Denial is a human phenomenon but it’s a harmful phenomenon.
There are so many memorable scenes in this morning’s Torah reading, many tragic scenes, but only one that is slightly odd, even silly. It’s the scene where Aaron denies the magnitude of his role in creating the calf that the people worship.
After Moses comes down from the mountain and sees the people dancing around the calf, he asks his brother, Aaron, what did the people do to you that you brought such a huge sin on them?
And Aaron says, the people were determined to do evil. They said to me, Make s a god who will go before us because we don’t know what happened to Moses. So I asked them to give me their gold, threw it into the fire, vayetze ha’egel haze. And out came this calf.
Out came this calf. Kind of a silly moment, in some ways resonant of when you find your child eating cookies before dinner and your child says, suddenly the box of cookies opened up and a cookie flew into my mouth.
The calf didn’t just “come out” of the fire. The Torah tell us explicitly, verses earlier, that Aaron fashioned the calf himself.
What Aaron is doing, when Moses asks him what happened, is classic denial. He retells the story in a way that diminishes his guilt.
Perhaps he knew he was doing this or perhaps he convinced himself that he was less responsible than he actually was - such is the nature of denial. When we are in denial, we often succeed at fooling ourselves.
I thought it would be helpful to reflect on the problem of denial which, as the ancient Israelites surely understood, is not just a river in Egypt...
Denial - as in, not taking full responsibility for the past, for ourselves, not seeing a situation clearly, not fully accepting the dangers that we or others bring to the table - can often be a stumbling block to the kind of growth and progress that we need.
I want to share with you several examples of how denial - denial of history, denial of reality - can be damaging, and what we should do about it. Denial is a problem for nations and for individuals.
There are many examples of nations not taking sufficient responsibility for their actions but one which stands out right now is Poland.
Article 55a of a new Polish law says that anyone who “claims, publicly and contrary to the facts, that the Polish Nation or the Republic of Poland Is responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich…shall be liable to a fine or imprisonment for up to 3 years.”
I recently read an excellent article about this by Menachem Rosensaft, a Lecturer at Columbia Law School and the child of survivors, which explores the problems with the Polish law in detail. He writes that it’s not accurate to say that Poland was complicit in the Holocaust, as an Israeli Knesset member argued, but it is also not accurate to say that Poland deserves to be recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, Israel’s leading Holocaust Museum, as Poland’s current Prime Minister insisted.
In his article in Tablet magazine, "Poles and the Holocaust in Historical Perspective," Rosensaft gives a sober, in-depth analysis of the roles Poland’s leadership and citizens played during the Holocaust.
Poles were victims of the Nazis and the government did not officially collaborate the way that the Vichy government in France did, he writes.
And there were Poles who risked their lives to hide Jews during the Holocaust.
However. Those who are known to have helped were a tiny fraction of the population. Roughly 6700 out of over 30 million non-Jewish Poles were recognized as righteous among the nations. That’s less than .01%.
Moreover, even an account sympathetic to Poland indicates several things: That anti-Semitism was widespread in Poland before the war, that there was near unanimous agreement to encourage Jews to leave the country, that the German attacks on Jews at the beginning of Nazi occupation of Poland aroused no strong opposition from Poles and that many Poles actively looted Jewish property.
As the Holocaust progressed, there was widespread collaboration between Polish non-Jews and Nazis. The Nazis required Polish police to swear allegiance to them at the beginning of the occupation and the overwhelming majority did.
A Polish-Canadian historian named Jan Grabowski estimates that as many as 200,000 Jews were killed by Poles during the Holocaust.
According to the new law, a Holocaust survivor who claims that the Polish police persecuted Jews during the Holocaust is subject to fine and imprisonment.
I would argue, based on my knowledge of Holocaust history and confirmed by Rosensaft’s article, that the the current Polish law is an unjust attempt to deny the negative impact - ranging from being bystanders to actually killing Jews - of individual Poles and official Polish groups during the Holocaust.
Denying the negative realities of the past, as we well know, is not the way to ensure a better future. This law, which wreaks of denial, does not remove the stain from Poland’s past. In fact, it places a stain on Poland’s present and sets the groundwork for an unsavory future for the Jewish community in Poland and for Poland in general. I applaud and support careful, reasoned efforts to oppose this law such as the one articulated recently by American Jewish Committee CEO David Harris.
Second example of pernicious denial at work. I spoke two weeks ago about the shootings in Parkland Florida and I won’t repeat everything that I said. But I will say that in this country, there is often, especially in certain segments of the population, a profound denial when it comes to the relationship between gun laws and gun deaths. Nations that have stricter laws have proportionately fewer deaths. Within our nation, states that have stricter laws have proportionately fewer deaths.
