“All Voices Are Yours”- America in the Wilderness
Rabbi Noa Kushner
Kol Nidrei 5781
Forgetting
The Ba’al Shem Tov was on his way to the Land of Israel with Rabbi Zevi the scribe
But on the way to the Land of Isrsael, the ship stopped at an unknown island.
They went ashore, and when they tried to return to the ship
they lost their way and fell into the hands of robbers.
Rabbi Zevi said to the Ba’al Shem: “Why are you silent? Just do as you usually do (the Ba’al Shem was the magic kind of rabbi)
Just do as you usually do and then we shall be free.”
But the color had left the Ba’al Shem’s face.
He replied: “I know nothing at all any more. I forgot everything. It has all been taken from me.” (2)
I believe this kind of complete forgetting
Where we can’t remember who we are, where we came from, and where we wanted to go
is dangerously close to where we are as a society
2. In the Wilderness
It did not happen overnight
The moment we’re now in took decades to achieve
but, as George Packer writes,
“….Americans have lost faith in institutions, in one another, and in democracy itself.” (3)
Even before the current president, “the damage had already begun” (4)
Decades of unraveling of tax laws, safety nets eroded, changes in immigration policy
Dramatic changes in media — in the ways we talk and listen
Environmental damage
Our health care system overwhelmed, convulsing
An untreated racism corroding every imaginable arena, from housing to schools to our legal system
Our current president exacerbating what had begun long ago
So that now,
You could say, collectively, we’ve not only forgotten who we are,
American society is now in a kind of wilderness
a place of in-between —
With the extended, restricted quiet, the vast insecurities introduced by the pandemic —
The changes to daily life
it doesn’t take a lot to imagine us between places, neither here nor there
it doesn’t take a lot to imagine us in an uncharted terrain
Tonight we’re all in so much pain over so many things I wish I could just comfort us.
But it would be irresponsible because
As you know
Forgetting who we are and being in a kind of wilderness at the same time
This a dangerous and serious situation
And so tonight we must do our best to remember together who we are, where we’ve been and where we want to go.
3. Trap 1: “Make the Wilderness Like Egypt Again”
We do have one thing going for us: When we forget, we have this book, Torah.
And, oh yes, it seems we have been in this wilderness before….
And we made mistakes,
The first one I like to call, “Make the Wilderness Like Egypt Again”
It happened to take the form of a golden calf
A glittery distraction relieving us for a few moments
from our fear of being responsible for each other
A little respite from our fear of how much we were changing in the wilderness
I won’t lie, the calf looked really good
Generated a lot of buzz
But our instant devotion to it was suspect from the start
Our insistence that it was this calf that deserved our worship, this calf that ended slavery
— Instead of admitting that we were, in that moment, calling the very symbol of slavery back —
We were ignoring the inconvenient fact [that while we were building the calf]
Moses and God were putting the finishing touches on a covenant with us
One that did not demand blind deference to power —
Nor did it rely on paternalism, cheap tricks or shiny things —
Not that I have anyone in mind
Not to mention, not that I have anyone in mind
This calf also didn’t ask us to admit to anything that had happened in the past
nor did it ask us to commit to making anything new happen
We just figured it would protect us if we stayed loyal and afraid.
You see, it seems that once we
Forgot where we’d just come from and repressed where we said we wanted to go
it was remarkably easy to just start rebuilding the slavery of Egypt right there,
right in the middle of the wilderness!
Just as it seems
If we forget now, in America, where we’ve come from
If we forget now, in America
where we said we wanted to go
Not so hard to get versions of slavery going again right here is it?
