Parashat Lech L'cha

            Shabbat Shalom! This week’s Torah portion is Parashat Lech L’cha, in which our ancestors Avram and Sarai are called to be God to begin their journey, to where they do not know. The Ramban, a slightly lesser known contemporary to Rambam who was also a wise rabbi, Torah commentator, and physician, interpreted the verse, “To the land that I will show you,” as meaning that Avram and Sarai “wandered aimlessly from nation to nation and kingdom to kingdom, til [they] reached Canaan, when God told [Avram] “To your seed I shall give this land… Before that, he did not yet know that that land was the subject of the command.”

            To illustrate this aimlessness to the second graders at Gesher this week, we went wandering around the grounds on Wednesday afternoon. I asked the line leader of the week to pick a place, and we walked out to the soccer fields. Then I asked another student to pick a place, and we walk to a muddy pond where the students sometimes do experiments for their natural science classes. I asked another student to pick a place, and he led us on a particularly roundabout journey to the labyrinth in the wooded area behind the school that another rabbi at the school had built with the middle schoolers. I asked him if it was so roundabout because he hadn’t decided on a destination before he asked to be the next leader, but he said the labyrinth was his goal the whole time but he forgot the way. Luckily one of his classmates is the daughter of the rabbi who built it so she was able to redirect him when he needed help. At one point in the woods, we lost the path, and although they’re not so thick and we weren’t so deep, we did get a bit turned around and couldn’t find a way out that wouldn’t mean stomping over pricker bushes. The sky got dark and the wind picked up, and for a moment some of the students were frightened. We found a path without prickers, although it still wasn’t the way we had come into the woods, and hurried back inside before the rain started.

            I asked the 2^nd graders who else they could think of that might feel lost and scared, aimless and unsure of where to find shelter, the way that Abraham did and they way that they did ever so briefly on our wander-about. Immediately, several hands shot into the air, and they named homeless people, poor people who are at risk to have their homes taken away, and refugees. They told me some stories about their grandparents and great-grandparents who had escaped from the Holocaust, though they didn’t know many details. Although modern commentator Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg remind us that Avram is explicitly not a refugee, the connection the students made was clear to me. Unlike Adam and Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden, Cain sent away from his family, the people of Babel dispersed, the later Israelites exiled to Babylon, Avram is not threatened or forced out of his home in Ur. He is called upon to begin a sacred journey to a holy Promised Land. But like Avram, many refugees must travel without a sure destination, wandering from nation to nation and kingdom to kingdom until they reach a place that is revealed to them as a holy Promised Land, a place where they can be safe to worship who they like and be who they are, a place to call home.

            As Jews who know what it is to feel the fear of persecution, to grow up being told to always have a current passport and have some cash hidden, “just in case,” we have a responsibility to help those looking for a safe place, especially those of us who are more secure than others due to class, race, citizen status, gender, sexuality, or whatever other axis of oppression and privilege we claim. It may not be safe to invite strangers into our homes, but there may be a time when someone you know is in need of a warm bed, a hot shower, and some milk money, or some legal help defending their civil liberties. To turn them away would be to dishonor our ancestors, who after being weary travelers themselves, take in weary travelers in the plains of Mamre. And when a situation is such that we cannot directly intercede, there are organizations that can. Donate to a homeless shelter so that they can continue to provide safety for these modern-day sojourners. Volunteer at a soup kitchen so that those pressed between feeding their children and paying their rent don’t have to make the painful decision this month. Learn and spread information about HIAS, formerly known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, so that those escaping war, famine, and genocide know that there is a safe destination for them and they need not wander aimlessly.

            May we all find our destinations, a place we are called to, a safe space, and when we get there, may we welcome in others with open arms. Amen and Shabbat Shalom.

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.