Denial of this correlation is deadly. It continues to create a greater likelihood of more deaths in the future. As I mentioned last time, I will be attending a talk this Thursday at Temple Sinai in Roslyn, given by a rabbi whose father was murdered in 1999 and who has been advocating for sensible gun policies. I encourage others to join me there on March 8 at 7:30 pm.
Thoughts and prayers have their place, but when it comes to life and death, we need to take action and that means pushing back against entrenched, and dangerous, denial.
One more area in which denial does significant harm and that’s in the personal realm. In so many situations, it is often easier for us to deny that we have a problem that to admit it and confront it.
You name the problem and I can probably think of someone who is denying that the problem exists and I’m as guilty of this as the next person. As I often say, before I became a rabbi, I used to be a person.
Each issue is distinct, and each requires a different approach. I want to call everyone’s attention to one cluster of issues that, thank God, we are starting to confront as a community and that is, issues of addiction.
The numbers of people addicted to alcohol and other substances is staggering. Addiction destroys the lives of the addicts, it sometimes ends their lives, and it wreaks havoc on the people around them.
Denial of addiction is deadly.
I have offered public praise from the pulpit and in writing to local Great Neck school leadership for offering sessions such as the one held on opioid addiction. And houses of worship also need to do their part.
Two weeks from today, in this sanctuary, Rabbi Mark Borovitz will speak about his own experience with addiction and how it motivated him to work hard to address addiction in the wider community.
Rabbi Borovitz is the co-founder of Beit T’Shuva, a residential program for addicts in Los Angeles that uses medical, therapeutic and spiritual intervention to confront addiction by addressing the entire person. Beit T’Shuva addresses the “hole in the soul,” as Rabbi Borovitz calls it. Deanna and I know people whose children have spent time there and it is no exaggeration to say that it gave them a second chance at life.
Please come hear him. He will be speaking to our teens on Thursday, March 15, at Shabbat dinner the next day (everyone welcome, reservations required for the dinner), and on Shabbat morning as well. And he will make himself available to any individual or family who wants to speak with him privately and confidentially about a personal struggle with addiction or to address any questions you might have.
The Israelites may have left Egypt, but they never really leave denial. Denial is human. It is a source of comfort, but it’s a false comfort, like a bad sugar high.
It provides an illusory protection from the truth which inevitably does more harm than good.
Nations, families, individuals that overcome their impulse to deny what they really ought to face can begin to grow. They can begin to heal.
Ken tihyeh lanu. Whatever our circumstance, whatever our challenges, may we have the strength to overcome our denial and to begin to face the truth.
There are so many memorable scenes in this morning’s Torah reading, many tragic scenes, but only one that is slightly odd, even silly. It’s the scene where Aaron denies the magnitude of his role in creating the calf that the people worship.
After Moses comes down from the mountain and sees the people dancing around the calf, he asks his brother, Aaron, what did the people do to you that you brought such a huge sin on them?
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu marking the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 2010
And Aaron says, the people were determined to do evil. They said to me, Make s a god who will go before us because we don’t know what happened to Moses. So I asked them to give me their gold, threw it into the fire, vayetze ha’egel haze. And out came this calf.
Out came this calf. Kind of a silly moment, in some ways resonant of when you find your child eating cookies before dinner and your child says, suddenly the box of cookies opened up and a cookie flew into my mouth.
The calf didn’t just “come out” of the fire. The Torah tell us explicitly, verses earlier, that Aaron fashioned the calf himself.
What Aaron is doing, when Moses asks him what happened, is classic denial. He retells the story in a way that diminishes his guilt.
Perhaps he knew he was doing this or perhaps he convinced himself that he was less responsible than he actually was - such is the nature of denial. When we are in denial, we often succeed at fooling ourselves.
I thought it would be helpful to reflect on the problem of denial which, as the ancient Israelites surely understood, is not just a river in Egypt...
Denial - as in, not taking full responsibility for the past, for ourselves, not seeing a situation clearly, not fully accepting the dangers that we or others bring to the table - can often be a stumbling block to the kind of growth and progress that we need.
I want to share with you several examples of how denial - denial of history, denial of reality - can be damaging, and what we should do about it. Denial is a problem for nations and for individuals.
There are many examples of nations not taking sufficient responsibility for their actions but one which stands out right now is Poland.
Article 55a of a new Polish law says that anyone who “claims, publicly and contrary to the facts, that the Polish Nation or the Republic of Poland Is responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich…shall be liable to a fine or imprisonment for up to 3 years.”
I recently read an excellent article about this by Menachem Rosensaft, a Lecturer at Columbia Law School and the child of survivors, which explores the problems with the Polish law in detail. He writes that it’s not accurate to say that Poland was complicit in the Holocaust, as an Israeli Knesset member argued, but it is also not accurate to say that Poland deserves to be recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, Israel’s leading Holocaust Museum, as Poland’s current Prime Minister insisted.
