Protests have sprung up around the country in response
to the decision of the grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri not to indict Darren
Wilson, the white police officer who shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black
youth, on August 9, 2014. How many times have we heard in recent days: “We need a
conversation on race”?
Could we even hold an open, honest conversation on race? I doubt it. First,
there is no such thing as race; it’s a social construct without
biological meaning. But even more: How many people claim to be “color
blind” or “race neutral” and feel the “conversation” has nothing to do with them?
In a famous field experiment
entitled, “Are Emily
and Brendan More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal,” Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago
Graduate School of Business and Sendhil Mullainathan of MIT measured and
quantified job discrimination based on skin color. They submitted 5,000
fictitious resumes to 1,300 employers who advertised openings in the Boston
Globe and Chicago Tribune. Comparable resumes were sent for a
variety of positions—with
one exception: the names at the top were
Emily Walsh or Brendan Baker, or Lakisha Washington or Jamal Jones. Here
is the authors’ summary of
the disturbing, but not surprising, results: “The authors find that applicants with
white-sounding names are 50 percent more likely to get called for an initial
interview than applicants with African-American-sounding names. Applicants with
white names need to send about 10 resumes to get one callback, whereas applicants
with African-American names need to send about 15 resumes to achieve the same
result.”[
How many of us—without a
shred of evidence nor a reliable statistic to our name—talk about
crime rates among people of color, and even cultural deficits among African
Americans? I hear it all, again and again, from the mouths of people I
otherwise like and respect, who believe themselves to be beyond “racism.” The truth is, we are not honest with
ourselves about our own biases and bigotries. Albert Memmi wrote: “There is a
strange kind of enigma associated with the problem of racism. No one, or almost
no one, wishes to see themselves as racist; still, racism persists, real and
tenacious. When one asks about it, even those who have shown themselves to be
racist will deny it and politely excuse themselves: ‘Me,
racist? Absolutely not! What an insult even to suggest such a thing!’ Well, if racists don’t exist,
racist attitudes and modes of behavior do; everyone can find them… in someone else.”[2] In Racism
Without Racists, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva concludes: “…my answer
to the strange enigma of ‘racism
without racists’ is as
follows. The United States does not depend on Archie Bunkers to defend white
supremacy… Today there is a sanitized,
color-blind way… Today most
whites justify keeping minorities from having the good things of life with the
language of liberalism (‘I
am all for equal opportunity; that’s why I oppose affirmative action!’). And
today, as yesterday, whites do not feel guilty about the plight of minorities (blacks
in particular). Whites believe minorities have the opportunities to succeed and
that, if they do not, it is because they do not try hard.”[3]
This week’s Torah
portion, Vayishlach, begins:
וַיִּשְׁלַח יַעֲקֹב
מַלְאָכִים לְפָנָיו, אֶל-עֵשָׂו אָחִיו,
אַרְצָה שֵׂעִיר,
שְׂדֵה אֱדוֹם
Jacob sent messengers
before him to Esau, his brother, to the land of Seir, the field of Edom.
(Genesis 32:4)
It may be difficult to imagine that
Jacob’s reunion
with his brother, Esau, is connected to the situation in Ferguson, the
oft-heard call for a “conversation
on race,” and the inability of so many of us to
recognize our own biases and bigotries, but a commentary on parshat
Vayishlach from an unexpected source sheds light on our situation.
Rabbi Elimelekh Weisblum of Lizhensk
lived in Galicia in the 18th century. A disciple of Dov Baer, the Maggid of
Mezeritch, he views this seemingly straight-forward verse (Genesis 32:4, above)
through a kabbalistic–hasidic
lens. He weaves for us a complex tapestry. If we view the tapestry from behind,
we see a veritable confusion of crossed threads and knots, a jumble of biblical
verses (employed in masterful word plays) and several passages from Talmud
woven together with the kabbalistic notion of the Supernal Letters that
structure the universe and order reality, the controversial hasidic doctrine of
the Tzaddik as leader and intercessory to God, and even a discussion of
neo-Aristotelian metaphysics.
R. Elimelekh begins with the account
of Jacob’s
wrestling match the night before meeting with his brother following a 22-year
separation.
וַיִּוָּתֵר יַעֲקֹב,
לְבַדּוֹ;
וַיֵּאָבֵק אִישׁ
עִמּוֹ, עַד עֲלוֹת
הַשָּׁחַר
Jacob
was left alone; a man wrestled with him until the rising dawn. (Genesis 32:45)
He points out that the Babylonian Talmud[4] preserves
a disagreement concerning who Jacob thought he was wrestling that night: Did
Jacob believe the “man” to be a Gentile or a Torah scholar?
If a Gentile, R. Elimelekh tells us that
we learn the importance of being a Tzaddik, as Jacob yearned to be:
…a
Tzaddik’s prayer is answered when praying for a sick
person or for others in need. This seems as if the Creator is subject to
change, heaven forbid. But the root of the matter is as follows. The Holy One
of Blessing created letters, which in their original state are pure potential.
