Who Are We? Surprising Reflections on Yom Kippur

Sermon by Cantor David Frommer
Yom Kippur – October 9, 2019
 

In the 1920’s, a Jew traveled from his small Polish shtetl to the great city of Warsaw. When he returned, he told his friend of the wonders he’d seen. “You’ll never believe it,” he said. “In Warsaw, I met a Jew who owned a large factory with many employees. I met a Jew who was a socialist and organized the unions. I met a Jew who was a Zionist and argued we should all move to Palestine. And I met a Jew who was religious and believed that God will provide for us wherever we are.” “What’s so strange about that?” his friend asked. “Warsaw’s a big city. There must be a million Jews there.” “You don’t understand,” the man replied. “It was the same Jew!”

We come together today on Yom Kippur for the single purpose of t’shuvah--to improve, and return to a better version of ourselves. But who exactly are we? As the joke implies, it’s not so easy to see… and sometimes even harder to believe. And yet, it is the question of ultimate importance. For how can we hope to return, if we don’t know where we are? The Book of Proverbs teaches, “Kamayim, hapanim lapanim--the face that looks into the water is the face that looks out.” When we look at our reflection, on this day, who is it that looks back at us? Who are we?

This afternoon, we’ll read the story of Joseph and his brothers from the Book of Genesis. It’s an ideal place to find out who we are because of its complexity and depth. To quickly recap the main events, Jacob, our biblical forefather, marries two wives, but loves only one. His disfavored wife, Leah, bears him numerous sons, while his beloved wife, Rachel, gives birth to only two--Joseph and Benjamin.

Jacob’s favoritism of Joseph angers the older brothers and they sell Joseph into slavery in Egypt. But there, Joseph rises to Pharoah’s second-in-command, and is unexpectedly reunited with his brothers in Pharoah’s court, when they travel to Egypt during a famine. Since they do not recognize Joseph, he seeks to learn if they have changed their ways by means of a ruse. He charges the brothers with espionage and arrests Benjamin, whom Jacob now favors, just as he favored Joseph. When the brothers offer one of their own in place of Benjamin, recognizing his importance to their father, Joseph knows they have changed. He reveals his true identity and all is forgiven. 

“Kamayim, hapanim lapanim--the face that looks into the water is the face that looks out.” When we look at our reflection in this story, who do we see? Who exactly are we? I think we are neither Joseph nor his brothers. Rather, I see us in the character of Benjamin. He is neither the hero, nor the villain. He is somewhere in between. He never protests the brothers’ sale of Joseph, but he also never bewails his own fate when he is threatened with enslavement himself. He is a minor character, but he plays a critical role. As the youngest child, he is clearly vulnerable, but he also inspires the loyalty of his brothers in the end. 

I think this is a pretty accurate description of how most of us in this room see ourselves today. As individuals, we make mistakes but we also have courage. As a community, our numbers are small but our impact is great. Like Benjamin, we may be threatened with misfortune, yet we trust that our integrity will rally allies to our side. We are righteous underdogs. When we look at ourselves in the Joseph story, it seems like Benjamin is the character who looks back at us. It seems like a comforting and hopeful reflection.

And it is… if Benjamin is in fact the righteous underdog he seems to be. But how well do we really know Benjamin? As it turns out, like the Warsaw Jew in the opening of the sermon, Benjamin has more than one side to him. And nobody knows that better than his own father. Jacob’s final blessing to Benjamin is unexpected… and disturbing. “Benjamin is a ravenous wolf,” Jacob describes. “In the morning he devours his prey, and in the evening he divides up the spoils.” A ravenous wolf... devouring its prey? I’m no expert in taxonomy, but I do have a Masters in Sacred Music, and I’m pretty sure a ravenous wolf is definitely the opposite of a righteous underdog. That can’t be who Benjamin is, because that can’t be who we are. A ravenous wolf can’t be what looks back at us in our reflection. What is Jacob talking about?

Jacob, it turns out, is not describing Benjamin for who he is in the Joseph story, but for who his descendants will become, centuries later, in a horrific tale from the Book of Judges. An Israelite man from the tribe of Levi is traveling to his home, accompanied by his concubine. They seek shelter overnight in the town of Giv’a, in the territory of the tribe of Benjamin. How will the Benjaminites receive these strangers? Levites and Benjaminites are both Israelites, descended from Jacob. But Levi’s mother was Leah, and Benjamin’s mother was Rachel. Centuries after Benjamin watched Levi and the rest of Leah’s sons sell Joseph into slavery, his descendents in the Benjaminite town of Giv’a are bent on retribution. 