Regardless of the fact that we are one of the richest countries in the history of the world
However, if we’re talking about this moment in America,
If we are talking about the re-emergence of the systems of slavery right here
Let’s be honest, unlike in the Torah
Many of us are more like the taskmasters, we’re the ones keeping up the status quo
For even if we know our country has a history of slavery
And maybe we even know — how that slavery and oppression built and builds the country,
How the money was transferred, from the backs of American slaves, to line the pockets of slaveholders and universities we’ve attended and companies we work with, how that unpaid labor and those families who were ripped apart still creates wealth for many in this country—
Even if we know our country has a history of slavery
We may or may not think as much about how that slavery has mutated again and again
A golden calf, an homage to Pharaoh rebuilt in every generation —
From Slavery to Jim Crow to Redlining to the humiliation and injustice in the death of George Floyd
To White flight and gated communities to different coronavirus death rates to
Social racism, sometimes subtle, often more overt
Systems that, if anything line our pockets and secure our standing
So I’m afraid, while there are exceptions
These days, in America, we’re not the slaves.
In fact, there may be something self-protective about our “forgetting” where we’ve been and where we’re trying to go when it comes to race
There may be something self-protective
about our yearning to just get out of this wilderness and just make things go back they way they were before Trump
It is a little too convenient for us to want to return to a time when we didn’t really think too too much about where we’d been, our history, or where we were going and so could just create nice little golden calves without thinking too much about where the gold came from or what those idols were distracting us from or who we were hurting in this country
See, slavery is clever, insidious
It loves to take new forms
So if we don’t work hard to remember, to unearth, to talk and not forget — to confront
What we did, where we were, what our part was and is
If we don’t keep talking about who we want to be —
Pretty soon you'll start to see new welcome mats around town for new kinds of slavery
New oppressions
Subtle and not so subtle signs that read: “New Pharaohs Welcome Here”
And as we’ve learned in the last four years
There’s a Pharaoh around every corner, just waiting for us to want Egypt back again,
Just waiting for us to be insecure enough to reach for more gold.
4. Trap 2: Throwing Rocks at God
The second trap in the wilderness is even more tragic than the first.
I am sorry to remind you, but when we got to the edge of the promised land,
The one promised by God
instead of crossing over and getting to work building a new society,
we stayed outside, sure that it was dangerous, that it was certain death to try and see it through.
In a brilliant assessment of Trump’s impact on our political systems and government institutions
Masha Gessen offers the following analogy:
“[O]ne might say that Trump acted at once the emperor and the boy who said the emperor has no clothes, ripping the illusory cover of decency off the system, forcing everyone to stare at its obscene nature.
Unlike the emperor in the fairy tale, though,
Trump felt no shame and so was not transformed by the exposure —
rather, he transformed the system,
…stripping away the moral aspiration of politics.” (5)
In other words, it’s not that Trump created American moral rot
There was decay
A revolving door between money and politics
Cronyism
Abdication of responsibility
Trump didn’t create these conditions
He just cashed in on them, exploiting them —
and then by doing so in broad daylight, revealed them —
But last, and most tragically —
Because Trump inhabits a world where shame has no place —
Not only did he continue unscathed
His continual success and attacks on anyone who would dare to question his lack of morality
Made us question the efficacy and wisdom of our own own moral aspirations
At a certain point over the past few years we’ve all quietly wondered —
Is the corruption of our world inevitable?
Facing the amount of power Trump quickly amassed
The price he never seems to pay,
We are compelled to ask ourselves — if we are the ones who are mistaken, if our moral aspirations only weaken us.
In the words of Frank Bruni, — referring to the republican national convention taking place from the King David Hotel in Jerusalem,
(A hotel whose lobby I used to like — )
We are living through “[The] confluence of audacity and absurdity” (6)
And after the stages of shock, rage, and fear pass
those of us still with any energy to pay attention,
recognize Trump’s advancement of the idea that morality is at best up for grabs, relative,
We’re getting the message loud and clear that by hanging onto our moral principles
We only put ourselves in harm’s way
We are starting to be uncomfortably familiar with the talking points:
Morality is for losers
There is no shame
Participate at your own risk.
Gessen again:
“The kind of power Trump seeks requires the degradation of moral authority
Not the capture of moral high ground
Not the assertion to judge good and evil, but the defeat of moral principles as such.” (7)
In other words, Trump wants us to forget completely
Our history, how we got here
the kind of people we want to be
Any aspirations we have for a larger collective, a future for our failing country
In fact the Trumps of the world depend on our forgetting everything
Staying weak and afraid of each other in this seemingly endless, relentless present,
this wilderness of American history
They depend on us forgetting the past and the future
So we cannot see that we are standing right at the boundary of the new promised land.
