Bullies

Preamble:

In honor of my father, I delivered this essay as the d'var Torah (words of Torah, or sermon) at Temple Beth Israel in Waltham, MA on July 28, 2018. The 7th anniversary of my father's death, on the Jewish calendar, would be the coming Wednesday. 

This was the first I've felt nervous before speaking in a long time. I knew there was risk in delivering these words. Thanks to a sudden inspiration just before I came up to the lectern, I set the stage by telling a story of when my son was a child and he pre-negotiated my understanding and patience ("promise you won't lose it with me") before telling me he'd bounced a super ball in his room and right through the glass of his front window...leading to some valuable lessons learned. I asked the congregation also to not lose it, because what I was about to say may be jarring but maybe we'd find things to learn together if they stuck with me.

My father, of course, always was frightened for me when I took risks; but he also was proud of me once I had. I hope this essay would have made him proud.

Vocabulary notes:

• Parashah = weekly Torah portion
• Torah = the Five Books of Moses
• Va-etḥannan = the name of the week's portion, which encompasses Deuteronomy 3:23-7:11
• JPS Tanach = An edition of the complete Hebrew bible published by the Jewish Publication Society
• Humash = the Torah in printed form (rather than in the sacred scroll)
• Etz Hayyim humash = a particular printing of the humash from the Rabbinical Assembly of The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, with translation and commentary; the edition is titled "Etz Hayyim" or "Tree of Life"
• Adonai = a term for God that I use when the translation says "Lord," as I am uncomfortable with the gendered translation

~~~

I don’t like God very much, in this parashah.

Running a search on the JPS Tanach translation, I found God described as “impassioned” three times and “compassionate” only once. God’s mood is portrayed three times as angry, while God’s love for us mentioned just once—yet our required love for God surfaces three times.

These data underscore the emotional response I feel when reading the parashah this year—that it portrays God primarily as an angry and self-referential authoritarian.

I’ve studied, written and spoken about Va-etḥannan before, and this isn’t always what rises to the top for me.  Just last year, speaking on the occasion of my father’s yahrzeit as I am today, I focused on the imperative of social justice for living in community and the urgency of teaching the next generation. I have scribbled notes in my Etz Hayyim humash, over the years, about our role in serving as a positive example; about the moment of the covenant transcending generations; about going even beyond the mitzvot to “do what is right and good” (Deut. 6:18); and of course about the inclusion of the Decalogue and the Shema.

But when I turned to Va-etḥannan this year, these are the passages that stood out:

You saw with your own eyes what Adonai did in the matter of Baal-peor, that Adonai your God wiped out from among you every person who followed Baal-peor; while you, who held fast to Adonai your God, are all alive today. (Deut. 4:3-4)

Take care, then, not to forget the covenant that Adonai your God concluded with you…. For Adonai your God is a consuming fire, an impassioned God. (Deut. 4:23-24)

For I Adonai your God am an impassioned God, visiting the guilt of the parents upon the children, upon the third and the fourth generations of those who reject Me, but showing kindness to the thousandth generation of those who love Me and keep My commandments. (Deut. 5:9-10)

Do not follow other gods, any gods of the people about you—for Adonai your God in your midst is an impassioned God—lest the anger of Adonai your God blaze forth against you and God wipe you off the face of the earth. (Deut 6:14-15)

Why is this how I am experiencing the text? The answer came to me last weekend while reading the novel The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton. It’s about five young women who form a tight bond while living in Palo Alto, California, in the 60s and 70s. One, Ally, is a white woman who married an Indian man and faced discrimination from many fronts. Here’s a passage:

Ally couldn’t say when, exactly, she’d fallen in love with Jim. Maybe that first moment she’d heard his lyrical voice—“excuse me, ma’am”—before she’d even looked up to see his face.

She knew her parents might be reluctant, that they’d worry about the problems she and Jim and their children would face. But she never imagined they would refuse to have Jim in their home, even to meet him. She never imagined that her father wouldn’t walk her down the aisle in the end, that she’d be married by a justice of the peace in Ann Arbor, in a dress she’d owned for years.

“I was sure my mom and dad would embrace Jim eventually,” she would tell us later. “You can’t know Jim and not love him. I never imagined they never would come to know him, that when I told them we were married they’d hide their goddamned prejudice behind the excuse that Jim wasn’t Christian.”

And while we were blinking at that—at Ally swearing and meaning it—she would say, “’For I, the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.’ Those were the last words my mother said to me, the last time she acknowledged I was alive. A quote from the goddamned Bible, from Exodus, for Christ goddamned sake.”

The quote is indeed from Exodus—Chapter 20, verse 5. And Va-etḥannan echoes it.

Ally’s late 1960s fictional mother cites religious belief to justify hate and quotes biblical text to validate turning against her own daughter. In 2018, real-life figures are similarly misappropriating sacred text. I believe most of us recall that last month Attorney General Jeff Sessions defended Administration immigration policy that led to the separation of thousands of children from their parents by saying, “I would cite to you the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes.”

