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Seeing Pain, Seeking Love

Lekh L'kha 5777 / 12 November 2016

November 13, 2016

Every spring during college, as I got ready to return to Camp Ramah, my friend Ashley packed for a very different summer experience. As a group leader forAppalachia Service Project, a Christian ministry devoted to improving the quality of housing in Central Appalachia, she and her co-workers mentored groups of teens who came to work, serve, and learn about the problems facing the rural poor.

One summer, while Rebecca and I were visiting my parents in Georgia, we borrowed my father’s car and drove up to Flag Pond, Tennessee, a small town nestled against the North Carolina border. The trip was surreal: a four-hour scenic drive through mountains, with a stop in downtown Chattanooga for lunch at a trendy pizza place — ultimately arriving in a village that looked like something we’re used to seeing in news reports from the Third World. Collapsed houses, missing windows, rusted cars: after an hour in Flag Pond, driving with Ashley and her team to visit project sites, I could hardly believe I was in America. More than the economic poverty — which was substantial — I couldn’t shake the sense of hopelessness and abandonment that seemed to haunt the town. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the reality that Americans — people who were supposed to enjoy the same rights and opportunities as me — could exist in a setting so dramatically removed from the affluent, urban world in which I grew up.

Then, after lunch the next day, we drove east over the next mountains and in less than an hour arrived in Asheville, North Carolina, where we toured Biltmore House, a 135,000-square-foot Gilded Age mansion set among eight acres of immaculately manicured grounds. It was a stark contrast: opulence on one side of the mountain, and destitute poverty on the other.

In her prayer journal, Flannery O’Connor wrote: “It does not take much to make us realize what fools we are, but the little it takes is long in coming.”[1] I’m ashamed to say that in fifteen years I haven’t thought about our trip to Flag Pond even once; but Wednesday morning, looking over the election map, the whole experience came back to me.

It is said that the holy tzaddik Reb Moshe Leib of Sasov[2] was once at an inn where he sat at the bar next to two drunken peasants. One man suddenly grabbed the other in a tight embrace and cried out, “Brother, I love you more than anyone in the world!” The other man had been holding a knife; as his friend pulled him into an embrace the knife slipped and cut his finger, but the first took no notice. The injured man pushed the other away and asked angrily, “How can you claim to love me, when you don’t see that I am hurt and bleeding?” Astonished, Reb Moshe Leib ran to his hasidim and told them: “Unless you know that your neighbor is hurting, unless you see the source of his pain, you can’t fulfill the mitzvah of וְאָֽהַבְתָּ לְרֵֽעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ, “love your neighbor as yourself.”[3] 

Hearing Civil Rights leader Ruby Sales suggest, “It’s almost like white people don’t believe that other white people are worthy of being redeemed,” feels like a personal indictment. I have been blind. I have voiced outrage, from this bima, when police killed unarmed black men, and yet I can’t even guess how many rural whites died this year from opioid addiction or suicide. In Chicago, I joined in protests over the absence of trauma centers in African-American neighborhoods without ever wondering about the state of medical care outside the city. I have been indifferent to the plight of the rural poor, to those left behind by economic, social, and demographic changes. Without seeing my fellow citizens’ pain, I can’t claim to love them. Worse, I have also failed in the complementary mitzvah of לֹא תַֽעֲמֹד עַל־דַּם רֵעֶךָ, “Do not stand by your neighbor’s blood.”[4]

Over the past half-century, we have witnessed the most rapid expansion of liberty in our country’s history, perhaps the fastest growth of freedom ever in the world. For all the problems minorities, and especially African-Americans, face today, I rarely consider that my own father, born in Mobile, Alabama, spent his entire childhood in a world of segregated buses, whites-only lunch counters, and lynchings. In just fifty years, our country has fundamentally redefined what it means to be a person of color, a woman, an ethnic or religious minority — and while the outcome isn’t perfect and the work is far from done, we can’t miss the fact that our reality is worlds apart from just a generation or two ago.