But if we read our book, our precious Torah
We can learn from our mistakes
We remember that last time around, when we got to the same border
We were so afraid, that we hesitated, and wouldn’t move
In fact, in one of my favorite ironic scenes in all of Torah
We started measuring the pros and cons of the promised land, looking at the produce,
as if this was the kinda place that could be assessed by the content of its soil or its yield of grapes
Sorta like asking the square footage of heaven
See, because once you take moral aspiration, what God asks of us off the table
Once you subtract integrity, responsibility, memory, vision
Everything looks real different
And there is in fact, not such a big face value distinction between the actual promised land
And the endless wilderness —
That is, once we’ve lost sight of where we’re trying to go, once who we are doesn’t matter
Trump and all his people are right — there is no reason to not cheat and steal and lie your way through life.
There’s a midrash that, see, at the boundary of that same promised land
Not only do we refuse to go in
But when other leaders, Joshua and Caleb try to convince us of the plausibility of the project
— Trying to speak to us on our basic terms —
We become hysterical, inconsolable.
We’re so committed to our nihilistic world view
Our only solution is to threaten to pelt the messengers with stones
And this is before twitter
But in what seems to me to be the most tragic move of all
Talmud says we actually took stones and threw them up — to heaven — as if we could stone God. (8)
As if our Torah is trying to help us remember how quickly it all unravels:
When we forget who we are, who we are trying to be —
Not only can we reject the very place we were trying to go
Hate takes the place of trust, hate quickly fills the vacuum
We not only start to hate one another
We start to hate God
Of course, we hate the one who gave us these meaningless lives
It all makes so much twisted sense:
Any promised lands are just bad real estate investments,
And since God is against us, the only way to survive is for each of us to fight for ourselves
5. Moses in Pursuit of the Wilderness
And so, we ask, what do we do?
After all, we’re already so tired and weak and afraid
We’ve suffered affront after affront for years now
With the little bit that we have left, with our masked mouths and kids at home
With our worries about our parents and grandparents
Where do we begin?
There is a midrash / a teaching
That in the middle of Moses’ life
When he was not much of anyone except a runaway fugitive, a shepherd
Before before God says anything to him at the burning bush
וַיִּנְהַ֤ג אֶת־הַצֹּאן֙ אַחַ֣ר הַמִּדְבָּ֔ר
(9)
Moses drives his flock — deep into the midbar / deep into the wilderness, into the outer reaches (10)
The rabbis want to know
Why is Moses in pursuit of the wilderness?
As we’ve see, the wilderness is the kind of place where a person can lose their bearings. Not the kinda place you pursue.
I learned from my teacher Avivah Zornberg through midrash that
The word midbar (wilderness) is connected to the word, midabeir
The word for speech
So Moses pursues the wilderness
Because he knows that’s where new things will be said and heard:
A new way of listening and talking that does not only depend on power and oppression and coercion and confusion. (11)
6. קולות במדבר / Voices in the Wilderness
Perhaps this American wilderness we’re in — this in-between, fluid kind of place —
Although we didn’t choose to be here
Perhaps this wilderness will provide some of what we need
Perhaps its main attribute, it’s lack of distinguishing features,
the fact that it seems to be without end —
Perhaps this resounding absence
is what we need now to help us understand how it is we got here
A resounding quiet
A time out
It seems possible
That in such a sustained quiet, a quiet for such a long time,
That we may learn to hear differently, and hear different things.