A June 15 article in Slate pointed out that the same Christian bible passage was used to defend slavery in the United States by arguing that it mandated obedience to the Fugitive Slave Act, that some European church leaders quoted it to promote submission to Hitler, and that it was cited to defend the status quo in Apartheid South Africa. Yet, Slate reports, theologians consider this a corruption of the passage that “places God as the appointer of authorities, but not the appointer of specific laws,” with the understanding that no one should respect or comply with the orders of those authorities if those orders are evil or unjust.

On March 19, Marco Rubio tweeted:

I will place boys as their princes; the fickle will govern them & the people will oppress one another, yes, each one the neighbor. The child will be insolent toward the elder & the base toward the honorable. Isaiah 3:4-5

His intent was to scold the youth who emerged as leaders in advocating for gun control because they didn’t trust elected officials to take action. Yet the full passage actually describes a world of chaos in which “People will oppress each other—man against man, neighbor against neighbor” and the children rise up because the elders are unable to lead, incapable of acting in their honored roles.

It’s a form of bullying—this misuse of holy text to justify controversial policy or condemnation of another's views. People in positions of power are yielding a literary tool of authority (however ineptly) to bludgeon their adversaries and hold sway over their followers.

Is it surprising that politicians usurp the bible to play the bully, when the God that emerges in Va-etḥannan could readily serve as a model for bullying? They might learn from the example of God’s actions against Baal-peor to frighten us into submission. Or from the image of a fire consuming those who fail to honor a covenant. Or from forcing a choice between future generations suffering guilt or experiencing kindness, that loyalty might be coerced rather than earned. Or from the potential to be wiped off the earth should that loyalty ever wander.

This reminds me that we have heard a lot about demands for loyalty in the current administration—loyalty to a single authority figure rather than to principle or to the responsibilities of a position. Turning back to The Wednesday Sisters, our current situation has parallels to the era in which the novel is set. The narrator explores her ambivalence about the anti-war protests, saying:

I believed—most American’s believed—that the spread of communism would be loss of freedom and torture and death, and perhaps even nuclear war. We never imagined the communist world would just collapse as it did in the Soviet Union years later. We thought the only way to preserve our lifestyle was to fight theirs. And we couldn’t, truthfully, imagine that America might be wrong. We didn’t like to imagine that what we were doing as a country could be imperialist or illegal or just plain immoral any more than we liked to imagine an America that could be defeated by a small country of small people we thought of as less intelligent and less compassionate and less worthy than we were. So we just didn’t imagine it.

How current this sounds—the incapacity to stand up against immoral government action, the acceptance when those different from us are portrayed as less important, intelligent, decent or worthy, because it’s all so beyond what we can let ourselves imagine. This mindset—in which we so want to believe good of our country and by extension its elected officials—has left us particularly vulnerable to those who will bully us into, if not full fealty, at least inaction.

And this doesn’t apply only to political leaders. We have seen many other examples in which holding positions of authority can open the door to bullying, predatory and harassing behavior. We want to believe the best of our companies, our bosses, our teachers…and we want them to think the best of us. The #MeToo movement has woken us up to the danger of this power dynamic and emboldened many women to speak up about our experiences. But this progress toward awareness in one dimension seems to brush aside the broader issue, as I repeatedly see people calling for gender diversity in work groups and conference panels without even taking notice that everyone in the room is white.

Does the example of the jealous, impassioned, easily angered, punishing aspect of God—the one who demands loyalty yet can confer great kindness and rewards—model, reinforce and serve to justify the bullying behaviors of political and other authorities? Or does monotheism guard against this because only God’s self holds the true role of authority, as exemplified in the parashah by Moses ascribing all that he describes to God—with his impending death resulting from the moment when he acted outside God’s authority? Or does our belief that we are created in God’s image communicate to some that they can seize authority through authoritarianism?

It really doesn’t matter whether I like God in this parashah. After all, God is…God.  Most religious constructs establish that there are beings—or as in our case a singular being—whose actions and decisions we may not understand but we accept as having purpose and reason.

But the rest of us are not God. Much of what Moses rails against here—what earns the threat of God's wrath in his oratory—is the setting up of false Gods. Let's not imagine that the sin of idolatry is limited to the graven image.  At every instance we must call out, speak against and bring down those who set themselves up as false...and bullying...gods.

Which brings us to the most important question I ask today: what is our responsibility, as students, interpreters and custodians of these sacred texts, to eradicate the oppression perpetrated by the bullies?

