Recently, I started davening in the morning again, for the first time since about two months after my Bar Mitzvah. Since it’s been so long, it is very good to have an open, inviting minyan to join, where I can get support, access to tallis and tefilin, and generally to be made to feel welcome as I am. So I’m very grateful.
Last time I went was a couple of weeks ago, on a Sunday morning. Davening was, once again, a remarkable experience. As the murmur of the Shatz and the congregation unrolled around me, occasionally rising to a few intelligible words or a plain song, I tried to follow the text in front of me. The Shatz helpfully called out page numbers, to keep everyone more or less in sync. I whispered the words and searched within myself for dveikus, cleaving to God, for the sense of addressing myself to my Creator, of knowing before Whom I stand. Instead of doing what I usually do, which is feeling shame and self-consciousness and self-doubt, I addressed my soul to God and tried to draw close to Holiness. Instead of sneaking glances at the other worshipers, I focused my heart on the One. I closed my eyes whenever I could remember the next few words, so that I could focus better. I said Omein out loud and with feeling when the Kaddish was recited. I was grateful for words of the liturgy; they expressed how I felt, my desire for God, and asked God for what I needed, and reminded me of what I had forgotten. I knew that I was in the right place, and whether or not I prayed for the sake of God’s reward, I was rewarded.
After about an hour it was over. I sat and removed the Tefilin shel Rosh from my head, and began to slowly unwind the Tefilin Shel Yad from my arm, and tried to put them back the way I received them. I am unpracticed, and putting them back took a long time. While I was doing it, some of the other men were already shmoozing a little in a couple of small groups. I could hear what they were saying in the group closest to me.
That’s when the moment shattered.
Thinking back on it, I guess the guys had just spent a whole hour praying to God, being Jews. Shouldn’t an hour, first thing in the morning, be enough? Every morning during the week, and longer than that on Shabbos! They should have a little leniency, to be able to put away the tallis and tefilin, relax, and be just regular white people together for a little while.
I’ve seen it before. I used to work with a bunch of smug, self-satisfied, racist white people, and I remember the kind of conversations that I was expected to take part in, if I wanted to be accepted and stay out of trouble. At the water cooler, or at the little table in the corner of the welding area, or in the warehouse, wherever white workers congregate for a few moments alone. The purpose of those quick chats was not just to have a break from work and relax a little, but to affirm a shared bond of whiteness, to maintain the othering of non-whites, and to show that the mask of civility outside of the white-only space is just that: a mask and a lie.
Participation doesn’t have to be much: a word, a turn of the head in a certain coworker’s direction, a smirk, a hint, even simply not walking away. Anything to show that I was part of the group, complicit, to show that I believed in Whiteness. It didn’t have to be much, but it was an expectation, and refusal carried consequences.
At first, it was just a little less help. Everyone needs help on the shop floor, maybe to carry something heavy or even just to keep an eye out for the sake of safety. I stopped getting it, and work got just a little harder. I got more tired, had to do without spotters, carrying things that should have been a team lift on my own. I started getting injured more often. I still didn’t get the hint, so next I started getting some extra scrutiny from the supervisor here and there, some extra attention from quality assurance, or an assumption or two about my productivity, a few questions about the frequency of my bathroom breaks. I could feel stares on the back of my head, and getting to work became a daily struggle with terror and despair. I got involved in some union organizing, and posters showed up with my picture, with a beard and wearing a hat. The caption was: “does he represent us?”
By the end of it, one of the guys called my name across the warehouse, and gave a Nazi salute right there by the parking lot door, in front of everyone.
So on the one hand, I have to ask: who am I to judge generations of Jews in this country, who got given the choice between joining the racist collective and going back to being its victims? As it is said: we live in Golus. The threat of antisemitism is terrifying, and people want to live. It’s not like today the goyim are demanding that we convert or die; accepting Whiteness is not like accepting Jesus: becoming a racist is not a “die rather than transgress” prohibition like becoming a Christian, because White Supremacy is not considered avoda zora (although perhaps it should? Is white skin an idol?).
But on the other hand, am I supposed to join in the conversation, here at the minyan, or wait for the consequences? It’s one thing to despise some pogromchiks and say so, but what kind of Jew, just minutes out of prayer, in public and without a trace of shame, disrespects the Creator by slandering His creatures, who were made in His image?!…
I am getting in the mail a Chabad publication, Chayenu. It’s a little weekly pamphlet with the appropriate Parsha with Rashi and other texts, with translations and footnotes. I don’t like everything that’s in there—I don’t like cabala, and some of the notes just straight up contradict how I understand my Jewishness and my relationship with the Eternal. However, it is very handy: it helps me study, provides structure and accountability, and contains many interesting things that I wouldn’t have access to otherwise.
