In spite of the fact that we are still
in the midst of a pandemic which has forced upon us a very unnatural way of
life, and that we were all witness to a horrific arrest of a black man on a
minor charge that ended in his death, and that for now more than a week the
county has been subject to civil unrest the likes of which have not been seen
since the Vietnam War, let’s get out of town for a bit. I don’t know about you
but I’m exhausted. Let’s take a trip into time past. I'd like us all to journey
back into mythological time to the point where the first man, Adam, wakes from
a deep sleep and witnesses a creature he has never seen before, Eve. If you
recall your biblical tales, Adam had searched for a partner among the beasts in
the garden of Eden and much to his dismay found no suitable partner. And God,
wishing Adam not to be alone, schedules surgery, knocks him out, removes a rib,
and builds another being who will become known as Eve. What did Eve look like?
What did Adam see when he first set eyes upon her? We’ll have to use our
imagination a bit for this, but certainly her anatomy was not quite like Adam's.
That must have been noticeable. Her hair did not look like his and perhaps her
skin color did not match his own. She was quite possibly shorter than him, or
maybe taller, and perhaps she weighed more than him, but let’s not do that to
her—she definitely weighed less. And Adam looked at her, a creature different
from himself, and exclaims, “This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of
my flesh” (Genesis 2:23). Now some theologians have long noted that Adam was
not the brightest banana in the Garden—his partner, Eve, seemed to be far more
curious, far more verbal, and far more daring than Adam, and yet Adam, in his
innocence, gives us one of the Bible’s earliest insights into our relationship
with each other, and that is no matter how different we are from each other,
our humanity is the common denominator that unites us all. Adam was able to recognize
Eve’s differences and yet say—she and I are fundamentally the same.
America has gotten itself into a bed
habit. We are forever looking at each other and figuring out just how unlike we
are from one another. Our differences are dizzying. We are split into Democrats
and Republicans. Gays, straights, bisexuals, Christian evangelicals, Jews, Muslims,
blacks, whites, cops, non-cops, white collar workers, blue collar workers, red
state, blue state, purple state, deep state, antifa, white supremacists,
millennials, boomers, Generation Xers, males, females, gender benders, etc. Under
certain circumstances, we can’t even look at one another and figure out which
pronoun to use. Given all this diversity, someone is going to look at it all
and blithely remark—It is our diversity that unites us. But frankly, we don’t
look so united these days. We have become a nation of disjointed individuals,
divided by a myriad of categories, with rigid, formidable boundaries guarded zealously
as if they were built out of gold.
The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis
as captured on a cell phone camera was so awful, so wrong, so perverse, that it
is hard to believe that anyone, let alone the police, could be so deaf to the
pleas and desperation of another human being, unless Officer Chauvin, now
charged with murder, was blind to the fact that his knee was on the neck of
another human being. We should be careful to not blame the sins of the few on
the group as a whole but the question is worth asking: have we become so
divided, so individualistic, so separated one from another, that all we can see
is “the other” but never the underlying humanity that unites us all?
The Bible still rests at the
foundation of our nation, but it along with God have taken a serious beating in
the name of a host of contemporary movements that have a better way. But that
better way seems rather elusive, and given the anger in the streets, coupled
with the looting and burning of both public and private property, in many cases
the businesses of black-owned small businesses, things have never been more
disunited and chaotic.
In parashat Naso, the term used for
counting or taking a census is Naso, which literally means “to lift up,” almost
as if one were lifting something up to the light to see it better. Over the
years, it has become increasingly clear to me when looking at people carefully,
that very few of us fit neatly into any category at all. Once you sit down and
talk to people—more than a “How are you?” or a “What’s up?”—and listen to who
they really are, and understand a little bit about their joys and sorrows,
their fears and challenges, their dreams and aspirations, it becomes clear as
the day is bright that they aren’t a whole lot different from who you are. You
might even discover that these people, purportedly so different from you, are
actually the bone of your bone and the flesh of your flesh.
I really don’t know what kind of
legislation can be passed which will lift us up out of the rut our nation finds
itself in. But I do know that each one of us has the ability to lift up our
neighbors, our friends and family, and see them in their full complexity and
not as a simple label that they have either adopted for themselves or were
subject to by a society dumbed down by identity politics. God did not make us
one-dimensional—none of God’s creations are. God does not want us to be alone,
live alone, or die alone. But God wants us to know that we all are descendants
of a single source and that the way we see each other is a testament to whether
we are human or beast.
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