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.
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.
Toldot – Generations
From Generation to Generation
November 8, 2015
Parshat Toldot
The reading from the Bible/parshat h’shavua this week is Toldot, which means both “generations” and “stories.” It opens with Isaac asking G!d to make his wife Rebecca pregnant. His mother, Sarah, also had been unable to conceive until she was a very old woman. Rebecca does conceive, and she carries twins who struggle in her womb so much that she asks G!d “if this is how it is going to be, then why am I?” or what is the reason for my existence? G!d actually answers this existential question by telling her “Two nations are in your womb, two separate peoples will come from your body. One people will be mightier than the other, and the older will serve the younger.”
While Isaac asks G!d to do something tangible – make his wife pregnant – Rebecca asks the reason for her existence. Isaac gets a tangible response, and Rebecca gets a philosophical answer, suggesting to some commentators that she is the deeper thinker and the one more spiritually attuned. G!d’s answer to her tells us that G!d has a plan for Rebecca that is bigger than the pain she is suffering during the pregnancy.
The plan unfolds as we read on in the portion: Esau is the first born twin. He is all red and hairy, which is what his name “Esau” means. He grows up to be a hunter and Isaac’s favorite, because Isaac likes to eat meat and Esau provides it for him. Jacob, the second to be born, is named Jacob meaning the one who grabbed onto his brother’s heal while he was being born. He is a homebody who likes to cook, and he is Rebecca’s favorite.
Rebecca conspires with Jacob to steal the first born’s blessing and birthright from his brother Esau. Our Rabbinic sages teach that she does this because she is in tune with G!d’s plan. Jacob will become a great nation – he will actually become “Israel” – after he wrestles with an angel, gets his hip ligament pulled and emerges forever changed from the struggle as indicated by the change of his name. Esau, too will become a great nation; the Edomites are his tribe. But this is the Torah, so its Jacob’s tribe that is the center of the story.
The story of these twins and their parents echoes the story of Abraham’s sons Ishmael and Isaac and their parents. The elder, Ishmael, gets pushed out because Isaac’s mother Sarah, like Rebecca, knows that it is Isaac’s story that matters for the development of the nation of Israel. Ishmael too founds a great nation, the nation that would become Islam, but again, this isn’t the Koran, it’s the Torah, so his story is secondary. And there are many, many more commonalities between the two stories.
What interests me about the similarities between the two stories is what the sons learn about life from their parents, and how the parents seem completely unaware of what they are teaching their children. In both cases, the children learn brutality and betrayal in the setting of the nuclear family. In both cases this learning will be projected onto the next generation with huge consequences that are both awful and wonderful. In both cases, the younger generation will have to go through its own struggles to develop into emotionally whole and spiritually developed individuals.
The sons’ journeys lead them to becoming fully actualized, emotionally developed and spiritually sophisticated human beings capable of doing great things because they reconcile with one another. Ishmael and Isaac come together to bury their father Abraham just as Jacob and Esau will reunite to bury their father Isaac. When Esau and Jacob meet up again as old men, Esau gives great quantities of gifts to Jacob, and Jacob tells Esau that to see his brother is like seeing the face of G!d. They’ve done the inner work that would lead to a transformation in their relationship and that would allow them to lead their respective people. Jacob’s words to his brother about seeing G!d in his face and Esau’s emotional response of clinging to Jacob and kissing him, lets us readers know that they have each internalized the other’s struggle and are genuinely changed by that. They have become spiritually renewed. This spiritual renewal doesn’t just affect their immediate families, it affects their children and their children’s children. “L’dor v’dor” or “from one generation to the next. It affects the nations they each lead. Jacob’s and Esau’s reconciliation sets in motion peace and cooperation between their peoples for all time.