One of those pieces that I keep coming back to I found in the Tanya section. The question is concerning the Talmudic statement (Pesachim 113b) that if one sees his friend sinning, he should hate him. The Alter Rebbe asks, how does this conform with the other statement, that every Jew has a divine soul, and the commandment to love one’s fellow applies to every Jew without exception. He resolves it like this: the commandment to hate the sinner applies only to one’s friend, who is also an equal in Torah and Mitzvos. Also, it only applies after one has already fulfilled the other commandment to repeatedly rebuke your friend, to persuade them to change their ways. For anyone else, who is not an equal, not a friend, and whom you haven’t already repeatedly rebuked for their transgression, one is not commanded to hate them. Not only that, says the Alter Rebbe, but on the contrary: Hillel the Elder’s words apply: “Be one of the disciples of Aharon, loving peace and pursuing peace, loving creatures and drawing them near to the Torah (Pirkei Ovos 1:12).” Perhaps thereby one may after all draw them close to the Torah and the service of God. This makes sense: if the goal is to increase righteousness, the only way to do it is not by hating or rebuking those who aren’t ready to listen, but through relationships and patience - in other words, love.
Further regarding the question of what should one do when one sees another transgress, I am reminded of another teaching, which I received from my friend, a righteous and God-fearing Jew. It goes like this: the Ba’al Shem Tov taught that whenever someone sees evil in another person, it is proof that there is some example of that evil within oneself. This is because everything that happens is a result of Divine providence: nothing is by chance, and everything that we see is placed in front of us to teach us something. When we are shown another person’s transgression, God is showing us a mirror; He shows the evil within ourselves through another person, because self-love would prevent us from recognizing it within our own self.
I think that maybe the strength of my reaction is the key to understanding what it is that God wants me to learn from this. How is it that a few seconds listening in to someone else’s conversation can wipe out the reward of an hour of prayer, the impact of a profound spiritual experience? I can’t help but think that all along as I have attempted to build relationships with Orthodox Jews, I was waiting for something like this. I was waiting for and expecting some mean, petty, racist remarks, and when those remarks came I was prepared with ready indignation, as if that is what I’d shown up for in the first place. It overshadowed everything else, because (according to itself) the indignation was the experience that really mattered: it was proof that what I thought about Orthodox Jews, what I’d been taught about them, was true: they are narrow-minded, bigoted, ignorant people inhabiting a tiny and isolated world, and have nothing but contempt or hatred for anyone who is outside of that world, especially Gentiles, and especially nonwhites. What could be more important than the vindication of outrage I was taught all my life is true?
If this is how I show up, who am I to tell anyone that they are bigoted, and disrespecting God?
According to the Noam Elimelech commentary on Tetzaveh, only the truly righteous can rebuke another. This is first of all because when the unrighteous rebukes another, it doesn’t lead them to mend their ways. Why should someone change their behavior just because some guy told them to? At worst, it would just lead to resentment, and at best, if they are rebuked by someone they like, they might change their ways—but only to please their friend, not for the sake of God. In the meantime, the unrighteous friend can tell himself how he did a mitzvah by rebuking another. In the end, both are transgressing: one with pride, and the others, at best with performing a mitzvah for the wrong reason. Only someone who is so righteous that they are above pride, and can truly lead by example, can cause another person to become more righteous. Paradoxically, since none of us are perfectly righteous, and so we are most in need of growth in Torah and Mitzvos, we are unable to teach each other to be better.
So what can I do? It’s true that racism is wrong, and that kovod habriyos is a critical virtue in Torah. But what can I do about it? Should I just leave and not come back? Should I just ignore the fact that this happened?
When I first met the rov who invited me to this minyan, I asked him a question: if everything that happens is according to the will of God, why is it that we are so different? He is a frum Jew, a Chabad rabbi, and I have been secular all my life. What is the purpose of us meeting? Why did God make me, and him? The rov replied: God made us all different, with different lives and different knowledge, because God wants us to learn from each other. Each of us knows something that the other doesn’t know, and we have met because I need to learn something from him; and he, the rov, needs to learn something from me. I think that he may have found this last bit a little amusing, but I choose to take him at his word.
So maybe this is how the paradox can be solved: the antidote to pride is humility, and we all have some aspects in which we are righteous and some aspects in which we sin. We can push each other to greater righteousness not by telling each other how we are wrong, but by being humble and mindful of our shortcomings and transgressions. We should seek to learn from the example and wisdom of others even as we bring to them our knowledge and teach them to follow our example in those areas in which we are more righteous. So as each of us draws the others with the bonds of love to those areas of Torah and Mitzvos, we will all together draw closer to righteousness and to establishing a sacred community; a community which is neither proudly distant from God nor smug in its self-declared righteousness, but one that strives to grow more righteous with every day and every generation, and which humbly recognizes its collective shortcomings and works together to overcome them.