[Here, he is speaking about the Supernal Letters which with the godhead
structures and creates the universe, a mystical concept found in the Zohar.]
A Tzaddik can reconfigure the [supernal] letters so that they form whatever
words are desired [i.e., prayers]. These configurations are what a Tzaddik does
in prayer–make new combinations. The Tzaddik’s
prayer does not cause change in the Creator, since the letters are always
there. All the Tzaddik is doing is creating combinations [of letters].
While on the surface this sounds to
the student of philosophy like an attempt to reconcile the neo-aristotelian
concept of a perfect God who never changes with the Hasidic cult of the
Tzaddik, it is far more, as I will point out shortly. In a masterful act of
textual interpretation surrounding Psalm 119:40, R. Elimelekh further tells us
that what distinguishes a Tzaddik as such is that he is someone who loves
everyone; indeed, this is what constitutes his service to God. Jacob was such a
Tzaddik, just as R. Yochanan b. Zakkai before him. Talmud says of R. Yochanan
that his love included both non-Jews and Jews, both of whom he greeted in the
marketplace before they greeted him. From the vantage point of America in the
21st century, this may not seem a momentous thing, but we must remember that R.
Yochanan led the Jewish community during the height of the Roman siege of
Jerusalem. The Temple and City were destroyed during his lifetime. To love a
Roman was no small feat. R. Elimelekh was born 60 years after the Chmielnicki
(also: Khmelnytsky) Massacres, a decade-long Cossack killing spree (1648-1657)
during which tens of thousands—perhaps 100,000—Jews were
murdered.[5] Should
not the challenge of loving someone different from us be far easier in America
today? And certainly, R. Elimelekh’s challenge relates to renewed calls
for a “conversation
on race.” R. Elimelekh describes how difficult
is to love someone who seems “other” or
different from ourselves:
In
reality a person may not love all equally—Jews and
Gentiles. One’s love for a Jew could be complete, while the
love for a Gentile might be lacking, still retaining the traces of foreignness.
This is the Talmudic opinion [BT Hulling 91a, see footnote 4 for the passage he
has in mind] that Jacob thought the person was not Jewish. That was the
struggle: the traces still there [i.e., for Jacob to rid himself of negativity
toward the traces of foreignness that were still there in the “man”].
Concerning the Talmudic opinion that
Jacob thought the “man” he encountered was a Torah scholar:
The (second) Talmudic opinion was that Jacob thought the person was a scholar—[and this is the case] even though Jacob’s love for this person was not complete because Jacob understood that he, himself, is still has not perfected his personality traits. Jacob did love him, but this love was still incomplete because of these deficiencies. This is the meaning of the verse, A person wrestled with him until עֲלוֹת הַשָּׁחַר the rising dawn (Genesis 32:45). He struggled to remove the darkness (shechorut) within him, so that he could love him perfectly. So the Talmudic debate is not so strange after all. Each position highlights a different aspect of Jacob’s ability to achieve perfect love for every person.
Even when a person is presumably easy
to identify with and love, nonetheless, our love is not complete because we are
never complete. We are “works
in progress.”
I have quoted only excerpts of R.
Elimelekh’s
commentary. It’s
complex and involved. But I hope you can see that viewed from the front, the
tapestry is an exquisite piece of art, inspiring these thoughts:
• R.
Elimelekh says that it is only a Tzaddik who can affect healing. Why? Because
his focus is on loving everyone: he treats everyone he encounters with respect
and love. It is not that the Tzaddik is more spiritual, or has a divine
connection the rest of us don’t have, or is intellectually endowed
beyond the rest of the community: it is because the Tzaddik approaches other
people—all of them—with love. The Tzaddik does what the
rest of us could if only we had the commitment and made the effort, but
few do.
•
How does the Tzaddik manage to love everyone? He taps into
the potential already inherent in reality (in psychological terms, we would
call this “reframing”). We
cannot change reality until we change our thinking. The Tzaddik understands
this and has made the commitment to change his thinking. This includes honestly
confronting his own biases and bigotries (as Albert Memmi and Eduardo
Bonilla-Silva urge us to do) and working vociferously to expunge them.
•
The Tzaddik never considers himself a perfected work. He
knows that there are deficiencies in his personality traits (middot).
This humility is what enables him to improve. He does not engage in the blame
game (the attempt to delineate what is wrong with others) but rather in the
struggle to remove the darkness (shechorut) within himself.
For us, reframing requires
understanding one another’s
perspective and narrative. After George Zimmerman was found not guilty by
reason of self-defense in the murder of Trayvon Martin in July of 2013, the
passions of many Americans were inflamed. Yet another white man who gunned down
a young black man, was exonerated. Five days later, President Obama addressed
the nation, reminding us all that our reality is not the only reality, as R.
Elimelekh teaches us.
You know, when
Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin
could have been me 35 years ago. And
when you think about why, in the African American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I
think it’s important to
recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through
a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.
