Lech L’ha: A “Pre-Occupation” with Justice
8 Heshvan 5772 / 5 November 2011
Rabbi Daniel Cotzin Burg
In a stirring scene from next week’s parasha, Abraham defends the many for the sake of the few. God, it seems, is determined to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and shares this plan with his new devotee. Abraham, for his part, argues with God in a moment akin to a high stakes marketplace haggle over the fate of the condemned cities. We’re familiar with the debate: “Will you save the cities for the sake of fifty righteous people?” “Yes, for fifty.” “How about forty-five?” “Of course for forty-five.” Forty, thirty, twenty and finally ten people – and God still agrees. And though, ultimately, Abraham is unable to produce these ten people on whose account the entire depraved populace would be pardoned, we, the readers, are left to consider the implications of the agreement. Many have been deeply critical, for example, of the Gilad Shalit deal in which so many criminals and many more suspected criminals were freed for the sake of one man. For the most part, Americans looked on in dismay, admiring Israel’s compassion but shuddering at the thought of so much potential destruction just to save one life, to unite one young soldier with his family.
Today I want to talk with you about the relationship between the many and the few, not about criminal justice though, but economic justice. I think it’s time we talked about the Occupy Wall Street Movement. The Jewish poet Emma Lazarus composed a poem (The New Colossus, 1883), enshrined at the Statue of Liberty, which beautifully captures one view of the American Dream, and no matter how many times I hear it, it still gives me chills:
“…Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
These words would bear witness to countless ships on their way through the New York Harbor to the shores of this great country. The ones who arrived from oppressive regimes and after long and difficult sea voyages foretold the ones who still arrive from war-torn nations seeking a home on this golden shore. This is what America has meant to generations of immigrants. This was, and is for many, the New Jerusalem, the Promised Land worth the arduous journey for the sake of a better life. But the Promise isn’t one of privilege or entitlement. Rather, it is the notion that if you work hard enough and play by the rules you have as much a chance of making it in this country as anyone, and these are words with which generations of Americans have tucked their children in at night.
And now some of those children, now adults, are fed up, so they’re sleeping in tents in Zuccotti Park or in Oakland or Los Angeles or Baltimore. They call themselves the “99%” and like them or not there is no doubt that the Movement is affecting policy discussions in the halls of government and providing fodder for conversations around countless American dinner tables. On the facts of their claim, at least the economist Paul Krugman seems convinced that they have a point. “We still think of ourselves as a middle-class country,” he writes in yesterday’s NY Times, “but with the bottom 80 percent of households now receiving less than half of total income, that’s a vision increasingly at odds with reality.” Much of the debate seems to be about their tactics or their cleanliness or their clothing or the way they vote by wiggling their fingers in the air. The Occupiers have become a lightning rod, a modern-day hippy movement fighting the modern-day “man” – finance, big business and corporate greed.
I’m not an economist or a politician, so I’ll try to stick to what I know something about: Torah. In Jewish law there is a concept called kal vahomer (in Latin, an a fortoriori argument). The basic idea is that if the high threshold of A is true, then the lower threshold of B must be true as well. If, for example, Abraham demonstrates that it is Jewishly valuable for many bad people to be saved on account of a few good ones, then kal vahomer – all the more so – many good people should not suffer for the sake of a few. Now we have to be very careful here. The analogy is far from perfect. Despite the frustrated and silly claims of some among the 99%, wealthy people are not bad or good because of their wealth. Like poor people or the shrinking middle class, people are people – some good, some bad, most somewhere in-between. One commentator points out that the gematria of mammon (money) is equal to the gematria of sulam, ladder. Money is a vehicle through which we can ascend to our higher ideals or descend to our harshest selves.
So let’s discuss the value of pursuing wealth or power as an end in and of itself – for nefarious or even benignly selfish reasons. Can we make a claim about the way a Jewishly inspired society ought to be constructed so that our central values are not just aspirational but achievable? A central value, perhaps the most central Jewish value, features prominently in this morning’s parasha: God’s call (Lech l’cha) to go forth to the Promised Land and Abraham’s and Sarah’s subsequent acceptance, heralds nothing less than the birth of monotheism, the truly revolutionary idea that there is One God of the Universe. It’s the closest we Jews get to dogma – proclaiming twice daily in our great mission statement: Sh’ma yisrael Ad-nai El-heinu, Ad-nai Ehad! Here O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one!