~~~

Postscript:

I ended my d'var Torah with a question. But here, I'd like to offer some possible answers. 

1. I reject the notion I hear in many circles that rabbis should not preach political position from the pulpit.  That is so forceful in the Christian right and we just forfeit it for the most part. Anyone--particularly a community leader--who believes our political environment poses a critical threat to our humanity should use the tools she or he has to address that threat.
2. When we cannot trust the Federal government to function within the conceit of a Democracy or for the best interests of the people, we must organize and act on a local and regional level and develop a deliberate structure of linkages among those local and regional efforts (which I believe large, systemic, humane nonprofits can help facilitate), so we end up with a national network strong enough to serve the nation and facile enough to serve localities in a manner that meets human needs and fights the injustices from the Administration. I believe even synagogues can have a role in that, our linkages with other local organizations can be a start of this network, and the larger Jewish governance bodies and foundations can further it.

I hope this is the start of a dialogue that helps us find our way to actively repairing our world. Please use the comments section to offer your answers.

For my grandson

I think often of tikkun olam—repairing the world.  There are some big, sweeping, important ideas related to this Jewish precept.  Such as social justice and caring for the earth, as just a couple examples.  My personal commitment to tikkun olam, however, is on a smaller scale: a daily, analytical decision-making approach to the options that face us each day, whether discreet or far-reaching. I suppose that I can measure success in my personal pursuit of tikkun olam by the frequency with which I consciously go through this process when the opportunity arises.  As I recently said to some colleagues, deciding on the right thing isn’t just about whether our reputation is at stake, or whether others ever will know the ramifications of our choices.  What defines me is what I know about myself and the decisions I’ve made.

In Judaism’s 10 Best Ideas, Arthur Greene points out in his chapter on tikkun olam: “The account of creation in Genesis reaches its climax when God sanctifies the Sabbath. That passage ends with a verse that says, if read literally, ‘God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, for in it God rested from all the labor that God created to do’ (Gen. 2:3).”  This suggests to me that God’s work was not simply to create the world, but to create a world in which we would have a creative role.  For that creative role to have meaning, the world as “finished” by God must be imperfect. Hanging out there is the notion of the future messianic era, but it is not for us to await such perfection—rather, it is our responsibility to move the world ever closer with our restorative contributions.  This is tikkun olam.

In a discussion about Greene’s chapter, a member of my congregation talked about tikkun olam in connection with the legacy each of us passes down and leaves behind. This put me in mind of a recent dialogue on Facebook.  My daughter Audrey wrote:

While I'm so thrilled by the news in NY re: fracking ban and what it might mean as a precedent for environmental justice, my emotions are conflicted. It is hard to reconcile the joys of local sustainability victories with the sorrows of far-off tragedies... to care about future generations close to home without equal care for distant populations. I realize nobody can tend to the whole world or place it all on his shoulders, but I can't help thinking of the mothers of those young children in Pakistan when I see all the celebratory talk about the fracking decision, since they're both bombarding my digital world at the same moment in time.