In fact, we remember, when we were receiving the Torah in the wilderness
Not only was there extreme quiet, but that quiet was followed by קולות במדבר
In a plain reading, thunder, thunder in the wilderness
But Rabbeinu Bayha points out that
Kol also means voice
And he says it wasn’t thunder but the voices of angels (12)
And the midrash jumps in suggesting that, actually, (now that you mention it)
there were five voices:
Two from the thunder, two from the shofarot (I forgot to mention but there were also shofars because obviously), and then there was also the actual voice of God speaking (13)
And then Tanhuma offers that actually there were seven voices that then were translated into 70 languages — in my reading, so that anyone who was ready to hear Torah in the world, could. (14)
In other words, perhaps
in the silence of the wilderness
There was not one voice that gave Torah — gave us the possibility of righteousness
But a great, great many voices
7. Seeing the Fishbowl: “A voice rings out from the wilderness” (15)
Toni Morrison (z”l) writes about her experience reading early American Literature.
See, the prevailing wisdom at the time was that these early writers —
(in her words)
“Were free of, unformed by, and unshaped by the four hundred year old presence of first Africans and then African Americans in the United States” —
No matter that this presence
“…[S]haped the body politic, the Constitution and the entire history of the culture.”
Being Morrison, she decided to read the works themselves in order to find out,
“What does the inclusion of Africans and African Americans do to and for the text?
She said ….I had always assumed that nothing, ‘happens.’”
But, in reading these texts, she realized she had been completely wrong:
“[I realized these writers] chose to talk about themselves through and within
a sometimes allegorical,
sometimes metaphorical,
but always choked representation of an Africanistic presence.” (16)
In other words, their presence was always there, it was just never stated “out loud.”
She writes:
“It was as though I [had previously been] looking at a fishbowl,
seeing the glide and flick of the golden scales,
the green tip,
the bolt of white careening back from the gills,
the castles at the bottom, surrounded by pebbles
and tiny, intricate fronds of green,
the barely disturbed water…
…and suddenly I saw the bowl itself, the structure transparently, invisibly, permitting the ordered life it contained to exist in the larger world.” (17)
It is possible
That in the strange quiet the pandemic has brought
It is possible that we could all hear a great many voices we did not hear before
It is possible we will start to understand that the voices some of us assigned to whole groups of people
The voices we have heard so far
Are, as Morrison suggests, our own projections
It is possible, that in the quiet, we will be quiet (!)
that we will quiet ourselves long enough to hear voices we’ve never heard
It is possible we will see our part in the continually reinforced and largely unacknowledged glass fishbowl that holds American racism together.
New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote about the jury decision regarding the death of Breonna Taylor:
“[She] was an innocent woman, sleeping in her own home, breaking no law. The state broke down her door and shot her dead.
That grand jury, the system, the state, erased Taylor as if she had never existed. Her death was simply a “tragedy,” a regrettable mistake for which no punishment was merited or required.
For the state, her body fell like a tree in the forest. [It made no sound.] (18)
He continues: “[But] For us, [Breonna Taylor’s death landed like a thunderclap and shook the earth. It was a horror. It could have been us. It could have been someone we knew and loved.”
Her death landed like a thunderclap,
He describes it exactly as the kolot / the voices of God in the wilderness are described.
Her death shook the earth, shook the wilderness,
!ק֣וֹל יְ֭הוָה יָחִ֣יל מִדְבָּ֑ר
(19)
just as our Psalmist describes the voice of God shaking the wilderness
Make no mistake, to ignore the traumatic death of young Breonna Taylor is to block out one of the voices of God crying for justice
But in order to hear it, each one must see ourselves as part of the “us,”
the, “It could have been us,” us
The ‘us’ that Blow describes.
In order to be part of the “us,” we need to get out more
We need to talk to people outside our tax brackets and existing circles
I asked Lucy Bernhotz a Kitchen-ite who thinks about equality and societal change
She told me
Many need to think less about “diversity” and more about getting our bodies in rooms where we are the minority
Less leading and more being led, more supporting black leaders
Particularly
We can get to know Color of Change, a group that designs campaigns powerful enough to end practices that unfairly hold Black people back,
and champions solutions that move us all forward
We can be an ally in the work of Black Futures Lab, a group that works with Black people to transform Black communities, building Black political power and changing the way that power operates—locally, statewide, and nationally
We can learn more about our place in the conversation by joining Kitchen’s anti-racism conversations
And meaningfully, we can join the Kitchen-ites already building relationships with all kinds of stakeholders at GLIDE, join the Kitchen / GLIDE efforts to build a new “us.”
