I write this week in part to speak up about what I see as a dayeinu moment in Tennessee. Dayenu is of course the song we sing during the Passover seder that comes on the heels of the recitation of the ten plagues, contrasting these plagues with the manifold blessings we have experienced from the Divine. We list these blessings, and after each one we sing, “Dayenu!” — just this one blessing would have been enough for us and yet so many more came. Just leading us out of Egypt would have been enough, but You also revealed the mitzvot—sacred calls to action—at Mount Sinai. For example. The song goes on like this for many stanzas, counting off 15 different blessings we received.
Unfortunately, in Tennessee this week, we bore witness to a series of injustices, each of which on their own would have been enough — dayenu! — and yet the injustices built and built and built.
The first injustice was inaction on the part of the Tennessee legislature to respond to the mass killing of six people at a school in Nashville: three nine-year-old students and three sixty-year-old school employees. The killer had legally purchased seven firearms, using three of them in the attack, and fired 152 rounds on school grounds—all this despite the shooter’s own parents having said they “should not own weapons” and having been in treatment for an emotional disorder.
In the face of this, and in the face of thousands of protesters marching toward the Tennessee State Capitol to demand action to limit widespread action to guns, the Tennessee legislature was poised to do nothing. If this inaction had been the only travesty to come out in response to this tragedy—dayenu. That would have been enough.
But it wasn’t.
Three Tennessee lawmakers joined the protests, going so far as to protest on the floor of the legislature itself, admittedly an act of civil disobedience and a breach of the rules of Tennessee House of Representatives, but an important, if minor, symbolic gesture to demonstrate solidarity with the protesters and to make a call for action in the face of perhaps the deadliest shooting in Tennessee history.
The response of the Tennessee legislature was to move to expel the three lawmakers from holding their legislative seats altogether, an extraordinary measure that had been invoked only twice before in the 150 years since the Civil War, one for a house member who had solicited a bribe and the other for alleged acts of sexual misconduct.
If the Tennessee legislature’s response in taking the extraordinary step of depriving Tennessee voters of their duly elected legislative representatives in response to a protest of gun violence had been the only gross part of this episode—dayenu. That would have been enough.
But it wasn’t.
Two of the three elected representatives the Tennessee legislature moved to expel were black. The third was white. All three participated in the protest that had broken the House rules, minor infractions as they were. When the votes were tallied, the legislature had voted to expel only two of the three lawmakers. I’m sure I needn’t spell out for you which were the two.
It is a gross episode in the nation’s history. Of the sort we would have hoped had been relegated to the history books.
There will be claims that the non-expelled lawmaker, Gloria Johnson, 60, had been less strident or vocal in her participation in the protests than the other two, Justin Jones, 27, and Justin J. Pearson, 28, but the disparity in treatment is striking.
This from a state that had recently criminalized “adult cabaret entertainment” including those featuring “male or female impersonators”—a patently discriminatory and unconstitutional infringement of freedom of speech, which was fortunately at least temporarily blocked by a (Trump-appointed) federal judged as a likely free speech violation.
While the two items — the response to gun violence and the prohibition of drag — may seem disconnected, both possibly stem from the same root cause: a fiercely gerrymandered state that limits the number of competitive districts, rendering primaries the only relevant elections and giving one party a supermajority in state legislative bodies. Putting elected officials this out of touch with the broad swath of voters they represent endangers us all and leads to the discriminatory results we’ve seen over the last several weeks.
As Jews, we know what it means to be dispossessed. To live on the margins of society. To not be treated with the same human dignity as others around us. We don’t want to live in a society where others experience what we have.
Dayenu. Enough.
We’re also following heartbreaking events in Israel this week, where terrorist attacks killed a mother and two daughters in the West Bank, and an Italian tourist in Tel Aviv on Friday, April 7.
A Palestinian teen was then killed as part of an IDF raid in search of a man wanted for terrorist activities.
All of this came amidst the backdrop of violence consisting of rockets fired into Israel from Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, with Israel then retaliating, after an incendiary exchange between Israeli police and Arab worshipers after the worshipers had barricaded themselves in a mosque at the Temple Mount, the holiest site in the world in Judaism and the third holiest site in Islam. The space is a frequent source of tension between Jews and Muslims and has sparked significant exchanges of violence in the past.
The exchange is one more sad entry in the story of a conflict with no end in sight.
My heart is in Israel as I mourn the loss of life, pray for leadership that will steer us out of this conflict, and yearn for a time when we will know peace in the land of Israel.
