Seeing Ourselves for Who We Are
This week’s Torah portion, Toledot, is a treasure-house of troublesome, intriguing, entertaining and iconic stories from the oldest part of the Torah.
In it, we read of Jacob and Esau wrestling in the womb, and Jacob being born grasping the hill of his twin.
We learn about these brothers, one outdoorsy, hairy, and seemingly not too bright; the other a homebody, a mamma’s boy, who is a skilled cook and a good negotiator. He convinces Esau to sell his birthright for a bowl of red lentil soup. Now, I like a good bowl of lentil soup, but not that much.
We read about Isaac in his 60’s, going around and digging out all the wells Abraham had dug, and that the Philistines had filled in after Abraham died. There is something mythic about that image. He continues to dig wells, until finally he digs the well that becomes Beersheva.
We read of peace treaties being made between Abraham’s descendants and the local rulers so that there would be peace.
And then we read the greatest piece of theater in the Torah, the story of Rebecca coaching Jacob to disguise himself to trick old blind Isaac into giving the blessing to Jacob instead of the first-born Esau.
And then one of the most heart-rending passages in the Torah when Esau, returning to see that his father had blessed his brother, and in anguish he cries out: “Father, have you no blessing left for me?”
Genesis, for an ancient book, is full of modern drama, of flawed humans trying to be good and create a good life and failing because of their limitations or because of the world around them.
This story is also about seen others clearly, about the ability to see ourselves clearly, and the way we put on disguises and change ourselves to get ahead, to get “the blessing”.
As I’ve been reading PEOPLE LOVE DEAD JEWS by Dara Horn, this idea of trying to act like we are ‘just like” the people around us we perceive as powerful comes up again and again in our history over the past 150 years. Jews have given up parts of our Jewishness in order to fit in with German culture, with French culture, to be good Bolsheviks, or good Stalinists, or good Americans, or good conservatives, and these day, good progressives.
Dara Horn points out that our brand as Jews is more about NOT being like everyone around us, and yet there has been this willingness to sacrifice a certain amount of our Jewishness for the sake of being part of the society around us.
As I’ve been teaching my class in Hebrew School about Hanukkah, this theme has come up about trying to be Greek.
In the US, the ways Jews changed themselves to be more easily accepted here is covered in great detail in THE PRICE OF WHITENESS, by Eric Goldstein.
But it would seem that as American Jews, in order to perceive Jews as “white,” we focused entirely on European Jewry. We leaned into our own immediate ancestry and culture, which is understandable, but in doing that, we started to choose certain practices over others, and little by little change the way we see ourselves.
As Reform Jews, we have been guilty of letting our desire to be accepted shape our choices about how we do Judaism. I grew up in a Reform movement in the South, where the congregants definitely saw ourselves as white, identified with our white neighbors even when we quietly, in private, whispered our disagreements with their views on race.
I think it is safe to say that most of us here if I asked, “what does a Jew look like,” would likely think of Tevye, or maybe Tzeidel, but definitely a shtetl dweller from Eastern Europe.
While worldwide, the majority of Jews are of Ashkenazic background, our culture is much more varied and mutli-cultural, more global that we often let ourselves see in ourselves.
For example, yesterday was the Ethiopian holiday of Sigd. It is a holiday unique to that community. This holiday, which in the Semitic language of Amharic means “to prostrate yourself” (a root it shares in Hebrew), occurs 50 days after Yom Kippur, and is when they celebrate God giving the Torah to Moses at Mount Sinai. Their communities climb to the top of a nearby hill to gather, they fast, sing songs, give thanks for the Torah, and until the 90’s, prayed for their return to Israel.
The name of the Ethiopian Jewish community is Beta Israel, or “house of Israel”. They trace their origins in Ethiopia to the time of King Solomon, or to the Babylonian exile of the tribe of Dan. It is widely accepted that they have an ancient pre-Exilic history. They didn’t have the Talmud or Pharasaic innovations, and they don’t celebrate the later holidays like Purim or Hanukkah. Our connection of the giving of the Torah on Shavuot is actually a fairly late development, and so it is quite possible that Sigd was an earlier holiday that faded away in the post-Exilic Jewish world.
The Beta Israel community, until the last century, believed that they were the last Jewish surviving. Living in remote villages, they didn’t know about the Jewish world of Europe. When they pictured a typical Jew, they see themselves.
This community was an independent kingdom for centuries, but there were periods of attacks from other tribal leaders, and in the 1600’s, there began a prolonged series of attacks and killing of many of them, and the forced conversion of many others. This continued and worsened during recent centuries with Christian Missionaries working with rulers to force whole villages to convert to Christianity to avoid a massacre.
Those from villages that refused to convert and suffered for it had resentment toward those who did, but you know what? Those that hadn’t converted were the first airlifted to Israel, and as they settled, they began to advocate for those who had converted, but now wanted to return to their Jewishness and come to Israel, saying they should come and learn.
Now almost all of the 150,000 Beta Israel in Israel today, over 2% of the population. They have faced racism and discrimination in Israel, but there is much active work being done to address this, and Ethiopians have now served in Knesset , in cabinet positions, and an Ethiopian singer represented Israel this year in Eurovision. There is much work to be done but much is being done.
The challenge for us is to see ourselves in those we see celebrating SIGD, see Ethiopian Jews. We need to learn to see ourselves in these, to see how deeply we are connected. We celebrate most of the same holidays, have similar dietary restrictions, keep Shabbat, and have shared experiences of antisemitism that included violence and forced conversion.
Over half of Israel’s population, so at least a quarter of the world Jewish population is not from European descent, but from North Africa, the Middle East, Asia, or Ethiopian. Yemenites alone are almost 12% of Israel’s Jewish population.
Our Torah portion, the story of Jacob centers a good deal on whether and how we see one another. Isaac is too blind to see that he is blessing Jacob instead of Esau. Really? But I’m not convinced. Is it realistic to think that by tying hairy got skin around your arm, your father would think it is your hairy brother. I’ve seen some hairy bears, but never a person with arm hair as thick as a goat’s pelt.
Isaac saw what he wanted to see. He let himself be deluded perhaps we are not so different than he.
The Jewish community is much more diverse than we assume, and there are many more American Jews of color, and there are all the different cultures and places where we have settled and developed whole ways of being and cuisines, all rooted in Torah, but all so different.
Jewish culture is fantastically varied, diverse, in food, in dress, in music, and yet all connected by the fabric of Torah. That is one of our greatest strengths and blessings.
In this time of racial reckoning, let’s look at ourselves honestly, and for bad. But let’s look at ourselves for ourselves, and not let others tells us who we are and reduce us to a culture that fits into the narrative they are trying to push. Let’s avoid tying goat skins to our arms, or pretending to be something we’re not to get a blessing. Let’s instead celebrate the blessing it is to be exactly who we are.
Shabbat Shalom.