There are very
few African American men in this country who haven't had the experience of
being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African American men who
haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks
click on the doors of cars. That happens
to me -- at least before I was a senator.
There are very few African Americans who haven't had the experience of
getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding
her breath until she had a chance to get off.
That happens often.
And I don't
want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African
American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it’s
inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear. The African American community is also
knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application
of our criminal laws -- everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our
drug laws. And that ends up having an impact
in terms of how people interpret the case.
I offer
you another way to reframe: We humans are extraordinarily diverse. There are
6.5 billion people on planet Earth. We speak some 6,000 different languages,
and have diverse cultures, appearances, beliefs, customs, values. Perhaps it’s no surprise
that we have so much difficulty bridging our perceived differences. But here’s a
perspective that may help. We human beings are but one of millions of species
that have existed. The first creatures we would identify as human beings walked
the earth 200,000 years ago. On the scale of the history of the universe, which
began with the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, if all time were to be
condensed into a 24-hour day, as Carl Sagan cleverly conceived, the first
anatomically modern humans appeared on December 31 at 11:52 pm — in the last hour of the last day of
the year. Our species has only been around for the past 200,000 years. We are
far more like one another than we are different. How important are the things
that separate us? Are they truly as insurmountable as we make them out to be?
Even more,
“Mitochondrial
Eve” lived in Africa 100,000–200,000
years ago: every single human being now on earth is descended from her. There
was a “Y-chromosomal
Adam” who gave rise to all the
Y-chromosome diversity on the planet. He is the male ancestor of all of us.
Scientists variously estimate that he lived somewhere between 60,000 and
338,000 years ago. Our Sages knew this long ago—not biologically, but morally and
spiritually. The Talmud tells us that God created Adam, and Adam alone, in the
beginning to prevent precisely the mess we have created:
For this reason one man was created alone, to
teach you that whoever destroys a single soul, Scripture holds him responsible
for destroying an entire world, and whoever saves a single soul, Scripture
credits him with having saved an entire world. Furthermore, [one man was
created alone] for the sake of peace among people, that one might not say to
another, “My father was greater than yours.”
(Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5, 37b)
How do we extricate ourselves from the much and mire of
bigotry and denial? How do we reach out to others in love, like the Tzaddik?
One answer comes to us from Dov Baer, the Maggid of Mezeritch, in a commentary
to next week’s Torah
portion Vayeshev. Jacob, R. Elimelekh’s model of the Tzaddik, settles in
the land where his father Isaac had sojourned. He brings Psalm 34:16, The
eyes of Adonai are toward the righteous, and his ears are attentive to their
cry to teach something very much akin to R. Elimelekh’s comment
about the Tzaddik whose prayer moves heaven by rearranging the Supernal
Letters. He writes: …the Blessed One thinks what [the righteous]
are thinking. If [the righteous] think of love, they bring the blessed Holy One
into the world of love. On the surface, this sounds like an audacious claim: the
righteous control the thoughts of God?! But the Maggid is quick to explain that
yes, the Mind [of God] is in the hands of the righteous. But how do
they merit this rung? By thinking that they are dust and that they can do
nothing without the power of God. Whatever they do, it is actually God doing
it, for without the Blessed Holy One, they could accomplish nothing.
Ultimately, it is a combination of deep humility and the attempt to align our
thinking and goals with that which is higher than us that will bring us to
where we need to be.
(The
Faces of Color in his document are the work of Francois Nielly and can be
viewed at http://modaddiction.net/2014/02/10/francoise-nielly-energia-color-maxima-expresion-artistica/.)
[2] Albert Memmi, Racism (1999), p. 3.
[3] Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists:
Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America
(2009), p. 305.
[4] R. Shmuel b. Nachmani said: He appeared to [Jacob] as a
Gentile, and the Master has said: If an Israelite is joined by a Gentile on the
way, he should let him walk on his right. R. Shmuel b. Acha said in the name of
Raba b. Ulla, in the presence of R. Papa: Whoever walks at the right hand of
his teacher is uncultured. And the Rabbis? [They said that the angel] came from
behind and dislocated both [thighs]. And how do the Rabbis interpret the verse,
As he wrestled with him (Genesis 32:45)? They interpret it in accordance
with the other statement of R. Yehoshua b. Levi, for R. Yehoshua b. Levi said: “This teaches that they threw up the dust of their feet to
the Throne of Glory, for it is written here, וַיֵּאָבֵק As
he wrestled with him (Genesis
32:45) and it is written there, And the clouds are the אבק dust of his feet (Nachum 1:3).” (BT Hullin 91a)
[5] Historians disagree about the number of Jews
murdered. Simon Dubnow and Edward
Flannery estimated between 100,000 and 500,000. Martin Gilbert and Max Dimont
set the minimum at 100,000. Shall Stampfer claims 18,000-20,000. Whether the “minimalists”
or the “maximalists”
are correct, the
number is staggering.
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