Baltimore
Parashat Aharei Mot-Kedoshim 5775/2 May 2015
The sons of Aaron died and the entire community, beginning with the leadership, then including the elite classes and finally the populace at large, had to learn how to repent. The forms and institutions of the Torah are often strange, even alienating. Still, the lessons they teach are ever unfolding. I do not know for certain what the sequences of events described in Parshat Acherei-Mot meant to people in ancient Israel or in any other slice of time in Jewish history, but I do know that the sequence is not accidental. The author of the Torah did not need to connect the rituals of atonement with the deaths of Aaron’s sons. Keeping chronology consistent or clear is not a characteristic of the Torah narrative. This connection was intentional and whatever its meaning was understood to be in previous times and places, it has a particular significance in our time and place.
For some 400 years in this land, before and after independence, before and after a civil war, before and after the constitutional amendment guaranteeing universal male suffrage, before and after suffrage was extended to include women, and before and after the so-called civil rights movement, the lives of black Americans has been cheap. The death of black men in particular. Under what would otherwise be intolerable circumstances was considered unimportant, hardly worthy of comment. It rarely even comes to the attention of the public.
Like many of you, I have pondered the Holocaust. Not its meaning, that is beyond pondering. Rather its very existence. How could a people decide to ignore, ostracize and finally exterminate a large percentage of its potentially most productive citizens? If Hitler truly wanted to rule the world, it is highly likely that with the contribution of his Jewish citizens: businessmen, bankers, academics, and scientists, he would have. And don’t think the Jews would not have helped. Bracket the anti-Semitism, fascism would have appealed to the Jewish bourgeois as much as it did to the non-Jews. The promise of stability, economic growth and ultimately German dominance, would have been very attractive to the Jews, many veterans of the First World War. But, Hitler did not want to rule the world. He wanted to conquer the world to eliminate the Jews everywhere he went. This is insanity.
America does not want to conquer the world. It does, however, want to lead the world in every category. Americans live under the rubric of American exceptionalism even when it is far from true; and it is far from true in more and more areas: income distribution, upward mobility, housing, crime, incarceration numbers, health care and moral standing.
When a nation willfully squanders its human capital, doesn’t care about generating jobs for working people, would rather ship them overseas so that some of us pay less and corporations make more – doesn’t care about adequately funding school districts, eliminates sports, art and music and no one cares – makes higher education less and less affordable – such a nation is proclaiming in no uncertain terms that it would rather go down in defeat than see one part of its human capital succeed.
In such a tyrannical context Thomas Jefferson – no innocent himself – urged the morality of revolt. That no such organized revolt has taken shape over 200 years is a testament, in part, to the halting steps this nation has taken toward a commitment to full equality. But the steps have been halting and it shouldn’t take the violence of the mob to urge us to action.
Baltimore didn’t just happen. It has been indirectly planned, not by its perpetrators but by us, by the oppressors and those indifferent to oppression – an entire electorate can be galvanized by abortion or gay rights in order to look away from the great issues of the day and the greatest is still the willful squandering of the human capital of this country. We are that electorate. Our candidates pander to our concerns or convince us about what those concerns are and we can choose what to be concerned about before it is too late to have that choice.
The moral imperatives that we read about in Parshat Kedoshim are ensconced in the ritual regulations of Parshat Acherei-Mot. The Torah demands allegiance to both because one without the other will not work. Without the ritual to continually interrupt our complacency, the moral imperatives are soon ignored. Without the moral imperatives, the ritual is mere rote. Our charge as Jews is to embrace both and then to bring the power for justice thus engendered to the larger community in which we live.
Tags: Aharei Mot, Current Event, Kedoshim, Responsibility
