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.

Light

There are more people in Alabama moved to deny power to a multiply-accused child molester (which, for some reason, the media choose to couch as “sexual misconduct,” but that’s another essay altogether), and to cast their vote against an individual who can’t comprehend that tokenism and stereotyping is the embodiment of prejudice (one of our lawyers is a Jew; someone with our campaign is a black), than there people in Alabama unable to step away from party ideology.

Thank you.

Let’s remember that this triumph was true in the last presidential election as well. The majority of Americans voting chose to deny the bigot and sexual predator, despite that he won the Electoral College.

Right now, when it’s been more than a year since I could take heart in what’s emanating from our country’s political system, it feels good to remember that most of us do act on what we as individuals recognize in other individuals, rather than on the collective pressure of holding to party lines.

Tonight, the light of my Hanukkah candles will represent the ray of hope we received from Alabama last night.

Church-and-State and the Politics of Leadership

Note: I delivered this as a d'var Torah (sermon, or literally "word of Torah") at Beth Sholom Congregation in Elkins Park, PA, on July 23, 2011. To learn more about my sermons, click here.

Let’s talk about Thomas Jefferson. I’m thinking about a particular doctrine attributed to Jefferson that has relevance to a religious setting.  What might that be?

*****

Yes, the separation of church and state.  The “church and state” phrase comes from Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists, who had complained that in Connecticut religious liberties were seen as “favors granted” rather than as rights.  Without commenting on the role of state government in his reply, regarding the federal government Jefferson wrote:

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

In his draft version he included a statement that further defined this separation as “Congress [being] thus inhibited from acts respecting religion, and the Executive authorized only to execute their acts.”  His marginal note indicates that this portion was to be removed so as not to offend members of his party in the eastern states. What interests me about this private version of the letter is that the language “acts respecting religion" seems to take the implementation of separation beyond the concept of establishment.

Let me tell you why I have Jefferson on my mind.  As I read Mattot in preparation for this morning, I was looking for an angle different from those I explored when I spoke about the parashah in 2007 and in 2008. Perhaps because of Rabbi Glanzberg-Krainin’s terrific d’var on leadership two weeks ago at Beth Sholom Congregation, I found myself drawn to the issues of leadership in Mattot and the sticky relationship that emerges with the interplay of politics and spirituality.

That led me to the haftarah that we read today because, despite it being one of the three prophetic readings of admonition preceding Tish-ah b’Av rather than thematically connected to the Torah portion, I find some alignment between them where leadership is concerned.  Finally, as I contemplated these issues, I thought of a piece about the separation of church and state that my brother, Jonathan Wolfman, recently published on his blog (click here to go to the posting).

According to Jon,

“The reason Jefferson wrote with such terrific thought and passion on state and church separation is that he knew both secular civil society and religious institutions are safer from each others’ often over-arching power when basic law keeps them apart. Jefferson also knew that people are often weak and often afraid, and when they are they’re pleased to give over to their religious leaders and the religious institutions of their parents and ancestors what may for the moment appear to be the knottiest, most resistant social, economic and legal concerns. Jefferson understood that this was a devil’s bargain.”

I have great respect for my brother’s intellect and know that he has read far more broadly and deeply than I on such matters.  Nonetheless, I thought I’d do a quick review for myself of Jefferson’s writings on the subject rather than take his word for it.  For the most part, Jefferson stuck to the protection of religion from government, and not the other way around.  But he did express strong skepticism about the impact of religious authority on civil liberties, believing, as he wrote in 1800, that “by getting themselves established by law and ingrafted into the machine of government, [the clergy] have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man.”  In 1813 and 1814 respectively, he wrote: “History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government,” and “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty.”

So with this as the philosophical legacy of the 3rd US president and principle author of the Declaration of Independence, as Americans and as Jews how do we reconcile a Jewish literary tradition that inextricably links politics with religion, where the laws governing society are handed down by God and prophetic writings delve into the reigns of kings?

I find that in Mattot, and in the words of Jeremiah that constitute today’s haftarah, the literature grapples with the mix of spiritual and political leadership.

Let’s look at the last portion of Numbers 31, beginning with verse 48.  We read of the sacrifice that the commanders make on behalf of their troops, giving far more than required from their booty as an offering to God, so those in the ranks can keep all theirs for themselves.  It would seem they make the political decision to reinterpret the commandment around supporting the Levites and the Tabernacle in a manner that would yield the required financial result while helping to bolster the fortunes of their charges and thus their allegiance, not to God but to the officers.  Moshe and Eleazar accept this independent political decision without comment, and the text fully attributes the gift to God as being “in behalf of the Israelites.”

