Justice Includes Jews: Thoughts About Black Lives Matter, Jews and Justice

I want to talk about the recent Black Lives Matter statements about Israel for two reasons:  First, this is an issue many of us have been reading about, and are likely passionate about.  Second, it challenges us to navigate a complex political dynamic, to oppose injustice toward others while also insuring justice for ourselves.

Here are some relevant facts and some context:

Black Lives Matter  - an organization launched, according to its website, in 2012 - has sought to advocate in multiple realms for just treatment of people of color.  

At the beginning of August 2016, the organization refined and presented a platform that includes several sections, including:  End the war on black people, Reparations, Invest/Divest, Economic justice, Community control and Political power.

Individual elements within these sections include advocacy for universal health care, fighting climate change and a reallocation of funds from policing and incarcation to education, justice services and employment programs. 

In the Invest/divest section is included the topic of cutting military expenditures, in which the United State is criticized for using excessive funds on its military in order to expand territory and power.  

In that topic, under that section, are several statements pertaining to United States support of Israel.   Here’s the one that was deemed most offensive by a wide political spectrum within the Jewish community:

“ The US justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliance with Israel and is complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people.” 

Some more context.  Numerous Jewish leaders have worked with the Black Lives Matter movement to protest unfair treatment of African Americans in this country.

Most Jewish organizations, right-wing to left, including those who have collaborated with the Black Lives Matter movement, were angered by these statements and for very good reason.  The statements are distorted, false and incendiary.  Several Jews of color have criticized the platform for being anti-Semitic.  Rabbis across the political spectrum have denounced the statements.

I saw some attempts to defend the statement about genocide on the basis that the authors were using the word differently, to indicate extreme discrimination rather than wholesale murder, but neither that nor any other interpretations were satisfactory to most Jewish leaders, and for good reason. 

Along with the vast majority of Jewish leaders, I say unequivocally that to call the treatment of Palestinians by Israelis a genocide is libelous and anti-Semitic. 

I want to identify two pitfalls that the Jewish community can fall into, neither of which are acceptable, and a possible third approach.

The Past Won't Shut Up: A Brief Tale of Two European Cities

Toward the end of the fourth book of the Torah, we read once again the long list of places that our ancestors stopped through on their way from Egypt to the promised land.  It’s a part of the Torah that gets us thinking about passing through different places, and a nice backdrop for me to reflect on a few of the places that Deanna and I passed through this summer.

But I’d like this to be more than a travel-log.  What emerged for me, especially in visiting some of the places in Europe that we saw recently, is a sense of the strong pull that the past exerts on the present.  Europe has strong resonance with the past.  You walk the streets of its cities and towns and you get pulled in, and pulled back, and it makes you wonder about how these places will continue to respond to current challenges.

So passing through inevitably leads to looking back as much as it leads to looking around.

And with no further intro, here’s my “tale of two cities."  I will in the future reflect on my time in Israel this summer, but today I’m going to take us to two of several cities that we visited in northern Europe - Copenhagen, Denmark and Berlin, Germany.

We spent a full day in Copenhagen on my birthday, actually.  Beautiful city, resonant with history but also in many ways future-oriented.  A city focused on reducing its collective carbon footprint – far more bicycles than cars in the city center, for example.  A city focused on broadening economic opportunity – universal health care coverage, fully subsidized university tuition. 

Inside the courtyard of Amalienborg Palace in Copenhagen 

We decided to take a walking tour.  The tour-guide was a young Danish man named Magnus who spoke excellent English and was very well-informed. 

Fathers Can't Flake Out

In the aftermath of the Orlando shootings, there is much that needs to be said and done.  Among other things, I want to affirm my own belief, as a father, as a Jew, as a rabbi, that the sexual orientations and gender identities of our children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews have no bearing on the unassailable, bedrock truth that they, we, all of us, are all human beings equally valuable, equally endowed with a divine spark.

I will go further and say that as a rabbi, in the context of the recent rulings of the Conservative movement and the United States Supreme court, I will do my best to be present to help sanctify the marriages of all Jewish couples, regardless of their genders, who ask me to participate.  Moreover, although as a Conservative rabbi I do not officiate at interfaith weddings, I will do whatever I can to help welcome interfaith couples into our community, regardless of their genders, and to encourage them to bring Jewish tradition into their lives and their homes.  

Now I want to move away from the rabbi piece and talk a bit about being a father. I want to talk to all the fathers who are here, since today is technically “Erev Father’s Day.”

Fathers can’t shirk the obligations of being a father.  We can’t use work as an excuse, we can’t use exhaustion as an excuse, we can’t use confusion as an excuse, we can’t use fear as an excuse, we can’t use “mom will take care of it” as an excuse, even if mom takes care of a whole lot.

When Confusion Is a Sin

I planned this message before the Orlando shootings occurred.  They occurred the day before I delivered the message and proved tragically relevant to the theme.  I referred to the shootings briefly in the moment and I'm including a paragraph which I subsequently added (along with the photo) to reflect what I said.  

We’re months away from the high holidays but I want to start with a reference to Yom Kippur.  On Yom Kippur we confess to a whole bunch of sins – most of them make complete sense.  One in particular, I always found curious. 

על חטא שחטאנו לפניך בתמהון לבב Al het shehatanu lefanekha b’tim’hon levav.  We confess for the sin which we committed through confusion of mind.