8. Holy Talking / Moral aspiration
Now we can also begin to understand why Trump’s approach to language,
His inability to hear
His “meaningless word strings”, his “power lies,” his erratic condemnations, his cruel names, his abuse of basic words — why these infractions are so serious and so damaging
Now we understand Trump’s cynical approach to language
Denies any reality other than his own
Denies any tentative voices in the wilderness, denies history, denies our future
Denies moral aspiration —
Now we understand Trump’s cynical approach to language
Makes all promised lands look foolish, like doomed suicide missions
As such, I believe that cynical approach to language is nothing less than blasphemy,
Nothing less than trampling on the name of God
The equivalent of ignoring divine voices that we desperately need to hear
It is the equivalent of holding up a Bible in a threatening way, as if it was a weapon, without bothering to read a single word.
But if we want to leave this wilderness it is not enough to identify and condemn
And it is not enough even to remember the truth, our past
Now we must also relearn how to carefully use or create words “…to arrive at a shared reality that is more nuanced than it was before the conversation began” (20)
Now we must learn how to listen for new voices and trust new sources of leadership
And now we must use our words precisely, honestly to do nothing less remember our history so that we can reach for righteousness
Consider, finally, the example of Julia Jackson, mother of an African American man who, in front of his sons, was shot point blank, in the back, seven times. A mother who would have every right to only try incinerate the world with her rage.
Consider, how, in addition to demanding justice, she dared to say to the country:
“As I have prayed for my son’s healing, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, I also have been praying, even before this, for the healing of our country, …We are the United States. Have we been united? Do you understand what’s going to happen when we fall? Because a house that is against each other cannot stand. …Everybody, let’s use our hearts, our love, and our intelligence to work together to show the rest of the world how humans are supposed to treat each other. America is great when we behave greatly.” (21)
Pay close attention
Even in her pain, Julia Jackson is speaking the language of moral aspiration, of our Torah,
No matter what any president says or refuses to say
This is the only language we’ve ever had
And this is the only language we have
Her clear voice rings out in this wilderness
Hers is the language of a promised land,
of a future,
of a greater “us” that is waiting to be fully born
Hers is a voice of righteousness that reminds us that we’re not lost in this wilderness at all —
We’re right on the edge of a new America.
Endnotes:
1. Midrash Tanchuma Buber, Toldot 16:1
2. From Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, New York: Schoken Books, 1947. Vol. 1, p. 78: “A Halt is Called”
3. George Packer, “Last Best Hope for America,” The Atlantic, September 8, 2020.
4. Masha Gessen, Surviving Autocracy, New York: Riverhead Books, 2020. p. 224-5.
5. Ibid., Gessen, p. 46.
6. Frank Bruni, “The Epic Shamelessness of the Republican Convention,” New York Times, August 26, 2020.
7. Gessen, Surviving Autocracy, p. 201-2.
8. BT, Sotah 35a. See Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s treatment of this in Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers, p. 124.
9. Exodus 3:1
10. Shemot Rabba 2:5, see Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg who points out this midrash in Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers, New York: Schocken Books, 2015, p. xx-xxii.
11. Avivah Zornberg, p. xx-xxi
12. Rabbeinu Bahya to Ex. 19:16
13. BT, Berachot 6b:30
14. Tanhuma Buber Shemot 22:4. Note that I made this one more universal (in my view, to further its own point). Originally it says the voice kills everyone who is not Israel. However, why would the voice speak to everyone if only to kill them?
15. Isaiah 40:3
16. Selections from Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, New York: Knopf, 2019, “Black Matter(s),” p. 143-4.
17. Ibid.
18. Charles Blow,“Breonna Taylor and Perpetual Black Trauma,” New York Times, September 24, 2020.
19. Psalms 29:8
20. Gessen, Surviving Autocracy, p. 95.
21. George Packer, “This is How Biden Loses,” The Atlantic, August 28, 2020.
