Here is what I shared with my community on Yom Kippur:
Judaism began with idol smashing.
Some of you may be familiar with the ancient midrash about the childhood of our patriarch Avraham. The story is told that Avraham’s father made and sold idols. One day his father went out and left Avraham in charge of the shop. Avraham took a hammer and smashed many of the idols, then put the hammer in the hand of the largest one. When his father returned and was horrified, Avraham pointed to the idol holding the hammer and said “He did it.” His father responded, “You know that’s not possible, these idols can’t do anything. They’re just wood and stone.” And Avraham replied with some version of “Dear Father, if only your ears could hear what your mouth is saying.”
Judaism began with idol smashing.
The Torah is idol obsessed -- filled with instructions for the early Israelites to smash idols wherever they found them. Including in their own homes. The lure of idol worship was apparently a continuous challenge in ancient Israel, even among the Israelites themselves.
In our time, an idol smasher is known as an iconoclast. I always talk about Judaism being counter-cultural, but that term doesn’t feel strong enough now. We need to be iconoclasts. Idol smashers.
And the idol perhaps most in need of smashing in our society right now? The ideology of hierarchy. The ideology that there is such a thing as humans who are “better than” or “less than.” The ideology that there is such a thing as races of humans who are “superior” or “inferior,” “majority” or “minority.”
The ideology of hierarchy is at the root of racism, sexism, ageism, ableism... every ism you can think of. (And our society has many, many isms.) All these isms are rooted in the false ideology that humans can be rated on a scale from inferior to superior. Think about it: Our entire schooling system is based on the practice of rating children in comparison to one another. Constantly. Why? Why do we do that? What value does that serve? Who benefits?
One giant hint of the falseness of the ideology is to notice who is always at the very “top” of hierarchies, who benefits the most from perpetuating all these isms: white, straight, able-bodied, wealthy christian men. It’s time to call B.S.
Avraham smashed his father’s idols because he called B.S. He was not afraid to name the obvious: that idols of carved stone and wood had no power, and neither did the supposed “gods” that these idols represented. Idols of carved stone and wood had no power except what people projected onto them. No power except what people gave them. And we can imagine that Abraham also called B.S. on the men (including his own father) who were profiting from this false belief in idols. Because behind every idol there are men who are profiting, in money and in power. It has always been so.
The origin stories of the Jewish people, told in our Torah, are all about subverting expected hierarchies:
Younger siblings outsmart older ones and come out on top in terms of leadership and inheritance;
Women make things happen while the men imagine that they are in charge;
Humble shepherds become tribal leaders;
A young boy with a slingshot triumphs over a colossal Philistine warrior;
and of course the tiny Israelite tribe itself breaks free from the massive slave empire of Egypt.
We are the spiritual descendants of these mighty “underdogs,” with a collective mantra to Love the Stranger because we know what it is like to be a stranger in a strange land. Because we know what it is like to be considered “less than,” “lower than,” “inferior,” the “minority.”
Idol smashing is our legacy. But we Jews living in American society have absorbed the values of American culture, including this toxic ideology of hierarchy. Which is why we need to practice being iconoclasts, now more than ever.
But wait. Isn’t Judaism all about making distinctions??
Kosher / not kosher
Pure / impure
Holy / unholy
Proper / improper
Permissible / impermissible
Jewish / not Jewish
The rabbinic enterprise for millennia has been all about making distinctions. Marking boundaries. Putting up fences. Making judgements. It feels natural and necessary to us to make distinctions.
Yes. Judaism is all about making distinctions. But never for the sake of sorting out who is “superior” and then oppressing those who are “inferior.” Our distinction-making is for the sake of serving God, not idols. From the ancient Jewish perspective, all humans are created b’tselem Elohim, in the image of God, meaning that every person is uniquely precious and of equal value. Therefore our distinction-making ought never to be for the sake of hierarchy.
When I searched my mind for just the right English word to capture this quality of distinction-making in our tradition, I realized that the original meaning of the word discrimination is actually what I was looking for.
DISCRIMINATION: from the past participle of the Latin verb discriminare (meaning "to distinguish or differentiate"), which, itself, is derived from the verb discernere, meaning "to distinguish between." Discernere, in turn, was formed by combining the prefix dis- (meaning "apart") and cernere (meaning "to sift").
To sift apart - to discern - to distinguish between - to make distinctions - all these meanings point towards an awareness of difference, not a creation of hierarchy.
The term discrimination has come to mean unfair and unequal treatment based on difference, but fundamentally to discriminate means to be conscious of difference. And to be conscious of difference is one way of serving God -- by recognizing the uniqueness of each person, and the glorious, infinite complexity of God’s creation.
For God’s sake, don’t aspire to be “colorblind.”
I hope that by now many of you are challenging yourselves with books and videos and podcasts on the subject of anti-racism and the ideology of whiteness in America. There is much to learn -- or rather, much to unlearn. I want to encourage everyone to wrestle with the reality of racism and what it means now, in 2020, to do anti-racist self-reflection and community work.
Black people in this country have been crying out for centuries about the evils of racism. And white people, for the most part, have chosen not to hear.
We have chosen not to even acknowledge that there is such a thing as whiteness, something which grants us so many life-giving benefits (while at the same time destroying much of our distinctive Jewish culture). But something in America may be shifting - at long last - we hope - and more white people are finding ways to listen and learn without retreating into our usual patterns of denial and defensiveness. The false assumption of white superiority really is a thing. And it’s not only been killing black people, it’s been crippling all of us. The ideology of hierarchy cripples all of us. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
It feels like time to reclaim our legacy as iconoclasts, for the good of all people.