SOMETHING NICE ABOUT THE POLICE AND WHAT THE DEMONSTRATIONS TELL US ABOUT WHO WE ARE AS AMERICANS

The demonstrations and protests of recent days, charging police with brutality and their departments with systemic racism, has gotten me thinking about whether there isn’t a broader context in which all this unrest rests. Certainly the killing of George Floyd as captured by a simple cell phone video, and so many other instances of unarmed black men killed while in police custody, calls for change and an end to the racial injustice that has plagued our nation since its inception. Like so many others, I find my patience having run out with a political structure that fails to correct the flaws that are themselves the very opposite of what we Americans hold dear. At the same time, the more generalized attack on the police as an institution is misguided. One crisis, the pandemic, has driven the other crisis, anti-Semitism, off the radar, but it was a mere three months ago when our synagogue and so many other Jewish organizations were working closely with the police to protect our institutions from attack. The police have been our friends and continue to be so. That some bad actors remain in their employ is a problem and that these bad actors are immune from prosecution is an even bigger problem. But to attack the police as an institution itself is clearly unsound. They arrest criminals, keep drivers honest, help maintain public order, break up fights, etc. The police are an essential service and a wholesale vilification of them is simple nonsense.

There’s a reason why we stumble into hatred of authority. In recent days, our experience with authority has been uniquely negative. Think the Catholic Church and how people whom we should otherwise respect have fallen from grace as testimony of sexual misconduct has repeatedly surfaced. The Church had its way of protecting bad actors, moving them from parish to parish, with hopes that a new space might give rise to needed reforms. Instead, it gave the head pray-ers a fresh population to prey upon. It was not a tactic that inspired trust in the Church as an institution.

Our politicians themselves, authorities legitimated by the consent of the governed—that’s us—are themselves held in virtual contempt. A 2019 Gallup poll found only 13% of Americans giving senators a very high or high rating in terms of honesty or ethical standards. That percentage dropped a point when Americans assessed members of Congress as a whole. The long and short of it is fairly clear: we have a problem respecting authority. And that’s a posture that the Torah will find problematic.

In this week’s parashah, B’ha-alotekha, Miriam and Aaron are taken to task for speaking ill of Moshe’s wife, a Cushite woman. Many modern commentators see in this episode racial discrimination, the Cushites being a dark-skinned people. Of course, the presumption here is that Moshe, Aaron and Miriam are white, a presumption with no textual support. Who knows what color they were? Jews are a multi-colored group. Moreover, when God reprimands Aaron and Miriam, it is not over their alleged racial insensitivity, but rather their challenge of a man with whom God speaks, “mouth to mouth, plainly and not in riddles” (Numbers 12:7). There is a hierarchy of authority in the wilderness and Moses is at the top, governed only by God. In the wilderness, authority is to be honored, not challenged, and for a group of Jews as unruly as the Children of Israel, that was probably a plus on many levels.

This respect of authority never sits well with contemporary Americans. We are a nation born of a rebellion against a ruling authority, the British Empire. Even before that, we were all and still are the heirs of that 18^th century historical period known as the Enlightenment that rejected the wisdom of the Bible, attacked the authority of the Church, and ignored the guidance of the clergy. There were good reasons for the Enlightenment to move people in those directions, but it did place an enormous burden on the individual who was often left at a loss for knowing how to proceed in life ethically or socially.

The authority of tradition rests in the fact that it is old, that is, it’s been going on for a long time. It’s been going on for a long time because it organizes our time, inspires our imagination, guides us in our moral dilemmas, and consolidates disparate people into a more or less cohesive group. When all that is taken away, we are left to the whims of cruel authorities who will consolidate people for their own inimical purposes, whether that authority is a despot or something more naturally sinister like a pandemic. Believe it or not, pandemics do consolidate people—around illness, health care, death, and fear. It’s not a good way to get organized.

One of the most marvelous by-products of the pandemic was a reinvigorated Kabbalat Shabbat on Zoom. We all somehow knew that on Friday, with the sun setting, and our week so horribly disrupted by social isolation, it was good to get into the Zoom Room and see our friends, neighbors and family. And sing. And sway. And dance a little. And reflect on our lives. And wish each other Shabbat Shalom. All in the name of this prescription that we had been given long ago to remember and observe Shabbat, as we learned from our ancestors and through the study of Torah.

Just to be clear, no authority is above the law and certainly not above ethics. To protect bad actors from prosecution is a recipe for disaster. There is work to be done in the law enforcement agencies throughout the country. Trigger-happy police must be prosecuted. Clerical sexual predators must be prosecuted. And as for lousy politicians, there’s an easier solution there. Vote. But when we disparage whole institutions, whether it is government, the police, or religion, we are indulging ourselves in foolish fantasies that would suggest we can live without them. But we can’t. We never have and we never will.

The authority of Torah is an authority worthy of our respect. It organizes us and guides us with principles that places respect for God’s creatures, regardless of their color, up there with truth, love and kindness. There are all sorts of time-honored institutions that are in need of reform, but let’s be sure that we engage in a surgical strike and not carpet bombing. God gave us brains for a reason. At a time of civil unrest and emotional distress, cooler heads must prevail.