the Battle of the Golden Spurs in Belgium in 1302, were they used the same technique. Even as recently as 1937, this was used on this continent: the dictator of the Dominican Republic asked people to say the Spanish word for ‘parsley,’ and if they pronounced it wrong, it meant they were Haitian. Twenty to thirty thousand Haitians were killed.
But if you have seen the word “Shibboleth” lately, it was probably a computer error message. I don’t understand the technicalities, but it’s the same general principle: your computer doesn’t recognize where something comes from – there’s a stranger in your midst that doesn’t belong.
Now, I have never been in a situation where being identified as a certain type of person meant that my life was in danger. But there have been situations where I didn’t want to be identified, because it would mean being judged. Situations where I don’t want someone to look over at me and think, “What’s wrong with that person over there?”
When humans separate into groups, they judge … but the Bible says they are not allowed to do that. Jesus said very plainly in Matthew: “Judge not that ye be not judged.” And he had a visual image that we might have gotten used to because we’ve heard it before, but it’s so absurd that it must have made people laugh out loud when they heard it: your neighbor has a speck in his eye, but you have a plank in your own. [HOLDS UP A PLANK OF WOOD, AND TRIES TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO PUT IT IN HIS EYE]
That can be a nice parable, because it means that other people are going to leave me alone for the speck in my eye. But no, Jesus isn’t talking to other people: he’s talking to me.
And then in Swedenborg’s work Apocalypse Explained, it’s even more explicit: you cannot judge the spiritual state of others. Only God has the perspective to do that. But still, you might think, “Yes, but those people are wrong! It’s printed right on the toothpaste tube itself—you’re supposed to squeeze it from the end!”
Nowadays, some people have the philosophy “To each his own – you do you, I’ll do me. Everyone is different; no one is better or worse than anyone else.” That’s a good philosophy, but it’s a hard one to maintain sometimes. The other day I was driving along I-94, a wide section that was a least four lanes wide, and someone zipped right in front of me, cutting across the lanes diagonally, doing at least 85 or 90 miles per hour. It’s not easy to say “Oh well, some people just drive differently from others” when they are actually endangering you.
So rather than saying “Everyone is fine just the way they are,” it is perhaps more accurate to say, “Yes, there is something wrong with those people over there. They are human, just like me.” After all, even in Jesus’ parable, there is a speck in the neighbor’s eye. No one is perfect.
Worry about the plank in my own eye. That sounds daunting. It sounds painful and difficult, and perhaps a lifetime’s worth of work. In the meanwhile, I should not say anything about anyone else’s faults.
But there is another lesson to be drawn from that Division Game. When I do it, I call out at least fifteen criteria, perhaps twenty of them, so people move around a lot. And when I call out one criteria, and you move across the room and join a group that feels and acts the same way you do, that can be nice. You may be surprised: “Look at all these morning people! I thought I was the only one.” It can be a comfort to be surrounded by people who think the way you do, and you may say “These people get it.” But then I call out a new criteria few seconds later, and you find that half of the “right-thinking people” moved to the other side. And after a dozen rounds or so, you might find that no one in the room agrees with you on everything. In other words, if you only want to hang around with “right-thinking people” like you, and you realize that they only agree with you on some things and are not “right-thinking people” on other matters, then you will end up a lonely person.
So your task for this week is to follow Jesus’ instructions, and not judge others, or even speculate about them. If you find yourself thinking, “What’s wrong with those people over there?”, stop and switch the focus back to yourself. It may even feel self-centered, to focus all your attention on yourself. You may even try saying to someone else, “Can you help me with the plank in my eye?” and see what happens.
Amen
READINGS
Judges 12:4-6
Jephthah then called together the men of Gilead and fought against Ephraim. The Gileadites struck them down because the Ephraimites had said, “You Gileadites are renegades from Ephraim and Manasseh.” The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, “Let me cross over,” the men of Gilead asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he replied, “No,” they said, “All right, say ‘Shibboleth.’” If he said, “Sibboleth,” because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time.
Matthew 7:1-5
“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
Swedenborg: Apocalypse Explained #687
[J]udgment belongs to the Lord alone. Who cannot see that to judge myriads of myriads, each one according to the state of their love and faith both in their internal and in their external human, would be impossible for any angel, and would be possible only for the Lord from the Divine that is in Him and that proceeds from Him; also that to judge all in the heavens and in the earth belongs to infinite wisdom and infinite power, not the least part of which falls to finite beings such as the angels are, and such as the elders of Israel and the apostles of the Lord were? These taken together would not be able to judge even a single person or a single spirit. For he who is to judge must see every stage of the person who is to be judged from infancy to the end of his life in the world, and afterward what the state of their life is to be to eternity. For in every view and in each and every particular of judgment, there must be what is eternal and infinite, and that is in the Divine alone, and from the Divine alone, because it is infinite and eternal.