In October, I heard an interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates just after he’d become a MacArthur Genius Award recipient. He’s a writer for The Atlantic, which last year published his Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations.” Coates is making the case for the payment of reparations to African Americans to begin to right the wrong of 200 + years of slavery, and its lasting effects. He cites studies done that show that millions or millions of dollars were stolen from African Americans by not paying them for their labor, by stealing the lands they came to own after slavery was over, and by denying African Americans mortgages and forcing them not just to pay for the homes they believed they were buying at rates double or more the homes’ values, but also to pay for repairs on those homes and the taxes on them, as well. Moreover, he cites evidence that in the year 1860, slaves as assets were worth more than the sum, the sum, worth of manufacturing, the railroads and all of the productive capacity of the United States.
In the interview, Coates spoke about growing up as a black child in Baltimore, where every decision he made, such as choosing which baseball cap to wear and how to wear it or what path to take to school, could mean the difference between coming home again safely or winding up dead. And he was clear that the potential for violence done to him that he had to consider every day was the result of the color of his skin and the result of the legacy of slavery.
Perhaps you are saying to yourself, “yeah, I also grew up in a tough neighborhood,” or “yeah, I also experienced discrimination growing up an immigrant or gay or Jewish” or whatever other reason you might have experienced it. At least that’s kind of where I was heading in my own mind as I listened to Coates talk, because, you know, I’m Jewish, and you know, there were, and still are those moments when someone’s anti-Semitic beliefs about Jews leaks out in my hearing. But he stopped me in my tracks with his next comments. He said that what really bothered him was that the majority of America, that is white America, went around living our lives having no idea that black, Native American, Latino, and Asian American kids lived their lives the way he grew up. No idea. He’s bothered that while neither he nor his parents were slaves, he and his kids live every day of their lives with the legacy of slavery affecting every aspect of their lives, and that white Americans don’t seem to appreciate that we, too, live every day of our lives with the legacy of slave holding affecting every aspect of our lives. That’s because we got the legacy of that luxury thanks to the color of our skin. But it’s also because we refuse to look that legacy in the eye and see ourselves as the descendants of a life that devastated an entire population and continues to adversely affect millions of African Americans.
I know what Coates means. One of my teachers, Rabbi Marcia Prager, and others have suggested that Jews live life with a collective experience of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I wasn’t personally a victim of the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Polish pogroms or the Holocaust, yet I inherited that legacy and it’s affected who I am in ways that still surprise me. And it can make me angry to think that most Europeans, most Poles and most Germans don’t daily suffer the shame and outrage of their ancestors’ beliefs and actions when I live daily with the repercussions of those ancestors’ anti-Jewish-ism.
Coates went on to say that if we want to celebrate the great American experiment in democracy on July 4th, if we want to be patriotic about what’s great about America, we needed also to deal with the fact that our great democracy, the creation of the American nation, was made possible by the enslavement of the black population. Even after 1865, the American nation, to quote one of Coates’s interviewees, was a “regime that elevated armed robbery to a governing principle” by such methods as Jim Crow and into the latter half of the 20th century by denying African Americans home mortgages, the rewards of the GI Bill, and a host of other government-sponsored or sanctioned discriminatory practices. Celebrating America is celebrating a lie if we don’t reconcile these truths. For Coates the way to do so is through reparations.
Coates is talking about something much deeper and more sustaining than the payment to African Americans of back pay and tax rebates. Coates writes that “Reparations – by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences – is the price we pay to see ourselves squarely.” He goes on to write that what he is “talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.” This is why I was so profoundly affected by his argument. It’s not just about the money; we’ve paid out reparations to slaves on occasions in our history, and if we wanted to do it, we’d find the money to do it now. But after twenty-five years of Representative John Conyers introducing a bill in the House at every opening session of Congress to study the effects of slavery, it’s still not been passed. Because we don’t want to go there. None of us as individuals wants to acknowledge that just because we ourselves weren’t slave owners doesn’t mean we don’t have a responsibility to right this wrong that is still being perpetrated.
