Rosh Hashanah Day 2 5766
Rabbi Tamara Cohen
This Dvar Torah was born a few times over this year.
I think the first place it was born was in the powerful
experience of giving birth to a beautiful baby, who among many other things is
a white Jewish boy with blond hair and blue eyes in a moment when the Black
Lives Matter movement was reaching a new level, in a moment when the stories of
parents mourning the deaths of their children of color due to police violence
were all around me. We took Kliel to a Hanukkah Black Lives Matter protest for
his first outing. He was barely a month old. Why? In part because I wanted to
be there and in part because I was struggling with how to allow myself the joy
of this new baby knowing that all around America and Philadelphia and even Mt
Airy other parents were also celebrating new babies, babies with all different
colors of eyes and skin and hair, and that all of us lovestruck parents,
wanting to do everything for our children, feeling acutely aware of their
vulnerability, also had different relationships to the vulnerability of our
kids because of the systemic racism in the America in which these babies were
being born.
I remember waking up in the middle of the night to nurse and
realizing that this waking in the night was core my current spiritual work. It
was a way to teach my baby's little body and deepest self: yes, it's true,
there is nothing I won't do to care for you. You are safe in this world and can
take root. You are loved and cared for. Each time you cry out, or murmur, or
show me your need, I will respond. And then it occurred to me that the
difference between my parental instinctual hearing and spiritual instinctual
hearing was this: I wanted to be and to raise my children to be, people who
wake in the night when they hear not only the cries of their own babies but the
cries of every and any baby. The kind of
people who can respond with love and surrender each time they hear a cry of
human being in need, even in the dark of night, even when we would rather sleep.
Another moment when this D’var was born was on a phone call with
my friend Y. after Sandra Bland was found dead in her jail cell. Y. was saying
something like “What’s going on? What’s going on? This is America.” And there
was an urgency in her voice, a terror. I had read a headline or two about the
case but I hadn't yet taken the time to read more. I was busy, planned to get to it soon.
But something in my friend’s voice, something said to me in a starkness,
painful and real, that the difference between being a good white friend and
ally and being a black mother in that moment was the difference between my
upset at the story and her terror. And I saw it clearly. I saw her daughter, 17,
headed to Princeton after graduating as the only black Jewish girl from her
yeshiva high school. I saw her suddenly, briefly through her mother’s eyes. I
saw the terror of having to release one’s child, one’s black child, to an
unknown world, the terror of having to allow one’s baby to drive on a street
through Princeton. Anywhere really. And I felt shaken awake in a new way to the
difference in my reality and in the reality of my dear friend, both of us
Jewish mothers who love our kids and would do anything to protect them, one of
us white and one of us black.
I tasted for a moment
the physical terror in her voice. And then I went into my house to have dinner with
my family and she went into her house to have dinner with hers. But before we
got off the phone I made a promise to her, yes, we would do something, no I
wouldn't forget the moment, no I wouldn't let this fear and anger and horror
all sit solely on her shoulders.
The
third place this dvar Torah was born was in my reading of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s amazingly beautiful,
powerful and heart-wrenching book Between the World and Me, which I read
this summer, thanks to the fact that the GJC Racism group decided it would be a
good thing to do together. For those of you who have not yet read this book,
and I strongly commend you to read it, what you need to know for now is that
the book is written by a black father to his fifteen year old black son. The
book tells the story of how Ta-Nehisi, in his words, has made the struggle to
live free in his black body in America the central meaning making struggle of
his life. He writes about his childhood on the harsh streets of inner city
Baltimore, his struggles with school, his period of valorizing and learning
from Black Power and Malcom X, his awakenings at Howard University to the
deeper complexities of race and racism and blackness, and about becoming
parent. He shares the story of the loss of a peer to police violence and of his
intense visit with the mother of this murdered son, a professor and dean, who
had raised her son in the suburbs, sent him to private schools and given him so
much, none of which protected him from being murdered by a police officer in
the prime of his life.
These
three experiences led me to feel compelled, if still somewhat anxious about,
giving this dvar torah. So here’s the essence of what I want to say:
For me, this year, the
Binding of Isaac is a story different from any other year I have read it. This
year it is a story about an Abraham who loves his son but who is so terrified
by the realization that he could be taken away from him that he almost kills
him himself.
This year for me,
Abraham is a black father. And Isaac is his beloved son. And what happens in
the story is that Abraham, through binding his son on the altar, passes on to
his son the terrifying truth that his body could be taken from him at any
moment.
Isaac and Abraham are
both afraid. Fear is something they live with and know. Indeed fear becomes
part of Isaac's name (as Gideon Ephrat points out in a blog post on the use of
the phrase Pachad Yitzchak after the Akeida).
I
want to briefly read you a few quotes from Between the World and Me that may help you see
how I have arrived at this reading of Akeidat Yitzchak.
Coates writes: “Black people love their children with a kind of
obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would
like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America
made.” He continues, “That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who
control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the
criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral
authority of a protection racket. It was only after you that I understood this
love, that I understood the grip of my mother’s hand. She knew that
the galaxy itself could kill me, that all of me could be shattered and all of
her legacy spilled upon the curb like bum wine. And no one would be brought to
account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any
human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of “race,” imposed
upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods.” - p.
82
So,
what happens when we read these two texts, Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Genesis 22
together? A few things happen.
One
of the most difficult and important things that Ta-Nehisi Coates asks his son and his
readers to do is to accept a radically different and more violent narrative of
America than the one we generally believe in. He asks us, as does the Black
Lives Matter movement more broadly, to recognize that what has gone on this
year have not been the acts of some bad cops, but instead a reflection of and
carrying out of a policy of systemic racism consistent with the basic tenets of
the American Dream in which the of safety and prosperity of people who get to
claim the identity of “white” get that through the plunder, ownership, and
terrorizing of Black bodies.
