Parashat Noach: Water is Life

Shabbat Shalom. This week’s Torah portion is Parashat Noach, arguably the most well-known story of our Torah. It is one of the earliest Bible stories I ever learned, and most children, regardless of religious affiliation can at least tell you the information they learned from the song “Rise and Shine”. In it, we learn that water is destruction. God uses a flood to wipe out all of humanity because people have become too corrupt. Afterwards, God sends a rainbow as a promise that God will never again destroy the world. Similarly, in this week’s haftarah from Isaiah, God promises that once the Jewish people repent and are returned from Exile, God will never again punish the Jewish people. It’s all very well and good for God to promise to never again destroy the world or harm the Jewish people, but now it’s up to humanity to ensure we don’t destroy ourselves, starting with caring for our natural world.

            According to Rabbi Eliezer, a great Rabbi from around the first or second century, this event happened exactly at this time of year in which we read the story, shortly after the festival of Shemini Atzeret and the beginning of the hopefully rainy season in Israel. Rashi, a much more recent rabbi from only about one thousand years ago, continues on in this fashion, saying that when God first sent the waters down, God hoped that the threat of the flood would have been enough to encourage the people to repent, and then the rains would be rains of blessing, need at this time of year to keep the earth in ecological balance. When the people continued to cause violence amongst themselves, the rains continued and turned from blessing to curse, from a life force that allows the earth to flourish to a great flood that destroyed everything. Because though water is the tool of death and destruction in this story, and certainly can still be to this day with hurricanes and tsunamis and the like, water is really a source of life. Without water, nothing grows, no one survives, and the earth withers and dies. Water is life.

            In college I studied some of the violence that can live alongside water disputes. There are places in the world were water is scarce, and it becomes a resource worth fighting over, causing water wars which some sociologists and environmentalists I studied at the time believed would be the cause of the next global war. These places and conflicts were the bulk and main focus of my studies, but I also read up on cases where a water source was itself used as a weapon of colonialism and capitalism. I could name a handful of those situations from different countries on multiple continents in which governments approve big building projects that destroy indigenous communities and entire eco-systems. Sometimes they are municipal projects, like building a dam that will flood out an entire population of an indigenous tribe and annihilate the habitats of countless animals in order to create power for a city expanding beyond its capacity. Sometimes they are business projects that oil companies, real estate developers, and the like pay for and coerce politicians into approving, at the cost of the people who actually live in the area being sold off to big businesses that will come in and build and leave, with no regard to the aftermath of such devastation and displacement.

Of course, a current situation as well known as the Noah story, at least now while it’s in the public eye, is the dispute over the Dakota Access Pipeline. As you may know, a pipeline has been approved for an oil company based out of Texas to build through Native American land. There are many aspects to the situation that are deeply problematic, but the most looming and easily relatable one for all people regardless of geographic location or national identity is the issue of ecological damage and water pollution that the pipeline is sure to cause. With climate change reaching a peak that scientists are now saying is irreversible, the water crisis in Flint, Michigan still unaddressed, and clean energy initiatives coming along painstakingly slowly, do we as an entire human race really want to risk building a new pipeline for oil know the pollution that burning oil causes? Do we really want to raze ecosystems and develop new harmful structures on protected land? Do we really want to risk poisoning yet another water source and decimating yet another community? I just can’t see any way in which that honors the covenant with God represented in the rainbow of this week’s parasha. God has promised to never again destroy the earth with water. I’d suggest that promising to stop destroying each other’s water sources the least we can do to uphold our end of the bargain, to care better for all of God’s creation.

May we learn from the indigenous people of this country to protect our water and our earth, for water is life. I’d like to close by sharing a poem I found online by a Mohawk woman.