Coates reminds me of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s suggestion that to acknowledge, to really see the person before me means I must take responsibility for that person, for not to take responsibility is to do violence to that person. I realize now that what Levinas meant was that while my family might have been too busy running from our own oppressors back in Russia and Poland during the period of slavery in America, I as a white American, who enjoys all that status has to offer, have a responsibility to my African American contemporary who is carrying the slavery legacy within her to be with her in her suffering, to fight with her for all African Americans to share in the American dream, and to stand beside her as witness to the suffering of her people. To see her face is to see the face of G!d, but it’s also to do my own internal, spiritual work. That means countering the lie of American democracy with the truth of the legacy of American slavery. That means encouraging my white friends to engage with our inchoate racism by forcing ourselves to look at our white privilege in order to eliminate it. For me, it also means making the argument for reparations not just for the economic justice it would bring about, which could, indeed, go miles to reverse a host of ills plaguing the African American community, but also for the national spiritual renewal it could catalyze.
A national spiritual renewal! Imagine us making new traditions on July 4th by telling our stories to one another and listening compassionately. Imagine us sitting beside one another and seeing G!d in each other’s faces as we acknowledge our collective culpability and take responsibility for an other’s suffering. Imagine saying “yes,” I owe it to you and choose to sacrifice some of what I have because you have sacrificed for me and this is what neighbors and fellow citizens do for each other in the oldest continuous democracy in the world. Imagine choosing to renew our national spirituality, so that all people are recognized, seen, heard and responded to with compassion and love.
A D’var Torah for Parshat Noach: All God’s Creatures Great and Small
Think back to the last time you voluntarily killed a living creature. Perhaps it was an ant in your kitchen, or a spider in your bedroom, a squirrel that had gotten into your attic or a rat that had gotten into your compost. How did it feel to kill that creature? How does it feel now that you think back on it? Do you regret it? Would you do it again?
Prior to this week’s Torah portion, the Rabbis teach that humans were vegetarian. (Sanhedrin 59b) It would seem that in this way, God valued all living creatures equally. Part of the perfection of the Garden of Eden is in this equality of all of God’s creation. Indeed, the Rabbis suggested that God created humans from the “upper” and “lower firmaments” so that there would be peace on earth without the upper or lower firmaments thinking one was greater than the other.
At least for some of our sages in some periods of history, humans are considered united with, rather than above all of creation.
This is so interesting when we consider that in this week’s parshat Noach, God destroyed all but two of each species that lived on the land or flew in the sky because “the earth had become corrupted.” (Bereshit 6:11). We learn that this corruption was a result of human sin, mostly of a sexual or violent nature, but also having to do with theft and deception. (Rashi on Bereshit 6:11) God created humans with the power to destroy by our behavior the earth and all that is on it. Makes sense when you consider that we are in relationship with all of creation; one species’ actions can affect the whole system. Only Noah was righteous in his generation; only Noah listened to God and took care of God’s creation as God intended it to be cared for: respectfully and consciously. Only Noah saw himself as part of, rather than apart from, creation.
Noah’s righteousness is apparent in his care for the animals. He “walked with God” (Bereshit 6:9), meaning that he listened to God’s instructions, for example, by bringing food onto the ark for him, his family (the only other humans to survive the flood), and all the animals.
God’s gift after the flood to Noach, and by extension to us, is that we can now eat animals. The dominion over animals given to humans in Bereishit 1:27, compared with the Rabbis’ notion that humans were created equal to the rest of creation, is perhaps an example of God’s and our own ambivalence about being the stewards of every other plant and animal species. Noah’s care of the animals taken in light of permission to eat the animals seems to suggest that he owns them and can do what he wants with them. We, like God and our Sages, seem also to be ambivalent about our role as stewards of the rest of creation.
Modern consumerist culture perpetuates the position that we are in a hierarchical relationship with the rest of creation. For example, we measure the health of our economy by the production of new goods, such as the number of new homes built in a fiscal period. We don’t measure the concomitant destruction of creature or vegetative life. So a new home might also mean the extirpation of a grass or flower species or the extinction of a bug species. It might mean the further sectioning of a bird’s or fox’s feeding grounds, causing the bird to have to fly further, the fox to hunt longer for its food. That in turn can mean the eventual loss of a species to the area.