I
hear in this two calls to us as a community of primarily white Jews.
The
first is that we recognize how much we have benefited from the process of mostly losing, at least in
the United States, the marker of having Jewish bodies, and of being accepted as
having white bodies. But we can’t stop there. We must also take the step of
deciding to stop believing in the whiteness of our bodies, while still fully
acknowledging white privilege, and of no longer acquiescing to the system that
gives us advantages because of our supposed whiteness on the backs of those
whose skin is black.
Another
equally hard and important move that I invite us to make is for us to be
willing to look at the Torah and at Israelite civilization with the same hard
scrutiny with which Coates looks at America, and also, through the course of
the book, at blackness.
He
writes, "The
writer, and that was what I was becoming, must be wary of every Dream and every
nation, even his own nation. Perhaps his own nation more than any other,
precisely because it was his own” (p.53) and also, "Perhaps there has
been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt
from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have
yet to discover it."
I
think its important for us as Jews to be ready to admit that indeed our beloved
Torah is not exempt as a story in which some great power is elevated through
the violent exploitation of other human bodies. Despite the power of the Exodus
narrative, in
the Torah, in the end, Israelites bodies are the chosen bodies. It is the
bodies of the inhabitants of the land of Canaan who are plundered and destroyed
in order to pave the way for our Dream, for the conquest of the Promised Land.
This is a very troubling way to look at the Torah, just as Coates presents us
with a very difficult read of America. But the fact that it makes us uncomfortable
doesn't make it not true.
And if we can tell the
truth, tell the truth about America, and tell the truth about the Bible, and
tell a more whole truth about our changing and evolving position as American
Jews in the civil rights struggle, not just about Heschel in Selma, and Andrew
Goodman, and the stories we are proud of, we will be moving closer to being
able to make necessary radical change.
Let’s return to Isaac,
bound and trembling with the knife raised above him. On the one hand I am
seeing him and asking you to see him as an American boy with a black body. I am
doing this because black bodies are the bodies in America today that hold the
position of Yitzchak, the position of fear, of lack of freedom, of being
struck, bound between the promise of a grand and fruitful future and the very
real possibility of immanent unexplained and incomprehensible death.
But
at the same time that I want us to hold the image of Yitzchak as a black child,
I also want to hold him as every child.
The
binding of Isaac is a story that reveals that actually we all have bodies. And
that actually every one of our bodies is vulnerable. Every one of our bodies
would cry out "I can't breathe" if it was put into a chokehold and we
had asthma. Every one of our bodies would be destroyed if it was bound and
driven around in the back of a police van.
Isaac is our reminder
that really race is a construct that creates an unnatural line between those
bodies that are vulnerable and destructible and those that are strong and invincible.
Our
narrative does not end with Yishmael cast out and Yitzchak protected as the chosen one. Yitzchak ends up
vulnerable in today’s Torah reading just as Yishmael did in yesterday’s. Isaac's
body lies there bound and afraid, just as Yishmael sat in the desert thirsty
and in danger of dying. Both of them together remind all us that all of our
bodies could be taken from us for reasons we don't understand and will never
understand. Each is dependent on an angel shifting their parent’s
vision in order to enable their survival.
So
on the one
hand I am saying that some bodies are more vulnerable than others and on the
other hand I am saying that all bodies are equally vulnerable. Yes.
Racism and the American
Dream's dependence on it makes it true that black bodies are far more
vulnerable in America than white bodies. But this is not an inherent truth.
This is the result of a system built to protect and construct white bodies and
to control and destroy black bodies, families, and
communities.
When
we recognize
that whiteness is a construct, that blackness is a construct, that race is a
construct, we take one important step. We then need to take another. We need to
take the step of saying that we want to exchange of our sense of distance from
the reality of the vulnerability of the body for a society in which all bodies
are equally vulnerable and equally free.
We don't yet live in
that society. The Torah doesn't live in that reality either. But Isaac's bound
body and the rabbis choice to force us to look at it every year is perhaps a
way in to that worldview.
That's where we want to
go. To the worldview where the color of Isaac's skin doesn't make him more or
less likely to be bound or unbound, where the color of his skin doesn't make
him more or less likely to live with a constant underlying sense of fear.
As Jews we often read
this story in a way that focuses us more on the intellectual, spiritual,
philosophical questions raised by the Akeida. I have felt compelled this year
to stay with the body. With the embodied terror of Isaac and of Abraham. And
beyond them of Hagar and Yishmael. And even Sarah.
I
have felt compelled to stay with the deep experience of bodily fear that is not right now
equally shared in this country. But which perhaps we can begin to more deeply
understand through our bodies than through our minds.
Racism can only
partially be unlearned through the mind. The racist’s fear, the fear that the
supposedly white body carries of the black body is also a bodily fear. And so perhaps
we can get more to the root of racism if we go to this body place. And perhaps
this year that is where Isaac is inviting us to go.
At least it is where his
body invited me to go this year. His body and a mother’s terror, and the crazy
sad fact of Sandra Bland's death, and all the lives taken this year because of
police violence and the powerful gift of Ta-nehesi Coates’s words to his
fifteen year old son — his act of father to son truth telling that somehow
calls out to me across time and space as an answer to Abraham's deafening silence
during his three day walk with his son.
Towards
the end of the book, Coates addresses his son: ”Part of me thinks that your very
vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the
quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite
their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability
becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should
enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when
nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked in a way that
those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be.
And I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in
which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels.
And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do
not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact... I would
have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.” (pp.107-8)
May
we keep learning, may we keep struggling, may we raise our next generation — all of them, to be
conscious citizens of this terrible and beautiful world. May the shofar keep
blasting and shaking all of us awake.
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