SMASHING STATUES & OUR SELVES, AND THE LANGUAGE OF JEWISH REPAIR

 

I am a sinner. I’m not ashamed to say it only because Judaism assumes all of God’s children are sinners, flawed, coming up short, etc., including those who have come before us, those who are destined to come after us, and all those hanging around these days, whether we know them or not. No human is perfect. We are all sinners. Acknowledgement of this reality is a good way to prepare for the holidays.

Every nation has its heroes. They’re all sinners too. But here’s the thing about sinners, the heroic and unheroic alike. The dark, unrepentant, thoroughly corrupt sinner is a rare phenomenon for sinners engage in saintly acts now and then. No one is a total sinner just as no one is a total saint. As the rabbis contend, we all have a yetzer hara, an evil inclination and a yetzer hatov, a good inclination, and the clear majority of people on earth are an amalgam of both praiseworthy and dastardly deeds. When we paint them as one or the other, whether sinner or saint, we turn them into phony persona, a canard only but nothing real. That distortion is a disservice to their humanity and our own, as we promote only a caricature rather than a character.

Those who might tear down statues of American heroes whom we know to be flawed men (the clear majority are men) have an ally in the Torah. When Moses instructs the Israelites as to how they should relate to the pagans of the land which they are about to possess, he says, “Tear down their altars, smash their pillars, put their sacred posts to the fire, and cut down the images of their gods, obliterating their name from that site” (Deuteronomy 12:3). That’s how to handle falsehood according to our biblical ancestors, and there was no falsehood greater than idolatry. We have seen this biblical zeal carried out in our own day. In 1996, the Taliban of Afghanistan systematically destroyed museum collections that were deemed unIslamic and in 2001, they blew up the giant and majestic Buddhas of Bamiyan which dated back to the sixth century. In the last decade, ISIS was responsible for dismantling almost all the churches in Mosul and throughout their reign of terror, destroyed ancient and medieval sites that had been protected for centuries as part of the history and culture of those lands.

It might also be noted that the Jewish people, historically, have not been spared these attacks, though having few structures to burn or tear down, the focus of the ruling party’s purifying powers had been our sacred texts. In 1242, some 1,200 volumes of Talmud were burned in Paris. A favorite action of the Nazis was book burnings of all subversive literature, which would include anything written by Jews. One might argue that a book is not a statue, which is obviously true, but both are expressions of an era, a reality, a point of view, for right or wrong, and their destruction or desecration are almost always carried out by the morality police, officially or self-appointed purists who themselves are sinless.

That “sinless” adjective was a bit of sarcasm. We are all sinners and when harsh judgments are given full reign, we become vulnerable to the very same cruelty when we find ourselves on the outs  of a new wave of self-righteous purists out to purge the sins of the day, or of the past.

The language of religious repair, or let’s be even more specific, Jewish repair, is lost on most moderns. Our highly secularized world, fueled by a destructive political polarization, has drained the color from people and turned them into mere caricatures of good and evil, purity and impurity. But the characters in our lives, as the choices we must make, are rarely that distinct. Most people are a muddle of wisdom and foolishness, honesty and falsehood, morality and its trespasses. And so it is that Judaism teaches us to live life with compassion, and to give people the benefit of the doubt, to forgive, and where we find it difficult to forgive, to in the very least, understand. We are all sinners as we are all capable of good.

According to an old midrash, Rabbi Shimon said that the angels erupted into argument with God’s decision to create Adam. The celestial prosecution charged the future Adam as lying and combative. The defense claimed Adam would be righteous and merciful. God thereby threw the Angel of Truth out of heaven (ouch!) and proceeded to create Adam (see Genesis Rabbah 8:5). It sounds as if the rabbis thought that our species (their’s too) was created at the expense of truth. To the contrary, humanity and truth reside on earth and our destiny is to grapple with the truths of who we are, our righteous and merciful ways, and our sinful and surly selves. We are rarely either/or but rather both/and.

The better way to deal with the darker side of our history is not to destroy the old artistic expressions, but reframe the lives of those so remembered, and most importantly, support those artistic endeavors that would reflect our own understanding and values. So too, at this time of year, when we face our own flaws, I hope we choose not to destroy ourselves, but rather remake or reinvent ourselves, to give ourselves the permission and fortitude to express ourselves in new ways that are more life-affirming and life-fulfilling. If we must protest vigorously, and we should, let’s arm ourselves with the language of Jewish repair work: compassion, understanding, forgiveness, insight, creativity and vision. This is the terminology that can heal the self and a nation, at least temporarily. But rest assured we’ll be back next year because we can never fully escape or extinguish our sinfulness or for that matter, Barukh HaShem, (Praise God!), our saintliness.