Water,
She possess
the specific rhythm
of a poet
Close to grace
given to cumulus clouding of frenzy
Perhaps she is as subtle as a late night bloomer
A desert cacti
A winged bird of prey
Feeding on the smallest of creatures
Nesting in the hearts of men
of boys
of beginnings
Our Water,
She is of the earth
It can be said
But,
It is the silk of sky she wears best
Riding the rainbows of the moon
The most delicate of hues washing her shadows
All the shades of white to marble her weightless flight
The whirlpool of her
digressions
mapping veins
blue as,
High noon July Sky
against
A northern river
Wide and deep as frozen yesterday
Our Water is Life,
She paints the horizon
We set sail
against
The four winds gathering nations
To carve
backward the motion of time
a feast of all memory
Her power
essential and sublime
Blessed is all of God’s creation, the water and the earth and the rains. Amen and Shabbat Shalom.

Why I always find a way to link Parashat Bereshit to Patriarcy thanks to Avivah Zornberg

                Shabbat Shalom! Last week, I spoke quite a bit about internalized antisemitism and some of my realizations from the conference on the Intersections of Antisemitism and Racism that I attended. But it was such a full and amazing weekend, I have more to say about it! This week, I want to address something that everyone in this room has probably joked about in a positive way, but I came to realize during the workshop two weeks ago seems to have stemmed from internalized antisemitism for Jewish men: the “Nice Jewish Boy.” I received an email from the Jewish Coalition Against Domestic Abuse earlier this month informing that October is Domestic Abuse Awareness month and urging all DC area clergy to talk about this issue this month. The first Shabbat after I received this email was the week I was away, and last week I was just bursting to address the realization I had made about my own personal intersection of antisemitism and racism, but this week I am ready to rise to JCADA’s call to speak on this issue, and it too relates to something I thought about during the conference.

Of course, this is not to say that Jewish men aren’t nice or that I think it’s wrong to want/expect/assume/pretend that the men of our community are better than others, exempt from the toxic hypermasculinity and violence that many other men fall prey to. But, in pretending that this is so, we may be silencing people in our same community that have been abused by those “Nice Jewish Boys.” Because too often we assume that such things can’t happen in our communities because our men are just “Nice Jewish Boys,” and that thinking is so harmful to survivors, especially those still unsure how to report abuse, escape the situation, or talk about it in order to heal. Once in a college Hebrew class, a professor was reinforcing this idea that there is no domestic abuse in Israel and that the IDF never has to worry about war crimes the way other militaries might because Jewish men are so inherently peaceful and just all above hurting women. I pointed out what an absurd claim that was, that no community can claim such a thing, and she replied, passively, “Well, there are criminals anywhere.” At the time, I felt like that was such a dismissive way to address my point. My point was not that there are criminals everywhere. There are men being socialized to never express their emotions in healthy ways and learning from a young age that tougher and stronger is better everywhere. That is a large part of what causes violent hypermasculine behaviors and domestic abuse.

During the workshop two weeks ago, one of the facilitators talked about how Jews have historically been judged by their gender performance. Jewish women have been painted by antisemitism as too domineering, pushy, nagging, masculine, bossy. Jewish men have been painted by antisemitism as soft, feminine, passive, emasculated by their overbearing mothers. I’m not sure why that information given by the facilitator triggered the memory of my college Hebrew class, but it did. I thought about Karen Brodkin’s brief gender assessments in her book, How Jews Became White Folks, in which she talks about her mother’s obsession with the two of them being thin and blond and beautiful by white Anglo-Saxon-centric standards. She draws attention to the fact that Barbie was created by Jews, yet looks nothing like Jewish stereotypes, and points out the ways in which gender dynamics played in Jewish households in the old country were different from the ways in which gender dynamics were expected to play out in proper American nuclear families. I came to the conclusion, with nothing but my own observations to corroborate this, that the concept of the “Nice Jewish Boy” is an attempt to reclaim the negative stereotyping Jews have faced about our previously cultural and traditional forms of gender performance. I’d been thinking about this since the workshop, and then just this week I heard a story of a Jewish woman who ran the family farm in Eastern Europe, who was indisputably the head of her household, until the family moved to the United States. Here, obsessed with assimilating, her husband became the domineering head of the household and she was forced into the role of the demure housewife. Hearing that tale hit the nail on the head for me and solidified that we need to be talking about these issues in our communities.

