The Latest from BZBI

Changes of Heart

Bereshit 5777 / 29 October 2016

October 31, 2016

After I finished this d’var Torah, I heard a recent interview with David Brooks and E.J. Dionne that further elaborates on the themes below, and I encourage you to follow the link and listen.

Would you invite a nationally-recognized white supremacist leader to Shabbat dinner?

I’m not sure that I would; but that questions came to mind immediately when I read a recent profile of Derek Black,[1] the twenty-seven-year-old whose father Don founded Stormfront, one of the first white supremacist websites, and raised Derek in the heart of America’s racist underground. As a child, Derek had already distinguished himself as a vocal advocate for “white nationalism,” a movement that attempted to take white supremacist ideas into more respectable, mainstream circles. By age nineteen, Derek was a rising star in the racist community, hosting a radio program and speaking at national conventions. The trajectory of his life seemed clear — and yet everything was about to take an unexpected turn.

Despite his insular upbringing — his parents home-schooled him in order to keep him out of a majority-Latino public school — Derek’s passion for History took him across the state to a small Liberal Arts college. Away from home for the first time, in a diverse, multi-cultural environment, Derek began encountering the very people his parents raised him to fear: immigrants, African-Americans, Jews. College, for Derek, increasingly became a double life: on campus he made friends with the kids in his dorm and took part in all the usual activities; and at the same time he continued co-hosting a radio talk show with his father and writing for Stormfront.

At this point it’s 2011 and it’s hard to keep a secret for very long. Another student, researching terrorist groups online, recognized Derek’s picture next to one of his Stormfront columns and “outed” Derek in a message to the student body. Derek returned from a semester abroad to find himself largely ostracized, shunned by peers who valued diversity and inclusion.

Here’s where Derek’s story gets interesting: amid all the controversy, one of Derek’s friends from his first semester reached out to invite him to dinner — not just any dinner, but Shabbat dinner. Matthew Stevenson, the school’s only observant Jew, hosted weekly Shabbat dinners for an ethnically and religiously diverse crowd; on a campus without much organized Jewish life, it was Matthew’s way of ensuring his Shabbat table would stay full. Derek, whose social life had essentially vanished once his true identity was revealed, accepted the invitation. Most of the regular guests stayed away once they knew Derek was coming, but Matthew remembers asking the remaining friends, “Let’s try to treat him like anyone else.”[2] Nobody brought up the controversy that evening, dinner conversation remained cordial — and Derek began attending weekly. Over time, Derek and the others came to know and ultimately trust one another, and the subject of Derek’s racial attitudes finally ended up on the table.

At first, Derek attempted to distinguish his “white nationalism” from white supremacist and neo-Nazi ideologies, but his friends’ questions began to weigh on him; he stopped writing for Stormfront and dropped out of his radio show as his former beliefs became less and less compatible with the relationships he formed in college. In an email, one of the other Shabbat guests urged Derek to “Get out of this … before it ruins some part of your future more than it already irreparably has.”[3] At age 24, after years of public advocacy for white racism, Derek Black wrote an open letter renouncing his former beliefs:

I acknowledge that things I have said as well as my actions have been harmful to people of color, people of Jewish descent, activists striving for opportunity and fairness for all, and others affected… I am sorry for the damage done by my actions and my past endorsement of white nationalism… [but]  I understand that my words don’t suddenly heal all wounds caused by my actions or my encouragement of others.

It’s a remarkable story — even more surprising for being the second story this year about a high-profile advocate of hatred and discrimination who, through personal encounters with the so-called “enemy,” came to a change of heart and a moral reckoning.

Like Derek Black, Megan Phelps-Roper grew up in a closed, insular community: her grandfather, Fred Phelps, founded the Westboro Baptist Church, now infamous for their offensive picketing of military funerals, synagogues, and LGBT advocacy organizations.[4] An early adopter of Twitter, Megan became Westboro’s voice on social media — a role that she used to promote Westboro’s uncompromising fundamentalist Christianity, but which also brought her into contact with a wider world — one that included David Abitbol, an Israeli web developer who became Megan’s debate adversary, on-and-off friend, and ultimately her first support when she and her sister Grace abandoned their church.

Although Megan Phelps-Roper and Derek Black sought different goals, their stories follow strikingly similar lines: both took on vocal leadership in late adolescence, with the internet helping boost their message; both encountered the very people they once reviled in contexts that forced them to compare their stereotypes with the actual human beings in front of them; both struggled with growing doubts about the formerly self-evident beliefs they received from their parents; and ultimately both faced the difficult decision to break with their pasts — and to speak publicly about their changes of heart. While their stories tell us a lot about the age in which we live, they also shed light on one of the key features of this morning’s Torah reading.