In his article in Tablet magazine, "Poles and the Holocaust in Historical Perspective," Rosensaft gives a sober, in-depth analysis of the roles Poland’s leadership and citizens played during the Holocaust.
Poles were victims of the Nazis and the government did not officially collaborate the way that the Vichy government in France did, he writes.
And there were Poles who risked their lives to hide Jews during the Holocaust.
However. Those who are known to have helped were a tiny fraction of the population. Roughly 6700 out of over 30 million non-Jewish Poles were recognized as righteous among the nations. That’s less than .01%.
Moreover, even an account sympathetic to Poland indicates several things: That anti-Semitism was widespread in Poland before the war, that there was near unanimous agreement to encourage Jews to leave the country, that the German attacks on Jews at the beginning of Nazi occupation of Poland aroused no strong opposition from Poles and that many Poles actively looted Jewish property.
As the Holocaust progressed, there was widespread collaboration between Polish non-Jews and Nazis. The Nazis required Polish police to swear allegiance to them at the beginning of the occupation and the overwhelming majority did.
A Polish-Canadian historian named Jan Grabowski estimates that as many as 200,000 Jews were killed by Poles during the Holocaust.
According to the new law, a Holocaust survivor who claims that the Polish police persecuted Jews during the Holocaust is subject to fine and imprisonment.
I would argue, based on my knowledge of Holocaust history and confirmed by Rosensaft’s article, that the the current Polish law is an unjust attempt to deny the negative impact - ranging from being bystanders to actually killing Jews - of individual Poles and official Polish groups during the Holocaust.
Denying the negative realities of the past, as we well know, is not the way to ensure a better future. This law, which wreaks of denial, does not remove the stain from Poland’s past. In fact, it places a stain on Poland’s present and sets the groundwork for an unsavory future for the Jewish community in Poland and for Poland in general. I applaud and support careful, reasoned efforts to oppose this law such as the one articulated recently by American Jewish Committee CEO David Harris.
Second example of pernicious denial at work. I spoke two weeks ago about the shootings in Parkland Florida and I won’t repeat everything that I said. But I will say that in this country, there is often, especially in certain segments of the population, a profound denial when it comes to the relationship between gun laws and gun deaths. Nations that have stricter laws have proportionately fewer deaths. Within our nation, states that have stricter laws have proportionately fewer deaths.
Denial of this correlation is deadly. It continues to create a greater likelihood of more deaths in the future. As I mentioned last time, I will be attending a talk this Thursday at Temple Sinai in Roslyn, given by a rabbi whose father was murdered in 1999 and who has been advocating for sensible gun policies. I encourage others to join me there on March 8 at 7:30 pm.
Thoughts and prayers have their place, but when it comes to life and death, we need to take action and that means pushing back against entrenched, and dangerous, denial.
One more area in which denial does significant harm and that’s in the personal realm. In so many situations, it is often easier for us to deny that we have a problem that to admit it and confront it.
You name the problem and I can probably think of someone who is denying that the problem exists and I’m as guilty of this as the next person. As I often say, before I became a rabbi, I used to be a person.
Each issue is distinct, and each requires a different approach. I want to call everyone’s attention to one cluster of issues that, thank God, we are starting to confront as a community and that is, issues of addiction.
The numbers of people addicted to alcohol and other substances is staggering. Addiction destroys the lives of the addicts, it sometimes ends their lives, and it wreaks havoc on the people around them.
Denial of addiction is deadly.
I have offered public praise from the pulpit and in writing to local Great Neck school leadership for offering sessions such as the one held on opioid addiction. And houses of worship also need to do their part.
Two weeks from today, in this sanctuary, Rabbi Mark Borovitz will speak about his own experience with addiction and how it motivated him to work hard to address addiction in the wider community.
Rabbi Borovitz is the co-founder of Beit T’Shuva, a residential program for addicts in Los Angeles that uses medical, therapeutic and spiritual intervention to confront addiction by addressing the entire person. Beit T’Shuva addresses the “hole in the soul,” as Rabbi Borovitz calls it. Deanna and I know people whose children have spent time there and it is no exaggeration to say that it gave them a second chance at life.
Please come hear him. He will be speaking to our teens on Thursday, March 15, at Shabbat dinner the next day (everyone welcome, reservations required for the dinner), and on Shabbat morning as well. And he will make himself available to any individual or family who wants to speak with him privately and confidentially about a personal struggle with addiction or to address any questions you might have.
The Israelites may have left Egypt, but they never really leave denial. Denial is human. It is a source of comfort, but it’s a false comfort, like a bad sugar high.
It provides an illusory protection from the truth which inevitably does more harm than good.
Nations, families, individuals that overcome their impulse to deny what they really ought to face can begin to grow. They can begin to heal.
Ken tihyeh lanu. Whatever our circumstance, whatever our challenges, may we have the strength to overcome our denial and to begin to face the truth.
No comments:
Post a Comment