But the advent of monotheism fundamentally includes the rejection of idolatry and this is where the midrashic (interpretive) tradition picks up: accepting one invisible and indivisible God means rejecting two other related ideas. First, we reject human idolatry – people posing as gods. Some rulers in the Jewish story have made such idolatrous claims – Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, Antiochus. In the Abraham story it is Nimrod, the Mesopotamian god-king, who, frustrated by Abraham’s attempt to discredit his “divine” rule, casts him into the fiery furnace. But there are others in history who without explicitly claiming the mantle of divinity still behave indiscriminately and cruelly, like gods. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Qaddafi, Ahmadinejad, all fail to see the essential humanity in others and the results are terrifying. The Torah, though, is quite clear about the uniqueness of God. The beautiful irony is that the ehad, the oneness we proclaim, is not necessarily about God’s distance or transcendence. The parasha we read two weeks ago reminds us that we, each of us, is created b’tzelem Elohim, in God’s image. The claim of monotheism is also one of egalitarianism. No one human can ever purport to be God because, though only God is God, each human being is a reflection of our Creator. God’s oneness is one of unity. Theologically speaking, we are all the 100%.
This brings me to our second polemic against idolatry: the one rejecting the idea that God can be represented by or made manifest in an animal or an object. What did Abraham’s father do for a living? Of course, he was an idol-maker. The story does not appear anywhere in Torah or Tanakh but it’s a story so profoundly interwoven with the mikra that so many of us simply take it for granted that it’s true. Here’s a shortened version of the tale.
Abraham is told to mind his father’s creations. He breaks the idols with a staff and then places the staff in the hand of the largest idol. When his father Terah surveys the damage he demands an explanation. Abraham replies innocently: “I didn’t do a thing! The big idol was jealous of the others, so he smashed them all to pieces.” When Terah replies that, of course, idols are incapable of such an act, Abraham knows he has won the argument: “Listen to what you are saying, Abba! If it’s true that they have not power, why do you worship them? There must be something greater, something beyond the work of human hands that is worthy of our devotion!”
To sum up the Abrahamic Jewish innovation then: we believe in a God who is unified and unifying, beyond any of us, but a part of all of us. And when we worship any thing, including material wealth, we risk distancing ourselves from the Source of all life. And even if our behavior does not rise to the level of worship - because for most people I don’t think it does - we are still responsible for ensuring that the resources of this world are not disproportionately allocated to a precious few, that the game is not rigged. Because those kids whose parents tucked them in to the stories of that great American dream, who are sitting downtown with tens of thousands of dollars in college debt and feeling angry and betrayed – they have a point. And others, young and old, who have other strikes against them, whose success in this country is statistically dependent not on their smarts or their passion or their creativity, but on their zipcode or their neighborhood or their public school – they have a point too. It may sound trite to say it isn’t fair, but it truly isn’t and it’s getting worse.
Our Torah portion describes the intersection of the Land and the civic and criminal justice that must be done within its borders. The other end of the Torah, though, again relates to the Land but this time in terms of economic justice. In the book of Devarim (Ch. 15), we read: “If there is among you a needy person, one of your brethren, within any of your gates, in your land which Ad-nai your God gives you, you shall not harden your heart, nor shut your hand to your needy brother…. For the poor will never cease from the land.” Yes, poverty is a fact and, to a certain extent it always will be. But rather than take a fatalistic approach to the problem, our sacred texts charge us to improve the situation. The fact of poverty does not excuse us from the fight against it. We may disagree about the policy implications, the right tools to solve the increasing problem of economic disparity, but can we not agree that we must find a way to reverse the current trend?
Some would have us believe that this is about karma, that none deserve to be rich and that they will get their just desserts. Rabbi Isaac Caro, writing in the Sixteenth Century on our passage from Deuteronomy, puts it this way: “The reason that the poor person is poor is because the rich person is rich, when your star ascends, his star descends. For this reason, the text says, “the poor person with you“… you are the reason that he is poor. And if you do not give to him, what will God do? God will rotate the universe in such a way that the star that is on top will sink to the bottom… (Tol’dot Yitzhak, Parashat Re’eh). The problem is that Caro’s solution assumes a stark divide between rich and poor. But perhaps what we need is a bit more equilibrium. The American ideal includes a strong middle class. Look around the world and you’ll find that countries with the greatest economic disparity also rank terribly low in gender equality, access to good healthcare, education, basic freedoms, and in just about any other metric of a healthy society.
Some of the so-called 99% are occupying the Inner Harbor. Most are not. This week, in the Torah’s third parasha, we are introduced to the Promised Land, but the Promise – in that country and in this one – is never really fulfilled. By the forty-seventh parasha (Re’eh), our people are still devising ways to provide for basic human dignity and economic parity. I often conclude my talks with a charge, a suggestion of something tangible we can do to move an issue forward. There are things to be done, of course: advocacy, education, legislation, tzedakah, Starbucks bracelets. But, I will avoid the temptation to give any specific assignments today. First of all, frankly I don’t feel qualified. There are plenty of people in this room, and in this city and country who have terrific ideas about how to decrease the gap and bolster the middle class. I defer to them. But more, I feel that the gift of this nascent Movement is that they have encouraged debate. So, if Abraham engaged in constructive dialogue with the Kadosh Baruch Hu about the many and the few and the best way to achieve a just society, kal vahomer, all the more so, shouldn’t we – at our dinner tables and in the halls of Congress – shouldn’t we be able to do the same?