The traditional gender performances and dynamics of Jewish cultures may well be one that legitimately allows for a “Nice Jewish Boy” narrative. But we’re not in the shtetl anymore, and our boys are exposed to the same glorification of violence and objectification of women that all other men are. When we ignore that and continue to only perpetuate the “Nice Jewish Boy” narrative, we are simultaneously embracing an inherently antisemitic idea that our culture has errant gender roles, and silencing those who are hurt by the men we insist are so nice.

Tonight we honor Simchat Torah, which occurred earlier this week, and we begin our Torah readings over again. Parashat Bereshit, specifically chapter two (the Adam and Eve story) is one that has been used for thousands of years as a reason to subjugate women. I once believed this was the fault of the Christian Patriarchs, but two years ago I read a commentary on Genesis by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg that forever changed my view of this parasha:

“Eve stands, then, at the hub of the narrative of seduction; she is both object and subject of this treacherous activity. She has gone down in cultural memory as both feeble and slyly powerful; incapable of resisting seduction, she is nevertheless irresistibly seductive. The weak link between the serpent and Adam, she has borne the brunt of responsibility for events read, quite simply, as a Fall.”         

This quote leads me to believe that this patriarchy and sexist double standards have existed from time immemorial, and that our Jewish ancestors are just as guilty of passing on this harmful legacy. Tonight, we honor and celebrate our Torah, our traditions, our Jewish history and culture, but we have to be honest with ourselves about what some of that history has entailed, and we are tasked now to reaffirm the celebration of our matriarchs as well as our patriarchs. After all, Zornberg also says in her commentary on Genesis that the expulsion from Eden wasn’t so much a fall, a downward motion, but a going out, an outward motion of reaching and expanding. Human beings didn’t become real people, thinking and feeling and in serious communication with each other and God until after they consumed the fruit of knowledge of good and evil and were forced from the Garden. We could thank Eve as much as blame her for the world as it is today, for making us complex and interesting creatures. And yet, after Eve, the mother of us all and the one who brought us human autonomy, so few women’s stories are told in the Torah. Only men are officially counted among those who left Egypt. While women have played a prominent role in building Judaism throughout the ages, only the rituals and legal rulings of men were formally recorded and codified. Our society is now seeing more and more feminist approaches to Judaism, and it’s important to know how much of that is really revival, a reclamation to our traditional roles as women of prominence in our communities, after years of subjugation by assimilation. I’ll conclude with this poem by Tzemah Yoreh in his book A Love Song for Shabbat:

In the Torah, men are born

Women, ex-machina, appear

From nowhere

Jacob had a daughter

Who disappeared, silently

If one day all women leave

What will happen to Torah?

            As we embrace our Torah, celebrate the Beginning, and start to really get into the swing of the New Year, let it be one of honesty and equality. Let sexism and abuse not be tolerated in our communities.  May we be willing to see the difficult signs that our own “Nice Jewish Boys” are not always so nice, and maybe, let’s just do away with that phrase altogether. And may we find peace and love in our Nice Jewish Homes. Amen and Shabbat Shalom.

Shabbat Sukkot and Unpacking Internalized Antisemitism

Shabbat Shalom! As some of you may know, I was away last weekend to participate in a workshop on the Intersections of Antisemitism and Racism. It was a heavy weekend with many ideas brought in and a lot of time spent on unpacking internalized antisemitism. We shared a lot about all the ways that antisemitism has shaped our lives and upbringings. We started off with a brief overview of antisemitism and how it works: a system of ideas based on White Supremacy and Christian hegemony that are passed down through institutions to enable scapegoating of Jews. It is fundamentally different from racism in this respect. Whereas most racism functions on lies of the inferiority of the marginalized people, antisemitism functions on lies of superiority of Jews, and puts us in positions of buffer between the real ruling class and the other marginalized people, so that we can be more easily scapegoated when the ruling class deems it necessary. It functions on our isolation, especially in separating us from other marginalized communities, and leading us to believe that we can only ever count on ourselves, while leading other marginalized folks to believe that we are the source of their exploitation. It is cyclical, allowing Jews to succeed in good times, so that they will be an easy target in bad times.

