Noach 5781: Vandalism and Healing

Raise your hand if you ever look at social media, read the news, or think about the political moment we are in and think, “let’s just….start over.” Let’s start humanity over again. Let’s return to more intelligent ways of being, of caring for the earth, of caring for one another. What we have now isn’t working, let’s throw the world as we know it in the garbage. If you’ve had these thoughts or feelings, you and G!d have something in common. In this week’s parsha, Noach, we read, “G!d saw how great human corruption was on earth, and how every plan devised by people was nothing but evil all of the time. And G!d regretted making humans on earth, and G!d’s heart was saddened.” Just one week ago, the world was created, now it is destined to be destroyed by a grieving G!d and a flood.

Personally, I have these feelings often. And, I felt them more acutely this past week when I learned of the anti-Semitic graffiti that defaced a sign downtown. The sign, outside of a chiropractic office, reads “End White Silence” a sign made by a Jewish woman as a call for white people to wake up and speak up in the face of racial injustice. Within the word silence was written a horribly four letters: k-i-k-e. A word that my father was called regularly having grown up in suburban Minnesota in the late 40s and 50s. A word that many of our parents and grandparents were called simply for being Jews. A word that symbolizes the ignorance and hatred that still so many people feel towards our people. An unwanted reminder of the flip side of our status as chosen people, that oftentimes it feels as if we are chosen to suffer.

With our history of suffering comes an enormous amount of resilience, often in the form of humor. Lizzie, the resident comedienne at Base, likes to say that every time you see a swastika spray painted somewhere, you’ll likely see 3 or 4 trial runs next to it. First it’s just an x, then it’s an x with the things pointing the wrong way, and then finally they get it right. I thought of this joke when I saw the defacement in downtown Ithaca this week. After my initial response of horror and disgust, I thought… “but what the f#$% is skikece?”

In this week’s parsha, after the flood destroys the world around Noach and his family (and the animals), a rainbow emerges in the sky. A reminder of the covenant between us and G!d. A reminder that we will not be destroyed again. And, a reminder of the color and life that fills the world. A reminder so needed in times like these, when things feel bleak and colorless. A reminder that in truth our world, regardless of it’s defacements, is beautiful and that reality is benign. On a walk on one of my favorite trails the other day, on a bench I saw another kind of graffiti. Unlike the one downtown, this one made my heart soar and my head tilt in curiosity of who this vandal might be and if I could befriend them. It was a poem by the Puerto Rican Jewish poet and activist, Aurora Levins Morales, titled “V’ahavta.” Here’s an excerpt:

Say these words when you lie down and when you rise up,

when you go out and when you return. In times of mourning

and in times of joy. Inscribe them on your doorposts,

embroider them on your garments, tattoo them on your shoulders,

teach them to your children, your neighbors, your enemies,

recite them in your sleep, here in the cruel shadow of empire:

Another world is possible.

Thus spoke the prophet Roque Dalton:

All together they have more death than we,

but all together, we have more life than they.

There is more bloody death in their hands

than we could ever wield, unless

we lay down our souls to become them,

and then we will lose everything. So instead,

imagine winning. This is your sacred task.

This is your power. Imagine

every detail of winning, the exact smell of the summer streets

in which no one has been shot, the muscles you have never

unclenched from worry, gone soft as newborn skin,

the sparkling taste of food when we know

that no one on earth is hungry, that the beggars are fed,

that the old man under the bridge and the woman

wrapping herself in thin sheets in the back seat of a car,

and the children who suck on stones,

nest under a flock of roofs that keep multiplying their shelter.

Lean with all your being towards that day

when the poor of the world shake down a rain of good fortune

out of the heavy clouds, and justice rolls down like waters.

Defend the world in which we win as if it were your child.

It is your child.

Defend it as if it were your lover.

It is your lover.

When you inhale and when you exhale

breathe the possibility of another world

into the 37.2 trillion cells of your body

until it shines with hope.

Then imagine more.

May we be blessed to find the rainbows in our lives, the glimmering reminders that there is beauty in this world, and that another world--the world of our dreams--is possible. Shabbat Shalom