This week we read the Parsha of Shelach. The Jewish people send spies into the land, and they return with a bad report. The people accept the report and as a result must spend 40 years traveling through the desert. Why do the spies, who are princes of their tribes, give a bad report? And why are the Jewish people so easily moved by them when they know intellectually that God, the God who split the sea, has brought them to Israel to bring them into the land?
The answer is that the Jewish people can not be viewed in a snapshot of time as the people standing at the borders of the land of Cannan. They are a people with a 200 year history of slavery, and that history, those years of persecution, the feelings engendered by generations of servatutude, fear, downtroddendess, and indignity, are cumulative. Even if the Jewish people look free on the outside, they are not free on the inside. Thus, they do not yet have the capacity to enter the land, because no matter how free they are at this moment, their history is painful and powerful.
The luminary of the Musar movement, Rabbi Nasson Tzvi Finkel known as the Alter of Slabodka (1849-1927) asks why the Torah commands us to do kindness for others, wouldn’t we know that without the Torah? He answers as follows:
“The kindness the Torah wants us to do is totally different from the kindness we would know to do for others solely by dint of our conscience. Though our personal conscience obligates us to feel the pain and downtroddeness of others, to do goodness for them, to alleviate their pain, to provide money for them, and to strengthen them, the Torah demands much more from us. It demands we feel the pain of others that they themselves do not fully feel. Pain due to the situation they have been raised in, or due to the influence of their society and its culture upon them -we must work to alleviate even this pain, because in the deepest recesses of their heart, they do feel it. The Torah obligates us to free them from the negative nurture they have been raised with, and from feelings of cumulative persecution they have received from many generations who came before them. We are obligated to free them from the impact of the pain and suffering that their whole nation has lived with for hundreds of years. These feelings that they have are real and we are obligated to address them.” (Ohr Hatzafun, Chapter 2)
The pain that the Alter is referring to is, as Rabbi Saul Berman once called it, is the cumulative effect of 1000 indignities, the mounting impact of generations of hardship. We may be inclined to view others only in a snapshot of the present moment, but, says the Alter, that would be to miss the point entirely. The pain which is deepest, the pain the Torah comes to enjoin us to respond to, is the cumulative pain of history and society.
I was on a call today with 50 other Rabbis from the Rabbinical Council of America to hear from Rev. Nicole Martin, an Evangelical leader, preacher and author who shared her perspectives on racism and the Black community. She spoke about the racism and hardship that Blacks in America have experienced. Though the Alter of Slabodka lived over 100 years ago I cannot help feeling that he addresses us as to how we as Jews should respond to the pain that is being expressed in the public square at this moment.
Though I don’t know how to solve it, perhaps as a first step we can begin from the gestalt of the coming months of Tamuz and Av – with lamentation and tears, and then we can reach out. Today, hearing Rev. Martin speak, I cried, and then I reached out to the closest Black pastor that I know to the Shul, the Reverend of the First Baptist Church on the corner of 27th and Dumbarton with the following words: “I’m thinking about how I and my congregation can be helpful in the struggle for our city and country to do an even better job of seeing all human beings, especially African Americans at this time, as made in God’s image and deserving dignity and opportunity.”