What would happen if we measured the health of our economy by the number of new saplings developing in a forest or the return of species to an area that has been environmentally rehabilitated? What would happen if we looked at our food, our homes, our clothing, our computers as gifts given to us by the earth, rather than as our right to take as the superior species in the hierarchy of species?
The Potawatomi (indigenous people of the upper mid-west and members of the Algonquian family) biologist Robin Wall Kimmer writes that “the essence of the gift is that it creates relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity. In Western thinking, private land is understood to be a ‘bundle of rights,’ whereas in a gift economy property has a ‘bundle of responsibilities’ attached.” Kimmer knows what most of us are unaware of: that the pecan trees, for example, work as a community when growing their fruit. They are as cunningly designed, in their own way, as we are. (From Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of the Plants.)
Upon exiting the ark after the waters subside, Noah “built an altar to God and, taking of every pure animal and of every pure bird, offered burnt offerings on the altar. God smelled the pleasing odor, and God said to Himself, ‘Never again will I doom the earth because of humans…” (Bereishit 8:20-21). Noah offered animals on his altar in an attempt to show gratitude and love to God who saved enough of creation so that creation could continue in spite of the human capacity to act immorally. The man who loved and cared for the animals also loved and cared for his God. He then planted a garden, perhaps suggesting to us that if we are to take from the earth and from the animals for our own sustenance, let us be sure that we are taking in a responsible way, only what we need, and ensuring conditions for the continuation of every species.
This week’s parshah teaches us another way of honoring and striving to emulate God. Maimonides teaches that God wants us to show compassion and respect to the animals just as God shows us compassion and respect. We can emulate Noah and learn to emulate God by making better choices in our buying, or even better, by buying less and being grateful more. We can see ourselves and our children in a reciprocal relationship with all of creation rather than in power over it.
*Published by Truah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, October 8, 2018 and in Living Nonviolence, Friday, October 19, 2018
It’s Different When It’s One of Your Own
Published in the Jewish Journal blog “Inspired and Expired,” September 14, 2016
My minister colleague passed into the next world recently. I had only known her about six months, and yet, we had become quite close. The depth we’d reached in our relationship in such a short time was partly because of who she was and her beautiful neshama or soul. Read more
The Ba’al Shem Tov and the Skunk
At least twice a week I take a walk with a friend. We pass a school and often hear laughing children at recess. We enter a wood that lets out onto a clearing, and the children’s voices fade away. Occasionally a red tailed hawk is perched on a branch over our heads or soars hunting over the field. The crows caucus loudly, and I hope for a flock of bluebirds that turn iridescent in the morning light. Back in the woods there are some houses. One has an impressive garden in which an orange fruit, perhaps a persimmon, clings to its branches even as the temperatures drop. Another’s breezeway gives us a glimpse of the ocean we’ll encounter full on a little ways ahead. Sometimes the waves come over the seawall, the spray chilling our faces with 30 mile an hour winds. Sometimes we see all the way to the mainland. We walk along a road that winds along a pond. Once we stood there for half an hour routing traffic around a box turtle making its daily pilgrimage from the wetlands on one side of the road to the pond on the other. But these last few months we’ve been marking the decay of a skunk. At first it shocked us, its blood staining the ground. The blood seemed still to be running, so freshly dead it was on those first sightings. Hungry crows eventually carried its viscera and part of its carcass down into the swamp. But they’d left the skunk’s head, tufts of fur, skeletal detritus and the depression it had made in the ground. Then the snow covered it all, but we still stopped to talk about the skunk, because there is always a lesson for us. The snow has since melted, yet we still see the skunk, the pieces, the whole, its shadow. Three yards on we stand at the edge of the pond counting geese or mallards, marveling at the light, watching a swan feed, looking across to the sea. Read more