Going back to the opening lines of Mattot, Moshe imparts God’s words about the obligatory nature of a vow. Unlike the more typical scene, in which God speaks through Moshe to the Israelite people as a whole, this time the narrative confines the audience to “the heads of the Israelite tribes.”  Though all of us bear the responsibility of vows,  Moshe tells only the leadership about this obligation.  Might we assume, then, that the leaders bear responsibility for informing their people, giving them an opportunity to exercise authority and thus a political voice somewhat separated from the voice of religious authority?

Perhaps part of their role is setting an example; the Israelites are not simply to hear the laws of vows, but to witness their leaders adhering to them.  Or, as leaders, do they have the power to make vows on behalf of those under them, so they must be all the more cognizant of their implications?

We see this last paradigm play out in Numbers 32 verses 20 to 24.  The leaders of the Gadites and Reubenites have requested to settle west of the Jordan, rather than with the others on the east.  Moshe strikes a bargain, exacting from them vows, as leaders, that their tribes will serve as the shock-troops in conquering the land to the east. Moshe declares, “But if you do not do so, you will have sinned against the Lord; and know that your sin will overtake you. Build towns for your children and sheepfolds for your flocks, but do as you have promised.” The leader’s vow is binding, for himself and for all his people.

How fascinating that this deal-making allows what seems to be an adjustment of God’s intended outcome, negotiated entirely as a political—and in this case socio-economic—matter among the leadership.  As with the disposition of the spoils of war, a secular approach to governing seems to emerge in parallel to the religious, though Moshe certainly fills both political and spiritual roles.

In the haftarah, Jeremiah takes a Moshe-like stance, insisting that he is not equal to the role of prophet and acquiescing only when God insists.  His objection is that “I don’t know how to speak, for I am still a boy,” in response to which God “put out His hand and touched my mouth, and Adonai said to me: Herewith I put My words into your mouth.”  Returning to my argument earlier, that leaders have a special responsibility regarding the spoken word because of their positions of power, it makes great sense to choose as prophets those who express modesty with regard to the use of language.  This implies a leadership of humility and selflessness, which we can see as a valuable asset for the community particularly when political power is at play. 

And certainly this is about politics.  God appoints Jeremiah “over nations and kingdoms” with the authority “to uproot and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.”  Jeremiah is to pit himself against a leadership of arrogance and self-interest in which “they shall come, and shall each set up a throne” in opposition both to the “towns of Judah” and to God.  And the humble Jeremiah is to prevail.

In both the Torah and the haftarah readings, we find that religious and political leadership intertwine, and in each case God’s intention for the people faces opposition from those who want political or socio-economic status. For Jeremiah, there is no negotiation independent of God’s word, but for Moshe and Eleazar it appears that they do have and exercise this authority.

Of course, that’s a far cry from Jefferson’s stance that religious leaders represent a danger to civil liberties and that government imperils religious freedom.  But do we see here an early acknowledgement of how difficult it is to mesh political and religious institutions?  And if so, is that the lens through which we, as contemporary American Jews, can begin to reconcile our dual traditions as represented by Torah and by the writings of Jefferson?

Torah does not separate church and state, but certainly it recognizes the difficulty of merging these two sources of power and shows an early example of negotiating purely political solutions.  And it acknowledges that power in the hands of humans can be destructive unless tempered with humility and an overriding drive to serve. It took some time, but the evolution to Jefferson’s legal construct of a wall separating church and state seems logical: both his worry that, given the opportunity to amass power by dictating religion, political leaders would crush citizens’ freedom to worship as they choose, and his concern that religious leaders, given the opportunity to broaden their reach, might lack the requisite selflessness to preserve civil liberties.

Yet the separation of church and state still suffers ongoing assault and this affects us as Jews.  In my brother’s essay, he invokes Jefferson in the context of decrying Texas Governor Rick Perry’s plans for a state-sponsored, evangelical Day of Prayer on August 6, using—in Jon’s words—“tax monies collected from Christians, Jews, Muslims and adherents to every other religion represented in Texas, along with money from agnostics and atheists, in part to rent Reliant Stadium in Houston.”

And here we are nearly 50 years after the school prayer decision in Abington Township School District v. Schempp, a case my father helped to initiate as an attorney volunteering with the Philadelphia ACLU. He learned in the process that his own, Jewish first-grader could recite the Lord’s Prayer by heart as a result of his public school education in Cheltenham, PA. Yet school prayer remains an issue still under debate and in the court system.

As we see in Mattot and in the haftarah, the politics and power of the church-state relationship aren’t easy. But we do need to tease them out and, I believe, more definitively apart than we have yet achieved.