Most of this was not new to me, though it felt validating to hear it from facilitators of this workshop and to sit in a room of people who see this reality and are committed to fighting it. After this background session, though, we moved on to “Facing the Unfaceable:” how antisemitism has affected us personally. We teased out all the Jewish stereotypes and neuroses and the ways in which so many of us have lived those stereotypes as coping mechanisms against the anxiety of antisemitism. This is when we started to unpack our internalized antisemitism. We practiced saying, “I hate what antisemitism has done to my beloved people!” and then naming a thing that we hate that has been caused by antisemitism. The facilitators called this and the other coping mechanisms we discussed, “Ancestrally designated best practices for our survival.” At this point, one of the facilitators said (paraphrasing because I can’t remember the exact wording), “Jews are human, just like all other humans. This means our grief and trauma connects us to the grief and trauma of all other people. This is important because antisemitism causes us to believe that we are a mutant people.”

This struck me hard. I walk around with both of those pieces and never realized it before. I assert to my fellow Jews all the time that we need to be involved in liberation politics because our grief and our trauma connects us to the grief and trauma of other people. I come into Jewish spaces assuming that our shared culturally inherited trauma and our shared values of Tikkun Olam means everyone is already on the same page as me, equally committed to ending state violence against other peoples, equally committed to intersectional liberation. But I don’t enter liberation movements with the same expectation and assumption that everyone is equally committed to ending antisemitism. And that is my internalized antisemitism. That is me accepting the narrative that we have no allies, that we shouldn’t even try to get other folks on our team. That the only way to break out of the buffer space that White Supremacy places us in is to show up purely as allies to other people that White Supremacy exploits, rather than to advocate for our own unique freedom from the ways in which White Supremacy exploits us. And that’s not good Jewish leadership. We’re a little over a week past Yom Kippur, but I realized during this conference last week, that I still have some more teshuvah to do for the Jewish people. For the sin I have committed against you by holding the people I love most against a higher standard than I hold for other people. For the sin I have committed against other peoples by assuming they can’t stand up to that standard.

We are now in the midst of Sukkot. Our sukkah reminds us of the fragility of life, and the miraculous strength and abundance of spirit. We can be vulnerable to antisemitism and but we can also be strong advocates for ourselves and our communities. In the Festival Torah reading for today, from Exodus, Moses demands that God show him Godself. He is concerned that God will abandon him to lead the people on his own without knowing what exactly they are getting into, and so he wants to see God’s leadership straight on. God, of course, cannot show God’s full self to a mortal, but allows the Divine Goodness to pass by Moses and Moses is able to get a fleeting glimpse of that Goodness. This is God reassuring Moses that God will lead and Moses can follow God’s trail, never quite seeing what’s ahead or God’s whole glory, but feeling certain that he is following the right path. The people of Israel dwelt in Sukkot throughout their desert wanderings, vulnerable to weather and war, but certain of God’s presences among them. We now often live the opposite way: in secure homes and seemingly safe from oppressive forces but vulnerable to theological doubts and existential dread. I want to hold both of these truths for our people. I pray that this time in which we put ourselves into slightly more vulnerable positions in our temporary dwelling places will help us see God’s presence in ourselves and strengthen our spirits so that we may all learn to be better self-advocates. May this festival season be one of community building and love, safety and strength, and may we be certain the holiness dwells among us. Amen and Shabbat Shalom.