A mob of Benjaminites surround the house where the Levite man is sleeping. They seize his concubine, drag her outside, and ravish her repeatedly until morning. Recall Jacob’s prescient words: “Benjamin is like a ravenous wolf…” Then, somehow, the story gets even worse. The other Israelites demand that the tribe of Benjamin surrender the perpetrators for communal punishment, but the Benjaminites refuse. They close ranks with their guilty brethren, and the other tribes launch an attack to bring the offending Benjamintes to justice. By brutally mistreating the stranger in their midst, the tribe of Benjamin, like a ravenous wolf, ignites the first civil war in Jewish history. “Kamayim, hapanim lapanim--the face that looks into the water is the face that looks out.” Is the face of Benjamin the face that looks back at us from our reflection? Is this who we really are?

It would seem hard to believe. As Jews, we are commanded to care for the stranger and practice audacious hospitality. We are open-minded and reasonable. The Benjaminites, by contrast, are so inflexible, so lacking in regard for the broader community, for basic civility and decency, that they would rather engulf their nation in civil war, than see justice done. If anything, the Benjaminites’ behavior seems to mirror that of our opponents, across the cultural and political divide. And what divides us most of all? The fundamental human question of how we treat the stranger. It is a question as old as the Bible itself, and today it inflames the passions of so many people around the world that it may very well decide the fate of western liberal democracy in our time. 

We have spent this past year at Sherith Israel studying democracy and resistance through a Jewish lens. What is the future of liberal democracy, in the face of populism’s rising tides? Professor William Galston, of the Brookings Institute, describes how populists “seek to drive a wedge between democracy and liberalism.” They claim that “Liberal norms and policies… weaken democracy and harm the people.” And whether in Europe or here at home, the issue that fuels this populism is immigration. We are all too familiar with the common tropes in nativist rhetoric about immigrants. They are likened to an invasion of pests, they are unable to speak our language, they have turned our country into a dumping ground and they deserve to be sent back. “We have an invasion,” President Trump has explained. “Illegal immigrants… infest our country. The United States has become a dumping ground for Mexico.” Fox TV host Brian Kilmeade has warned viewers about undocumented immigrants who “don’t speak English.” And who can forget the populist slogan, “send them back,” inspired by the president’s reaction to immigrant congresswoman Ilhan Omar. If this rejection of the stranger is our inheritance from the Benjaminites at Giv’a, then for many of us Benjamin cannot possibly be the face we see in our reflection. This cannot be who we are.

And yet, as painful, and difficult as it may be, Judaism teaches us otherwise. “Kol haposel b’mumo posel,” the Talmud instructs. “The flaw we see in the other is the very flaw we possess ourselves.” The Baal Shem Tov, founder of Chasidic Judaism, elaborates on what this means. “Your fellow human being is a mirror for you. If you see a blemish in another, it is your own imperfection you encounter. Take careful note of the flaws you perceive in others. They are your own flaws set before you, a reminder of your own spiritual work.” 

It seems heretical to even suggest a comparison between us and the very opponents who traffic in such anti-immigrant bias. It is unthinkable that we would say such things. And yet we did, right here in San Francisco, at the dawn of the last century, when we were confronted with a different wave of immigrants, but saw them in the same way, and described them with the same words.

“We are confronted with an invasion,” proclaimed a leading rabbi in San Francisco, (albeit from the pulpit of Congregation Emanu-El). He described the immigrants’ neighborhood south of Market Street as a “reeking pesthole.” “These people do not speak English [and] refuse to learn,” bemoaned a prominent Jewish writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. The President of San Francisco’s Hebrew Benevolent Society, founded for the express purpose of aiding immigrants, suggested that his agency “return a new arrival at once to his former place of residence,” to teach those communities “they cannot use this city as a dumping ground for their poor and sick.” Send them back. But perhaps the harshest judgment came from Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the founding father of Reform Judaism in America, and himself an immigrant from Bohemia. “We are Americans,” he declared. “And they are not.” 

Who were these immigrants, whose arrival in the United States was resisted by the Reform Jews in San Francisco, with the same language of President Trump and his allies today? What group of refugees, fleeing poverty and violence in their home countries, could have elicited such a response? It was the Jews from Eastern Europe, many of them related to us, who immigrated to this country by the millions between 1880 and 1920. They were seeking a better life in America, but were met with prejudice and disdain from the very Jewish community they hoped would welcome them. “We are Americans and they are not.” 

