Creating a Palace in Time Amidst the Whirlwind of the World
A couple of months ago I underscored the idea, using Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s famous turn of phrase, that Shabbat is meant to be a palace in time: immune to the whims and vagaries of the weekday rhythms, the trials and tribulations we encounter on a daily basis, the ups and downs, the drivings and ambitions, Shabbat he notes, is a day on which we abstain from the kindling of fire—even, he says, the fire of righteous indignation. We imagine that peaceful palace, a harbor, a fortress protecting us from the whims of the world.
And yet, in that same teaching we talked about the fact that, try as we might to construct that palace, sometimes the waves of the world come crashing in over the ramparts; that events overwhelm a desire to experience peace.
I’m afraid that while I would like to keep us in the tranquil state we have tried to make space for this evening, that once again the events of the world around us call for us to make space for reflection about how we respond to them.
You might be wondering just which events I’m talking about; given the state of the world, I could be talking about any number of things—wildfires raging exacerbated by a maltreatment of the only earth we have, the nomination of candidates who espouse views that threaten to upend our democracy and women’s bodily autonomy; an ongoing war in Ukraine leading to the loss of lives of innocents.
But no this week, I’m talking about the massacre of ten Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo New York, by a white supremacist terrorist. Ten human beings whose names I’ll list: Celestine Chaney, 65, cancer survivor, churchgoer, bingo player; Roberta Drury, 32, beloved daughter and sister who moved home to help her brother fighting cancer; Andre Mackniel, 53, who stopped at Tops to buy his 3-year-old son a birthday cake; Margus D. Morrison, 52, school bus aide survived by his wife, three children and a stepdaughter; Heyward Patterson, 67, father and church deacon who fed the homeless and gave rides to neighbors; Aaron Salter Jr., 55, retired police officer who died trying to stop the gunman; Geraldine Talley, 62, expert baker and friend to everybody; Ruth Whitfield, 86, beloved mother, grandmother and great-grandmother who was caretaker of her husband; Pearl Young, 77, who ran the local food pantry and loved singing, dancing and her family. (Descriptions from this Washington Post piece)
This set of killings would call for commentary, reaction, and a call to action here tonight even if had no ties to the Jewish community, given the sanctity of life in Jewish tradition, given the way in which we know that everyone was created in the image of the divine, and given the need to combat the longstanding strain of anti-Black violence in this country. So there would be a call to comment on this even if it had no ties to the Jewish community.
But it does.
I’ll read a couple of paragraphs from a well-crafted New York Times report that articulates what i’m talking about, under the headline, “Creeping Into the Mainstream, A Theory Turns Hate Into Terror.”
“Inside a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018,” the article begins, “a white man with a history of antisemitic internet posts gunned down 11 worshipers, blaming Jews for allowing immigrant ‘invaders’ into the United States.
“The next year, another white man, angry over what he called ‘the Hispanic invasion of Texas,’ opened fire on shoppers at an El Paso Walmart, leaving 23 people dead, and later telling the police he had sought to kill Mexicans.
“And in yet another deadly mass shooting, unfolding in Buffalo on Saturday, a heavily armed white man is accused of killing 10 people after targeting a supermarket on the city’s predominantly Black east side, writing in a lengthy screed posted online that the shoppers there came from a culture that sought to ‘ethnically replace my own people.’
“Three shootings, three different targets — but all linked by one sprawling, ever-mutating belief now commonly known,” the report says, “as replacement theory. At the extremes of American life,” it continues,” replacement theory — the notion that Western elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to ‘replace’ and disempower white Americans — has become an engine of racist terror, helping inspire a wave of mass shootings in recent years and fueling the 2017 right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Va., that erupted in violence.
“But replacement theory, once confined to the digital fever swamps of Reddit message boards and semi-obscure white nationalist sites, has gone mainstream. In sometimes more muted forms, the fear it crystallizes — of a future America in which white people are no longer the numerical majority — has become a potent force in conservative media and politics, where the theory has been borrowed and remixed to attract audiences, retweets and small-dollar donations.”
Replacement theory: the notion, espoused in one permutation, that Jews are manipulating elites—the media, politicians—to replace and disempower white Americans. And then multiple different targets of nonwhite groups are targeted for violence as a result of this theory: Jews, People of Color, Muslims … It leaves me speechless.
Fortunately, there is largely a consensus for how to respond. From a policy perspective, it largely entails electing officials who will recognize white supremacist violence as a national security priority, the policy implications of which include everything from ensuring that technology companies take steps to end the use of their platforms to facilitate violence, to restricting access to weapons of mass murder, to, if you can believe it, countering the recruitment and infiltration of law enforcement by white supremacists, which is apparently an ongoing problem, to investing in security funding for at risk institutions, of which we have been a beneficiary, to investing in public health and mental health services for those who are at risk, and more. There are ways to combat this.
But I want to turn our reflection here tonight in a slightly different direction, prompted by, and bringing us back to, where we started this evening, with Abraham Joshua Heschel. Heschel was living in Germany in 1938, and was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Poland. His mother and two sisters were murdered by the Nazis and a third was killed in a German bombing. He knew evil.
And yet his reflections on it were not straightforward. In a chapter entitled “The Meaning of This Hour,” published in his gorgeous book, Man’s Quest for God, on the subject of evil, he cited the Baal Shem Tov, the rabbinic mystic regarded as the founder of chasidut, a movement of Jewish spiritual revival when he wrote, “If a man has beheld evil, he may know that it was shown to him in order that he learn his own guilt and repent; for what is shown to him is also within him.”
When Heschel is shown evil he takes it as an opportunity not to attack the perpetrator—though that can absolutely be necessary, he suggests—but to look within. Going after the perpetrators is a part but not the whole of saving ourselves. The other part is to look within.
What does he mean?
I’ll give you a personal example. When I hear about replacement theory, the fear that someone else is coming for your position of power, that someone else’s participation in society means the denigration of your own, it sounds like an extreme, distorted version of something many of us experience—a sense of scarcity. A sense that there is not enough to go around. A sense that someone else’s success means the ultimate the deprecation of your own success. That someone else’s thriving means you are thriving less, when so often—not always, but so often—the reverse is true.
Sometimes, I find myself hearing that this or that rabbi got some recognition, this or that synagogue is in the news, this or that family is gaining in the world in some way, and I find the smaller parts of myself piping up inside—”You deserve that. What about you? Does this mean your own success is diminished?”
I’m not trying to compare myself to some of these horrific actors, but I am trying to take seriously the suggestion that when confronted with evil, it is an invitation to look within, with the implication that, while we can and should go after the bad guys to stamp out that kind of hate, that for for the world to be truly healed, for it to be truly a gathering place for the divine, that we are invited to bring forth that light within us, to tend to the parts of ourselves that, if we’re not careful, send out ripple effects into the world, that, multiplied millions, billions times over lead us to where we are.
Heschel essentially believed that if we would but let God in, however we might understand that, the world would be different. That there is an invitation, crying out to us to respond to it. To look within ourselves, see the parts of ourselves that need tending to, that need attention, that need love and care so that they heal and don’t harm others. Only then can we honor the memories of those we’ve lost. Only then can we create a true palace in time.