And yet amid all this progress, we have failed in one crucial respect: we never redefined what it means to be white in 21st-century America. We haven’t redefined what it means to be a man. In our celebration of multiculturalism, we never made room in the new America for the group that used to dominate American life.[5] “Whiteness is so much smaller today than it was yesterday,” Ruby Sales asks, “Where is the theology that redefines to them what it means to be fully human?”  

I see now that recent decades left half of the country with a stark choice between attempting to resurrect a past world in which they thrived at the expense of disenfranchised groups, or resigning themselves to a future that has all but forgotten them. As disappointed, frightened, sad, and angry as I am that half our citizens would at least condone — if not outright endorse — racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia, I know I have no right to be surprised.[6] 

I am afraid. I am afraid of the anti-Semitic graffiti cropping right here in Philadelphia. I am afraid of neo-Nazis and white supremacists emboldened by a president-elect who has yet to denounce them. I am afraid for my children’s future, for the country they will inherit, afraid that it might no longer have a place for them. But most of all, I am afraid of a country so sharply divided by class, by education, by geography and demography, that — on both sides — we literally do not understand how the other half lives.

The middle of parashat Lekh L’kha contains a small but crucial episode, in which conflict arises between Avram’s shepherds and those who tend to Lot’s flock.[7] For reasons that the Torah doesn’t make clear, Avram suggests to Lot that they part ways; Lot can choose whichever part of the land he wants, and Avram will settle elsewhere. Many commentaries find fault with Lot, whether because he took the best land for himself, because left Avram’s righteous household to live in the sinful towns of S’dom and Amorah and cared more for his material well-being than for his spiritual health, or because he took the offer to choose first instead of deferring to Avram as his elder. However, Don Yitzhak Abravnael, the 15th-century rabbi and philosopher, raises a surprising possibility: perhaps Lot’s mistake lay not in how or what he chose, but in his choosing at all. Lot, in Abravnael’s view, should have declined to separate at all and instead worked with Avram to reconcile their households.[8] 

Legend has it that Benjamin Franklin, signing the Declaration of Independence, remarked, “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” Franklin’s words resonate far beyond his own day; he speaks to the essence of Americanism. We must hang together: there can be only one America. Each time I see a protest sign that reads, “Not my president,” I can’t help thinking: Donald Trump may not have been your candidate, but he’s every American’s president now. Half of the country cast their ballots for him, but he will soon be responsible for — and accountable to — all of us.

Wednesday morning, Rebecca accompanied BZBI’s Pre-K class to the art museum. Describing her feelings as she walked through galleries with the kids, she reflected that art reveals to us all the beauty that human beings are capable of creating. As I listened to her, it struck me that the true beauty of art lies in the artist herself, the inherent beauty of human expression. As individuals, as a society, and as humanity we are defined by what we create, by the beauty we bring into the world. Later in the day, I was surprised to discover the same sentiment in Trump’s victory speech: “I’ve gotten to know our country so well — tremendous potential. It’s going to be a beautiful thing. Every single American will have the opportunity to realize his or her fullest potential.”

Over the past few days I’ve heard many people question the sincerity of that pledge, and after such a divisive and hate-filled campaign season it’s reasonable to wonder. For me, however, I take it as a call to action. Will every American — native or immigrant, white, black, Latino, Asian, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, secular, gay or straight, man, woman, or non-gender-binary — have the opportunity to express their beauty? That’s not a question for president-elect Trump to answer alone; it is a promise that all Americans must hold him to.