As Lucy mentioned earlier, the Torah opens with a Creation story. While we can find parallel cosmogonies in most ancient Near Eastern literature, one feature of parashat Bereshit has no counterpart in any other myth: עֵץ הַדַּעַת טוֹב וָרָֽע, “The tree of knowledge of Good and Evil.”[5] 

What makes this tree so special? As many commentaries point out, the first human must have received free will and moral reasoning from the outset, or else God’s commandment, וּמֵעֵץ הַדַּעַת טוֹב וָרָע לֹא תֹאכַל מִמֶּנּוּ, “But from the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil, you must not eat,”[6] would make no sense — nor would the consequences that inevitably follow its violation.[7] Instead, we must imagine a state in which human beings have the capacity to choose without the temptation that often leads us astray; the possibility of sin, for Adam, was as real as the possibility that I might voluntarily stick my hand in the fireplace — technically possible, but never going to happen.[8] Eve and Adam’s unfortunate taste awakens in them the will to make choices that go against their best interests[9] — in the words of the 16th-century Italian Rabbi Ovadiah Sforno, “to choose that which is sweet but poisonous over what is bitter but healthy.”[10] 

After Eden, when the struggle between right and wrong becomes an internal battle, we face a double challenge: we must do good and avoid evil, but first we need to discern the difference between those two categories. Temptation abounds; well before adulthood we already know that the “bad” things are often fun, while making the right moral choice tends to be difficult and sometimes costly. No one gets it right all the time; we inevitably need to reverse course on bad decisions.

Still, even after we’ve put our lives back on track we can’t always mitigate the consequences of our past behavior. In a year when the white nationalism Derek Black once worked so hard to promote has become a focal point of the election, he admitted to a Shabbat-dinner friend that “It’s scary to know that I helped spread this stuff, and now it’s out there.”[11] Our actions, big and small, take on lives of their own; they take flight and continue on even after we’ve changed course. “We know that we can’t undo our whole lives,” Megan and Grace Phelps-Roper wrote of their decision to leave Westboro Baptist Church, “What we can do is try to find a better way to live from here on.”

Although the Talmud teaches that God put teshuvah, repentance, in place even before creating the world,[12] each of us bears responsibility for keeping its channels open. In an online article for Harvard Business Review, Professor Deepak Malhotra laid out seven steps for creating an “Exit Ramp,” a safe space for others to reconsider their beliefs and behaviors and chart a new course.[13] The final step, according to Malhotra, is to “let them in:” welcoming and rewarding those who change their minds, rather than punishing them for their past behavior. We’re tempted to say “I told you so,” we’re naturally suspicious of people who weren’t allied with us from the beginning, but those responses push others to hold tighter to their present beliefs — even if those beliefs prove counterproductive or harmful for themselves or others. As Malhotra cautions, “You can’t ask them to leave the comfort of their own tribe and then abandon them once they do.”[14] Our own tradition reinforces this concept: reminding a person who has doneteshuvah of her past misdeeds ranks among Judaism’s worst sins.[15]

Matthew Stevenson and the rest of his Shabbat circle offer a beautiful example of how this plays out. The Jews, immigrants, and other minorities who shared those meals had ample reason to shun Derek Black; but instead they reached out and created an “exit ramp” that allowed Derek to reconsider and ultimately renounce his prejudices. As David Abitbol said about Megan Phelps-Roper, “Relating to hateful people on a human level [is] the best way to deal with them.”[16] After years of disrespecting and abusing others, Megan and Grace left their church to find a world ready to help them get settled, to offer compassion and friendship.

Rabbi Yonah Bookstein, whose family hosted the Phelps-Roper sisters soon after they left the church, reflected that “No matter how people are programmed to hate, there always remains the possibility of transformation and healing.”[17] 

Would I invite a white supremacist or a fundamentalist anti-Semite to Shabbat dinner? I’m not sure. But each of us, in whatever way we can, must do our part to create safe spaces in which the people around us — our family, co-workers, friends, neighbors, and even complete strangers — can reconsider and back away from poor decisions they might have made. It’s a moral imperative from our parshah, and it’s also vital to the future of our society.


[1]        Eli Saslow, “The White Flight of Derek Black,” The Washington Post, 15 October 2016.

[2]        Saslow, “Derek Black.”

[3]        Saslow, “Derek Black.”

[4]        Adrian Chen, “Unfollow: How a Prized Daughter of the Westboro Baptist Church Came to Question its Beliefs,” The New Yorker, 23 November 2015.

[5]        Gen. 2:9. See Nahum Sarna, The JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 2:9.

[6]        Gen. 2:17.

[7]        Sarna, JPS Torah Commentary, 2:9; Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Hirsch Chumash, tr. Daniel Haberman (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 2009), Gen. 2:9; HaKtav ve-ha-Kabbalah, Gen. 2:9; Beit HaLevi, Gen. 3:22.

[8]        HaKtav ve-ha-Kabbalah, Gen. 2:9.

[9]        Ramban, Gen. 2:9.

[10]        Sforno, Gen. 2:9.

[11]        Saslow, “Derek Black.”

[12]        Nedarim 39b.

[13]        Deepak Malhotra, “How to Build an Exit Ramp for Trump Supporters,” Harvard Business Review (online), 14 October 2016.

[14]        Malhotra, “Exit Ramp.”

[15]        Bava Metzia 58b.

[16]        Chen, “Unfollow.”

[17]        Yonah Bookstein, “Tweeting for God,” in “The Mail,” The New Yorker, 4 January 2016.

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