What’s so wrong with being confused? 

God knows, there are many situations that are legitimately confusing, where we are considering competing needs, or weighing competing values.  In such situations we may do well to admit to some confusion, even ambivalence.

But there are situations that are so clear that a response of confusion of mind, tim’hon levav, is a sin.  Situations where anything other than a clear, unequivocal response is a travesty.

I’m going to discuss some unpleasant but important topics this morning that illustrate the sin of tim’hon levav with reference to Shavuot and these upcoming moments of Yizkor.

A Lesson from Harambe: The Issues are Usually Bigger Than We Think

A 17-year old gorilla named Harambe was killed in a zoo in Cincinnati because it was felt that he posed a danger to a little boy.  The boy had climbed over a pretty short wall and fallen a considerable distance into the area where the gorilla lived.   

The mother of the boy, who had lost sight of him temporarily after he said "I want to swim with the gorilla," was quite scared as you might imagine when she saw the gorilla scooping the child up and carrying him a bit.  It's all on video which you can watch, if you haven't seen it yet.  The mother called 911 and the zoo officials made a quick decision to shoot the animal dead. 

Reactions ran the gamut.  People said the mother was at fault for not supervising her child more carefully.  People said the zoo was at fault for not having a high enough barrier or that they were at fault for deciding to kill the animal, rather than stun the animal. 

On Wednesday, one of our sons texted his brother and me that they would try to use the story of the gorilla to help me write my sermon.  What followed was a brief back and forth of collaboration and I present the fruits of that collaboration as tribute to Harambe, a magnificent animal whose name means "pulling together" in Swahili.   

The incident at the Cincinnati zoo suggested to us that people are quick to place blame for specific situations, but not so willing to step back and ask the larger questions about what allows such situations to happen. 

Find Me Through One Other: a Brother's Blessing

Jews deal with God in kind of a unique way.  I'd like to reflect on that by exploring a blessing that one brother recently offered another.

Ordination of Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie

But first I want to take you back several decades.  When I was a rabbinical student I worked at Lenox Hill Hospital participating in a pastoral education program.  In my small group of six students were clergy students of other faiths.  Our group included someone preparing to be a Dominican friar, a Roman Catholic lay leader, a Presbyterian minister and a Franciscan monk.

The pastoral work was fascinating.  In addition, it was enormously beneficial to have extended contact with people of other faiths at a similar point in their professional journeys as I was.  We talked often about tradition and community and theology.   We noted our similarities and our differences.

Here’s one area of difference that I noticed and I want to use it as a basis for my comments this morning.

My Christian colleagues took many classes at their respective seminaries in a subject called systematic theology. 

Systematic theology classes, as you might imagine, teach various Christian views on God in a systematic way.  These classes were a major part of the curricula at the various Christian seminaries that my colleagues attended.

We, however, took classes in Bible, Talmud, Jewish history – an occasional class in Jewish philosophy – but proportionately we didn’t spend a lot of time learning the systematic theologies of various thinkers.

Again, proportionately, Jews don’t do a lot of systematic theology.  When we arrive at God, it’s generally not through systematic contemplation.  If I had to generalize I would say that when we arrive at God at all, it’s through our laws, our stories and, not incidentally, it’s through each other.  

Through other human beings – family, community, people, humanity - we sometimes come to some understanding of God.

To reflect on how we might arrive at God through one another, I'd like to share a brief vignette about two brothers.

What To Do With Our Bitterness

Bitterness can be hard to let go.  Case in point:

Chapter 1 of the book of Exodus:  וימררו את חייהם בעבודה קשה Vayemar’ru et chayehem ba'avoda kasha.  

The Egyptians embittered the Israelites’ lives with hard labor.  (Exodus 1:14)

Ch. 15 of the book of Exodus:  After leaving Egypt, after crossing the sea and singing the song of thanksgiving and victory, the Israelites came to Marah ולא יכלו לשתות מים ממרה כי מרים הם v’lo yachlu lishot mayim mimarah ki marim hem. 

They couldn’t drink the waters of Marah because they were bitter.  Hence the name Marah, bitterness. (Exodus 15:23)

How interesting, how sad, how understandable, how human – that the bitterness that the Egyptians imposed somehow remained with the Israelites even after they left Egypt and began to experience freedom.

 Moses looking out toward the Promised Land

This morning, on the last day of Passover, with the resonance of the Passover story still with us and the resonance of loved ones present and no longer present powerful for each of us, I want to talk about bitterness.  The understandable, yet ultimately corrosive feelings of bitterness that most of us have felt at some point or another and possibly are feeling for whatever reason even now.

Did someone hurt us physically or emotionally?  Does life feel unfair? 

Did we not get what we felt we deserved?  Were we discriminated against for one reason or another?

I would define bitterness as the feeling of hurt and resentment that perpetuates a sense of victimhood and misery.

Someone else can embitter our lives, as the Egyptians did for our ancestors, but the extent to which we continue to feel bitter, even after the initial impetus may be gone, often depends more on our volition than we realize – a version of Eleanor Roosevelt’s often quoted statement, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

By and large, no one can impose lifelong bitterness on us without our consent. This can be hard to accept, but what we do with our bitter feelings is largely up to us.