“Kamayim, hapanim lapanim--the face that looks into the water is the face that looks out.”

Our Reform Jewish community in San Francisco used the same rhetoric, the same exact words, about immigrants that we decry today on the other side. And those were the immigrants of our own faith. I won’t tell you what we said about the Chinese. If we look at our reflection today, and fail to see the people whose views on immigration we most passionately oppose, then we need to take a closer look. “Kol haposel b’mumo posel--the flaw we see in the other is the very flaw we possess ourselves.” 

But we miss the point if we relegate this flaw to a distant past. For it lives within us today, not towards immigrants, but towards our neighbors, and even our very congregants, whose views on immigration we oppose. As the political commentator Andrew Sullivan observes, “Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes.” “Denouncing citizens concerned about immigration as ignorant and bigoted,” he writes, has done more than anything else “to weaken support for liberal-democratic norms and institutions.” If we are to save liberal democracy, we must find a way to see ourselves in the strangers who look exactly like us, as well as the strangers who don’t.

Like the Benjaminites at Giv’a, our belief that only we are the righteous underdogs has contributed to a cultural civil war we cannot win. For as Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks teaches, “If you seek to inflict defeat on your opponent, they must, by human psychology, seek to retaliate and inflict defeat on you. The end result is though you win today, you lose tomorrow and in the end everyone loses.” Win today, lose tomorrow. A tragic but fitting epitaph for President Obama’s DACA policy for Dreamers.

What, then, is our path forward? Our verse from Proverbs shows us the way. “Kamayim, hapanim lapanim--Just as the face that looks into the water is the face that looks out… kein lev ha’adam la’adam--so does one person’s heart reflect that of another.” The Or HaChaim, an 18th c. rabbinic commentator, teaches that this verse “speaks of a mental telepathy between the hearts of people who do not even see each other but perceive whether their counterpart loves them or hates them.” 

“Kein lev ha’adam la’adam--one person’s heart reflects that of another.” We can bend our hearts towards openness, but we need inspiration. And for that, I suggest we return to the story of Benjamin one final time. Centuries after the Benjaminites’ crime at Giv’a, in the city of Shushan, the evil vizier, Haman, plots the destruction of the Jewish community--strangers living in Persian lands. When Mordechai learns of Haman’s plans, he beseeches Queen Esther to intercede on the Jewish community’s behalf. But will she do so? Most of the Jews are from the tribe of Judah, whose mother was Leah. Esther and Mordechai are from the tribe of Benjamin, whose mother was Rachel. Which side of Benjamin will Esther reflect? Will she be the ravenous wolf, who leaves the Judahites to the mercies of Haman, while she and her Benjaminate family are protected by the King? Will the horrible, partisan history of Giv’a repeat itself? Or will she be the righteous underdog, and risk death to unify the entire Jewish community and defend the values it stands for? Esther’s decision to confront evil, to put aside tribal loyalties, and to stand up for justice is truly the best of Benjamin’s reflection. And it can be the best of our reflection as well. 

Like the Jew from Warsaw, like Benjamin and his descendants, like our San Francisco community, we have many sides. The human impulse is to replace one reflection with another, and another, until we find the side of ourselves we like. The human impulse is to avoid who we were when we say who we are. The human impulse is to strive for victory at our opponents’ expense. But Judaism insists that our future is not determined by these impulses. It is determined only by our commitment to t’shuvah--to improving ourselves, and by extension our world.

T’shuvah demands that we open our hearts to the strangers we oppose. That we hear their opinions and engage them in conversation, for they are no more the ravenous wolf than we are. Their flaws are our flaws. They are as much in our reflection--they are as much a part of us--as the strangers we support. The more we strive for their defeat, the more we defeat ourselves. But t’shuvah equally demands that we recomit ourselves, now more than ever, to the work of righteous underdogs--advocating for the rights of immigrants, refugees and dreamers, accompanying them to court, and organizing for their support. Sherith Israel was the first synagogue in San Francisco to become a sanctuary congregation, and in March we will travel to the Mexican border to observe first-hand how we can further help. Today we reject the same nativist language once used by our own community. This is not hypocrisy. This is the very essence of t’shuvah. 

On this Yom Kippur, may we accept these powerful and challenging truths that Judaism teaches us. May we see ourselves in both the stranger across the street and the stranger across the border, and thus ensure the future of the democratic institutions that all of us hold most dear.
 

G’mar Chatima Tova!
Cantor David Frommer