The Lizard in the Mikveh

August 2024

A couple of years ago my spouse and I were in Nova Scotia. Our friend sent me a link to a New York Times article about the black Loyalists during the American Revolution who had relocated to Nova Scotia. They were promised by the Crown land on which to settle, jobs and a better life. Not surprisingly, the land, the jobs and the better life never materialized and some of them were actually among the first Black Americans to go to Sierra Leone and start the Liberia experiment. But some of the people who’d gone to Nova Scotia stayed and carved out lives for themselves there.

Some eventually established themselves in the north end of Halifax. Their community was situated adjacent to the stockyards and the city’s dump. They lived literally on the other side of the tracks. And over 120 years, as more and more Black Americans came to Halifax to escape slavery and institutionalized, government sanctioned discrimination in the US, they developed a vibrant community, policing, educating and ruling themselves, taking care of their own and engaging in all manner of commerce and industry in the broader society. They filled their own sanitary and highway needs. They established the Seaview United Baptist Church.

In the 1960s, the city wanted to expand the town dump and determined that Africville had to go. They bought Africville’s properties at well below market value, and then one night, they bulldozed the remaining homes, razing every building including the church. Provisions for re-locating all of the residents had not been made ahead of time, so they had to find themselves their own housing.

After the home demolitions the residents of Africville continued to organize themselves and to seek compensation for those whose homes had been razed without it, taking care of their own as they’d always done. In 2010 the community was given about an acre and half of land on the original site, and enough compensation was made to rebuild a replica of the church, which houses the museum of the Halifax Black community established at the time of the American Revolution. An apology was issued by the Halifax mayor.

Yet some of the community never received justice, let alone compensation for their lost property. And most of the land was not returned to the Black community even as portions of the area are reclaimed and rehabilitated. It was a half-hearted “We’re sorry,” a “we’re sorry but…” And that’s like bringing a lizard into the mikveh with you.

A mikveh is a ritual bath. Men and women go to the mikveh when they are marking a change in status, such as getting married or divorced, after giving birth, and for conversion into Judaism. They might go to the mikveh if they’ve survived what might have been a fatal accident or disease. One can also bring one’s dishes and pots and pans to the mikveh to make them kosher.

Lizards are not kosher. They are identified as specifically not kosher in the Bible. So if you know what a mikveh is for and you bring a lizard into the mikveh, you’re undermining the ritual purity you are seeking to create. You’re also making the whole mikveh impure, thus nullifying its sole purpose.

It’s like when someone says, “I’m sorry you felt hurt by my actions.” They aren’t really owning that they hurt you and are suggesting that they are not in fact responsible for your harm. Or when someone pays restitution for damaging your property when they were doing work on their home and they do it again when they have the opportunity, choosing to pay for their behavior but not change it. It’s like bringing a lizard into the mikveh: the good deed is completely nullified by the bad.

Communities like Halifax and nations like Canada and the United States perpetuate the bad behavior even as they take steps to right some wrongs. While the Canadian government has issued apologies to and done some restorative justice with the First Nations of Canada for the government schools that treated the Natives so abysmally, they continue to exploit tribal lands on which to lay oil pipelines.

I spoke in this very pulpit several years ago about the case for reparations for Black Americans to compensate for their ancestors’ enslavement, and some local municipalities, as well as the state of California have taken steps to pay reparations. Yet we haven’t even begun to address the wholesale robbery of Native American lands in the US.

More importantly, we haven’t begun to address the systemic social and economic oppression of Black, Brown and Native American peoples in this country. If we had we couldn’t possibly be entertaining putting a racist in the White House for the second time. If we had we wouldn’t be confronted with the vitriolic and disgusting misogynoir, perhaps our newest word for talking about the uniquely abhorrent way black women are treated in the public arena.

What might it look like if we, as a nation, were to really accept responsibility for the harm we as a nation have perpetuated on millions of the people who have lived within our borders? The 12th century Jewish philosopher Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, known as Maimonides or by an acronym of his name as RaMBaM, came up with a five-step process of repentance. First, I confess. That confession may be to God or may be to myself. The point is that I recognize that I’ve perpetrated harm and I own my behavior, that I do the internal work required to admit my wrongdoing.

