“When a righteous person leaves a city, its glory, its splendour and its beauty depart from it.” (Rashi, citing Bereshit Rabbah 68.6)
Our parashah begins in terror: Jacob is running from certain death. We put it in more elegant ways in different translations, but the truth is that our ancestor was a refugee, running away, not running toward. He did not have the luxury of choosing a destination. He was simply, desperately, hoping to remain alive.
Jacob is a symbol. There are times in our lives when we have the luxury of planning a destination; at other times, we just know we need to move. At the worst of times, questions of what we deserve and where to apportion guilt become clouded over with a kind of social madness that sheds blood and destroys lives without any kind of “due process.” Sadly, too many of our neighbors and friends are experiencing exactly this reality right now, in our midst.
We are offered a new way of understanding our own history, and our inherited trauma, when we see it echoed in the lives of others. Now we might more thoughtfully be able to answer the questions that have lived in our minds since the Shoah: how is it possible to stand idly by the blood of one’s neighbor? Why didn’t more people do something to help? And why didn’t the victims fight back?
These questions seem altogether different in the glaring light of our own day. With more than a half-century’s worth of Holocaust education and activism for justice in our immediate past, in these days we face the humbling truth that, as my Palestinian peace activist friend says, “it’s complicated.” There is no single individual who will turn the tide and save the day, despite what all the fairy tales promise; there are no easy answers to the questions of what is wrong, what happened, and what can we do.
Consider all the challenges that face us when someone desperate for safety and shelter appears among us:
Am I aware of the immediate need, or just the general situation?
If I am able to assess the need of the moment, do I have the ability to respond?
Do I have the resources, or access to them, that are needed?
Do I have the inner resources?
Do I have the freedom from other responsibilities to risk myself by standing between the vulnerable and the evil that pursues them?
Will I suffer if I help them, and am I prepared for that possibility?
Am I spiritually, constitutionally, able to help?
There are reasons why people do not flee. A Palestinian friend of mine admits that his friends have started to seek refugee status; Spain is a welcoming place, for example. But he will not go: “my mother is not well, and she needs me.”
There are reasons why people do not step up. A neighbor in Portland feels constrained by her primary responsibility to her children; who will care for them if she is jailed for protesting, or hiding refugees from deportation agents?
And there are reasons why we do not act: in many cases, the evil that is happening does not knock at our front door. We go on about our daily lives, we who are not yet touched, beyond the audible reach of the cries of the persecuted.
Clearly, this is a time to soberly recognize the real complications of real life. There are so many refugees, so many innocents whose lives are at risk – immigrants, the houseless, our Black friends, our Trans siblings and our neighbors of color. Against the organized forces of evil it is not that easy to take a stand; the natural inclination is, rather, to stand aside, that one might survive the onslaught that one, alone, cannot stop.
We, who at this moment are lucky enough not to need to run without even knowing our destination, have an ongoing responsibility to life, to guard its preciousness where we are able, and to bear witness where we are not. In order to do this we must have a sense of grounding, so that we can feel our feet firmly planted, so as to bear the weight of witnessing, of discerning where one can act, and, most of all, so as to survive the humbling disappointment of not being able to save the world.
Our cities are diminished when innocent, righteous people are disappeared by the forces of evil in our midst. Thus the teaching that Rashi transmits:
“When a righteous person leaves a city, its glory, its splendour and its beauty depart from it.” (Rashi, citing Bereshit Rabbah 68.6)
With each ICE kidnapping, we are all diminished. May those of us who are able to do something find a way to do it; may those who cannot, recognize the importance of what we still can do: bear witness to what is happening. Do not diminish the terror of others.
Stand grounded in your life; know your value: you can do something. You can tell the story. This is the most Jewish of aspirations: to not let those who disappear be forgotten. Not to let fear spread a blanket of silence.
Torah for the 21st Century by Rabbi Ariel Stone 