My teacher, Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, writes that love is the antidote to hate.[9] As Reb Moshe Leib learned from the peasants, true love demands that we recognize and understand our fellow citizens’ pain. We need not, and in many cases should not, condone or even accept the response to that pain; but progress only becomes possible after we see and acknowledge that the pain exists. “Only when we feel valued, recognized and affirmed,” Artson writes, “Can we take the risk to see the humanity of the people around us.”[10]

Our parshah opens with a strange reference to הַנֶּפֶשׁ אֲשֶׁר־עָשׂוּ בְחָרָן, “the souls they had made in Haran.”[11] The Midrash, perplexed by the patent impossibility of making a soul, explains that even before setting off for the Land of Israel Avram and Sarai had gathered disciples, opened their doors to anyone willing to listen and consider their spiritual path.[12] Avraham, our paradigmatic example of hesed,[13] love that emerges as a tangible response to other humans,[14] surely used that hesed to draw others into fellowship. We can easily imagine that Avraham and Sarah’s pagan neighbors in Haran did not share their values; and yet through hesed, love and compassion, our ancestors brought others in and built a moral community.

Rabbi Harold Schulweis זצ”ל teaches that conscience entails not only resistance to injustice but also the obligation to participate in moral progress.[15] To accept and normalize the hatred and discrimination that surfaced this year would be morally unconscionable; on the other hand, for Trump’s opponents to dig in and adopt a stance of total rejection merely exacerbates the pain that brought us to this point. Regardless of how we cast our ballots, as Jews we must stand firm against any threat to human dignity, diversity, free discourse, or religious liberty. At the same time, when our values align we have a moral obligation to make common cause for the betterment of all. True commitment to diversity requires us to make space even for the opinions we don’t agree with; more than ever, America needs to hang together within our disagreements. Anyone who holds diversity and pluralism as a value must lead by example. We must show ourselves willing to engage with and understand viewpoints that we do not and perhaps can not accept; to work together wherever we can, and take opposing stands where we must.

The Talmud teaches that in our day prophecy has been left to children,[16] so I will close with something Azriel said at dinner on Wednesday night. Out of nowhere, he looked up at Rebecca and said: “Everyone has some good. I hope Donald Trump’s goodness gets good-er.” Red or blue, urban or rural, progressive or conservative — we have all been through a lot of pain, not just this year but for many, many years.

Many of you have asked me this week if we have any reason to hope, and I believe we do. The time has come to heal, to bring love — hesed — back into American life. In this moment, we can finally see all of our forgotten and displaced neighbors. We have the opportunity, in this time of uncertainty and anxiety, to give voice to our pain, to recognize the hurt that others experience, to offer love even — perhaps especially — to those who hate, to rediscover the fellowship within diversity that has always been our nation’s well of strength. I pray that all of us have the wisdom and courage to choose love and understanding, to see the goodness in every person and to nurture that goodness so it can grow and flourish. This is our journey to a land yet unknown; it is work that calls our generation to step forward and do our part. May we be blessed to see it realized in our time.


[1] Flannery O’Connor, A Prayer Journal, ed. with introduction by W. A. Sessions (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013), 20.

[2] Poland, 1745-1807.

[3] Lev. 19:18. Story adapted from Jiri Langer, Nine Gates to the Hasidic Mysteries, tr. Stephen Jolly (1961; repr. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1993), 235-236; different versions of the story appear in Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim (1947; repr., with a new foreword by Chaim Potok, New York: Schocken Books, 1991), 2:86 and Bradley Shavit Artson, God of Becoming and Relationship (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2013), 67.

[4] Lev. 19:16.

[5] Robert P. Jones, The End of White Christian America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 223-226, 231-234.

[6] Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2012), 127-128, 136-138; cf. Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom (1941; reprint, with a new foreword, New York: Avon Books, 1969), 144-145.

[7] Gen. 13:5-13.

[8] Abravnael, Gen. 13.

[9]  Artson, God of Becoming and Relationship, 66.

[10]  Artson, God of Becoming and Relationship, 67.

[11] Gen. 12:5.

[12] Bereshit Rabbah, Lekh L’kha 39.14; cf. Rashi, Gen. 12:5; Torah Temimah, Gen. 12:5 n.11.

[13] Tikkunei Zohar, Tikkun 22 (67a).

[14]  Cf. Artson, God of Becoming and Relationship, 66.

[15] Harold M. Schulweis, Conscience: The Duty to Obey and the Duty to Disobey (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2008), 3-5.

[16] Bava Batra 12b.

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