Audrey is pregnant, her due date just nine days from when I am writing this.  She was recognizing the tension between joy and sorrow, the chasm that often yawns between our personal priorities and the world condition, and the questions tragedies raise about the world into which we choose to bring a new generation.  I responded to her:

It is an extraordinary blessing to be able to find joy in our lives even while we feel and cry for the deep sadness that may be at the same time in our own lives and in others'. Last night, I wanted joyfully to watch the news over and over to see the images of … Alan [Gross, my good friend Estelle’s cousin] finally being released from captivity in Cuba, and yet that interspersed with the excruciating news and images--from which we cannot and should not hide--in Pakistan. When we are expectant parents, we can't help but ask ourselves: what kind of world are we bringing this child into? The answer is--has always been--both kinds, and we have the opportunity to raise one more child to add to the vast majority of people who are so very good and, we can only hope and teach, to do his part to make it better.

Yesterday, my daughter told me of the exhaustingly busy day she’d had making the final preparations for the baby.  Cleaning, organizing, putting the car seat into place, packing the hospital bag, buying the last basics.  The next day, she said, she would rest.  How very much that sounds like “God rested from all the labor that God created to do.” Just substitute “parent” for “God.”  She was finishing with the act of creation that would come before the ongoing creation there will be to do, in the birth and raising of this new human being.  And all day, Audrey told me, as she accomplished these things she could not get out of her head the traditional tune of Adon Olam, the closing prayer of the Shabbat morning service.

Audrey did not have the words in mind, but these are the first stanzas of Adon Olam:

Before creation shaped the world, eternally God reigned alone;

but only with creation done could God as sovereign be known.

When all is ended, God alone will reign in awesome majesty.

(Translation from  Siddur Sim Shalom, The Rabbinical Assembly, fourth printing, 1999)

Adon Olam (sovereign of the world) defines, by calling attention to them, the gap that falls between these states of God's singular existence, which we collectively must fill with tikkun olam (repair of the world). This is how we ensure that “God… [is] known.”  I can think of no better tune for Audrey to have had running through her mind as she took care of the last details before that ultimate moment of legacy—bringing one more person into an imperfect world to help with the work of making it better.

This essay was inspired by a discussion and learning session, led by Rabbi David Finkelstein, at Temple Beth Israel in Waltham, MA.

Writing Reality

I enjoyed a matinee of Ruby Sparks this weekend.  The premise is that a brilliant young writer, somewhat less brilliant in his emotional life, writes a character with whom he falls in love.  And beyond the bounds of what we accept as real or sane he writes her into existence.

Why is this beyond the bounds?  Long ago, people developed foundational stories that were brought together to form what we know as the Bible.  These stories essentially wrote God into existence for what would become generation upon generation upon generation.  Ironically, within the stories God authors us into existence with words of creation.

Yet even with this history, we find it unbelievable that a young man might write his lover (or anyone) into being.

The movie leaves us with plenty of questions to ask ourselves.  For now, I'm at: How is it that we humans are at once so expansive and so small minded?  How do we determine which approach is sane (or crazy) in any given circumstance? (Spoiler alert:  I'm particularly fond of the French fluency test in the movie.)

A Rosh Hashanah Lesson: T'shuvah for the Irresponsible Media (that Turns an Irrelevant Lunatic into a Global Threat)

Please click here to see my comment, # 285, posted at the New York Times website on the story Coverage of Koran Case Stirs Questions on Media Role.  Spending Rosh Hashanah with a focused intention toward t'shuvah -- a return to God (to righteousness) -- only makes more stark the complete absence of such intention in the media's attention to Terry Jones and its self-centered fascination with itself.  My prayer is that the sound of the shofar this season calls us to hear the effects of our own voices and to use them more responsibly...knowing when that means we should not be using them at all.