In the End, There Was Love

MAY 6, 2021 By RABBI ALEX KRESS

On June 19, 1865, two-and-a-half years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas. They delivered the news that the Civil War had ended and General Order Number 3, declaring that “all slaves are free.”

In a Thanksgiving address a few months later, the abolitionist rabbi Bernhard Felsenthal chastised the masses for their incredulous indifference to this historic moment: “Were not those who spoke for universal freedom and acted for universal justice in a small, small minority? And was not the name abolitionist a name of disgrace? And now this name has become a name of honor…” His optimistic proclamations — “The fetters of prejudices are broken” and “The white people have become emancipated just as well as the black people” — were premature. The fetters of prejudices are still intact and our society is still broken. Slavery was abolished, but discrimination remains embedded in our laws, our cultures, and our biases. As the struggle against racism continues, Parshat Chukat holds a hidden lesson in how we might find sustenance and purpose in our journey in the pursuit of justice.

In Numbers 21, we read how the Israelites battled against adversaries during their trek through the wilderness. The Torah tells us that in the “the Book of the Wars of Adonai speaks of et vahev b’sufa” (Numbers 21:14). These last three Hebrew words are particularly confounding. The English translation “Waheb in Suphah” reads like a bygone locale, but our tradition takes an interpretive approach to explain the phrase.

In the Talmud, we read of two study partners whose intense arguments made them feel like enemies. Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz teaches that vahev is related to the word for love, ahava, and b’sufa as “at its end” [b’sofa]” (Kiddushin 30b). In other words, et vahev b’sufa could be interpreted to mean: “In the end, there was love.”

Read in the context of war, it may seem naive to expect enemies to end up as lovers. However, the Jewish understanding of love is based on the depth of covenant, not on the flutters of infatuation. The great Civil Rights rabbi Joachim Prinz reflected this understanding when he said, “You cannot be a rabbi unless you love people. You don’t have to like them, but you have to love all of them. [God] says, ‘Thou shalt love the neighbor as thyself.’  [God] doesn’t say, ‘Thou shalt like them.’ I have loved all the people with whom I’ve come into contact. Even those with whom I have disagreed because I think God wants us to love people.”

This non-romantic, communal type of love elevates the concept of humanity as being created in the Divine image and espouses an understanding of covenantal responsibility to each other. Every human being has innate, inalienable worth, and Judaism demands that we see each other through that lens of covenantal love.

When I read et vahev b’sufa through the creative exegesis of our tradition, I am transported to the March on Washington in 1963, when, just before Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Rabbi Prinz laid out the Abrahamic case for our ongoing fight against racism: “Our fathers taught us thousands of years ago that when God created man, he created him as everybody’s neighbor. Neighbor is not a geographic term. It is a moral concept. It means our collective responsibility for the preservation of man’s dignity and integrity.”

Just as Parshat Chukat lists the Israelites’ battles and resting places in their trek toward the Promised Land, so too should we mark our nation’s jagged journey toward racial justice. It is therefore appropriate to mark not just the official end of slavery with the phrase et vahev b’sufa, but also the continuing struggle against the legacy of Jim Crow – systemic racism.

 

Perhaps et vahev b’sufa is yet another reminder in our tradition of what redemption should look like: a time of overflowing covenantal love in which we lift up our fellow human beings’ dignity and integrity. Though that promised land remains far off with many righteous battles and much good trouble between here and there, a prayer for redemption in the prayer book Mishkan T’filah guides our way: “Wherever we go, it is eternally Egypt. That there is a better place, a promised land; that the winding way to that promise passes through the wilderness. That there is no way to get from here to there except by joining hands, marching together.”

Know Before Whom You Stand Before You Judge

MAY 5, 2021 By RABBI ALEX KRESS

During the pandemic, I had a serious mental health breakdown and no one knew. Perhaps I seemed a little off or distant to my loved ones and coworkers, but the depth of my sorrowful disorientation remained mostly hidden to the outside world.

Back on more stable ground, for now, I realize how much the still unraveling experience has opened within me access to new channels of empathy and understanding. The expression, “Be kind, for everyone is going through something you know nothing about,” has always resonated with me, but the trauma of the pandemic brought that lesson home in a profound way.

 

Poet Rudy Francisco writes:

Sometimes I’m the mess

Sometimes I’m the broom–

On my hardest days,

I have to be both.

 

Covid-19 has brought on my hardest days, forcing me to be both mess and broom.

In Parshat Balak, we read the farcical story of Balaam and his talking donkey. Balak, the Moabite king, hires the seer Balaam to curse the Israelites, whom he views as a growing threat. As Balaam sets out on his journey, God becomes irate and sends an angel to stand in front of the envoy’s donkey. Though Balaam fails to see the angel, the donkey does and swerves around it. Balaam beats the animal for reacting to something he cannot see. It happens again, and the donkey squeezes along the wall, painfully pinning Balaam’s foot. Balaam strikes the donkey again. The third time the donkey sees the angel of God, she lays down with Balaam on her back, at which point he becomes furious and hits her with a stick yet again. God finally intervenes, opening the donkey’s mouth to defend herself and then opening Balaam’s eyes to the presence of the angel. Balaam then says, “I erred because I did not know…” (Numbers 22:34).

So often we err because we do not know. We judge and gossip before ever attempting to react with kindness or understanding. The sin of Balaam is not his inability to see the invisible but to assume he knows it all and react violently. The medieval commentator Rashi adds that the acknowledgment of error was a disgrace for Balaam “because he used to boast that he knew the will of the Most High (24:16) and now his own mouth bore testimony: ‘I did not know’” (Midrash Tanchuma, Balak 1). When we pretend to know the inner workings of others, we assume to know the intricacies of God’s creatures, setting ourselves up to have to confess, “I erred because I did not know.”

Instead, we must recognize our agency in every situation and the harm that can be inflicted by claiming ignorance after acting carelessly. All of us have played both the role of Balaam and the role of the donkey. Like Balaam, we are all guilty of doing something harmful because we did not know or understand the situation or consequences. We judge based on perfect Instagram feeds instead of recognizing the inherent messiness of human life. Other times we are like the donkey, dealing with something no one else can see or understand and often receiving harsh judgment in return. When we truly understand that life is always more complicated than what most people publicly project, we begin to recognize the value and impact of acting thoughtfully and compassionately in the first instance of every action and interaction.

When Prince Harry and Meghan Markle broke from the royal family and aired their pain publicly, they shattered the pristine image many outsiders had of royal life. The public fixation with the royal family has always invited grandiose assumptions of what their lives are like as seen through the prism of endless media messaging. Yet, no one on the outside can understand the vulnerabilities we do not see. We make assumptions about other people when we are able to see and understand just a fraction of their experiences. The private stressors and traumas we carry affect us profoundly, and we all must learn to replace our reflex to judge with a reflex to show compassion.

 

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel reflects: “When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.” I still admire intelligent people, but perhaps Heschel is correct; it’s the kind people we should aspire to emulate.