RaMBaM’s second step is not to re-harm when I’m put in a similar situation as when I last harmed someone. Say I have been insulting to someone who works for me. The next time I am faced with an opportunity to insult the person, I make a different choice. Maybe I walk away before I speak. Maybe I find language that will help them do their job more competently or efficiently without making it into an insult.

The third step is to offer restitution and accept the consequences of my behavior. Let’s say I cut down trees on your property to enhance the view from my windows. I pay you for the value of the trees and accept that I may receive a fine as well from the town, which I also pay.

It’s only after these steps that Maimonides advocates apologizing to the person or people I’ve harmed. That’s because he knew there’d likely be a lot of response from the victim of my bad behavior after I pay restitution and even more after I apologize. In fact, Maimonides offers specific suggestions about the apology itself, including how the victim should respond and if the victim doesn’t accept the apology, the perpetrator’s next steps.

The fifth step in the RaMBaM’s process is that I make life changes as a result of my bad behavior. Maybe I stop being a supervisor at my job, maybe I leave my job altogether and pursue work in which I don’t have to supervise others. Maybe I sell my house, offering it first to those on whose adjacent property grew the trees I cut down.

Rabbi Danya Rutenberg in her 2022 book entitled On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World suggests that not just individuals but communities and nations can follow RaMBaM’s steps. She argues in her book that some indigenous peoples as well as in some Black communities, processes such as RaMBaM’s have been used for generations. She notes, too, that here and there, as in the cases I cited earlier, Canada and the US have done some of this work. They just didn’t go all the way with it.

What might it look like for peoples who have perpetuated harm on others for generations to fully embrace this process, so that the people who experienced the harm could be seen, acknowledged, apologized to, paid for their pain and trust it never to happen again? What might it feel like as a nation to know that we’d committed to a different path?

I think it starts with the artists: the painters and mural makers, wood carvers and sculptors, the dancers and the singers, story tellers and actors, the poets and the playwrights, the novelists and lyricists. I think it starts with two writers who care about each other and know their plights are interwoven like the Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevi who spent a year living in Gaza, talking to people and writing their stories as an Israeli in Palestine, and the Egyptian Arab writer R.F. Gregory who has written about the plight of the Palestinians and also the Israelis. When these two authors choose to sit down and talk with one another about their work and share their hearts and their souls with one another, the process of seeing each other in under way. They then project that onto an international screen for all to see and hear through their books, their films and their radio interviews, furthering the process of real repentance and repair.

I think it continues with artists like the Black American vanessa german, who created an art space first in Pittsburgh and then in other cities in which she has lived, where the children and the adults in underserved, poor, predominantly Black communities could come and make art together, art that tells their stories of abuse and neglect and of their hopes and dreams, and that gets shown to the broader community, because, as is quoted in the New York Times on August 11, “One of the threads that connects her [german’s] varied interests is a belief that art can restore our capacities to love ourselves and our communities – but only after we confront traumas and injustices, past and present, that stand in the way of such care.”

The banning of the teaching of an honest history of Black American enslavement in states like Florida and Texas because it may make white children feel badly about themselves is one of the ways we continue to perpetuate the harm done to our Black American citizens. The expectation that immediately after a Black American citizen’s loved one is shot to death by a white perpetrator just for being Black offer forgiveness to the perpetrator, an expectation never made of white victims’ families, is another way in which we continue to harm, as Rutenberg makes clear in her book.

We travel between fostering the work of the writers Halevi and Gregory and artists like german that move the needle in our capacity to do real justice and the back slide into racist education policy and the perpetuation of white fragility as an excuse to continue harmful behavior toward people of color.

I think that way we move beyond the trauma and injustice is by talking to each other across dinner tables and in churches, on soccer fields and in art spaces. We can’t keep leaving it to the diplomats and politicians, because they are failing. We need to take it upon ourselves to do this work of repentance and repair.

After the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel, the work that Palestinian and Israeli women had been doing to heal their communities didn’t stop; it accelerated. Palestinian women helped Israeli women mobilize to provide material goods and support in the Israeli communities that had been attacked and Israeli women took on work within Gaza on behalf of women and children as Israel has retaliated militarily, and this all continues to this day. These are the peacemakers, the ones doing restorative justice, the ones moving beyond, the ones pushing all of us forward.