The Moral and Religious Imperative of Racial Justice
By: Rabbi Shai Held
Tags: Anti Racism, Judaism

The Moral and Religious Imperative of Racial Justice

Rabbi Yitz Greenberg’s Torah changed my life in fundamental ways and for that I will always be in his debt.

Rav Yitz’s grappling with the theological implications of the Shoah taught me that a robust relationship with God and Torah permits, and sometimes even requires, deep questioning and sometimes even protest. Even in places where I have reached different theological conclusions from Rav Yitz, his model has been my guiding light.

To his enormous credit, Rav Yitz has never wanted his students to be carbon copies of himself; accordingly, he has always encouraged me, and countless others, to think for ourselves and develop our own voices. I hope that my voice, even when it differs from Rav Yitz’s, does him proud.

When I first heard Rav Yitz teach about Tzelem Elohim and the intrinsic dignities that go along with being human (infinite worth, equality, and uniqueness), I was electrified. I remember asking myself then, as I have asked myself almost every day since, how my life would be different if I took the absolute value of every human being seriously; how my community’s life would be different; how my country would be different; how the world would be different.

It was Rav Yitz’s Torah that led me to see gender-egalitarianism and the commitments to listen to and honor all voices, regardless of gender, as fundamental to what Torah in the modern world can and should be. Without Rav Yitz’s influence, I would likely not have embraced a gender-egalitarian vision of Jewish life and observance, and I would certainly not have been involved in the founding of the Hadar Institute. Hadar and those who have benefited from its Torah owe a vast debt to him.

Rav Yitz and me at a Hadar event in 2016

It was Rav Yitz’s Torah that led me to conclude that the struggle against racism in our society was one of the defining moral — and theological — issues of our time. If you take the concept of Tzelem Elohim, that we are all created in the image of God, seriously, I realized, then there is no more painful (and sacrilegious) reality than the scourge of racism. To see another person, an infinitely precious image of God, as less than human, or as less human than you, is nothing short of an abomination.

When I was arrested protesting the police killing of Eric Garner, I was animated by the Torah I learned from Rav Yitz; when I joined students involved in racial justice work to convince New York legislators to embrace greater police accountability in their relationship with African-Americans, I was driven by Torah I learned from Rav Yitz. When I have written and published on issues of race in America from a religious perspective, I have had Rav Yitz’s Torah front of mind; when I came to see the moral urgency of Black Lives Matter, I was again impassioned by Rav Yitz’s teachings.

I don’t know whether Rav Yitz would agree with every political position I’ve taken; my point is that I would not have been inspired to engage in this work without Rav Yitz. (If anything, I readily concede, I have not done nearly enough.)

Rav Yitz’s Torah of dignity led me to places Rav Yitz himself has not gone. When, as someone who loves and feels deeply connected to the State of Israel, I have called for greater dignity and rights for Palestinians, I have been animated by ideas I first learned from Rav Yitz. When I have described the occupation as a moral and religious calamity, I have been inspired by Rav Yitz’s vision of Tzelem Elohim. I know that Rav Yitz does not share my political views on the ongoing and seemingly never-ending crisis in Israel-Palestine, but my vision has been shaped by his Torah. Rav Yitz understood and respected my decisions, even as they differed from his own. I know that some of my own students’ views differ from or go beyond my own, as mine in some of these ways differ from and go beyond Rav Yitz’s; and like him I take joy, even sometimes pained joy, in seeing my students inspired by these values and engaging with them seriously.

So much of who I am, and of what I care about, was shaped by Rav Yitz’s Torah, and more than that, by his kindness and his mentschlichkeit.

In light of all this, I must say with full candor that I found Rav Yitz’s recent essay in SAPIR disheartening.

I am grateful for Rav Yitz’s moral clarity. “The time calls for serious action,” he writes. “The Jewish community should join in making the case for directing extra attention and resources to resolve areas of long-standing deprivation and inequality. Given the cumulative suffering of African Americans from centuries of slavery followed by systematic discrimination, their need for support to overcome deprivation deserves an out-of-the-ordinary response.” Rav Yitz is right: it is long past time for our country to do the painful work that will be needed to reckon with our past and to repair our present.

So what disturbs me about Rav Yitz’s piece?

As anyone who knows him will attest, Rav Yitz is an extraordinary listener. He is a person of insatiable human curiosity — he wants to know other people, to hear their stories, to learn what animates and inspires them.

In some of the ways Rav Yitz talks about parts of the movement for racial justice in America, I do not hear the deep sensitivity and nuance that is usually so characteristic of him. He paints what he refers to as the “antiracism movement” with a very broad brush, According to Rav Yitz, “This group brings a new narrative that rejects the inherited story of America as a land of opportunity. This worldview holds, instead, that the true story of America is one of unalloyed exploitation and abuse, primarily of black citizens.”

But why must we choose between these two narratives? America has been a land of opportunity for many, but it has also been a place of brutal oppression for countless others.

There really are no two ways about that understanding, not if we look squarely at the history of racial discrimination in our country. There is also an ocean of social scientific research demonstrating the ways that ongoing racism holds many African-Americans back — from studies of how Black men who report pain are treated differently by physicians than white men; about how much more likely a resume is to be taken seriously if it is headed by a stereotypically white name than by a stereotypically Black name; and so on. And the reality of unarmed African-Americans being repeatedly targeted (and sometimes killed) by American police speaks for itself — or ought to.

It seems to me that we need to embrace the complexity of what America is and has been — a land of dreams for many, and also a land of nightmares for many others. It was from Rav Yitz that I learned about the importance of embracing complexity and multifaceted-ness. We need to do that in telling the story of America too: An honest look at our nation’s failures need not cancel out the joy and admiration we also feel.

Rav Yitz worries that “it follows [from antiracist narratives of America] that all white Americans are beneficiaries of structural racism and are thereby implicated in this entrenched evil.” It’s important to understand, though, that most activists do not attack individuals and their achievements and successes; rather, they attempt to open our eyes, however resistant many of us may be to what we are being shown, to the ways that being white often does mean you get a head start in America.

To be sure, there is plenty of suffering among poor whites in America, but I have never heard African-American activists I have worked with and listened to deny this. The point many of them make is that devastating racism in the past, coupled with pervasive discrimination in the present (it’s often — though not always — more subtle, but it’s there) make the America many white people take for granted inaccessible and unavailable to many Black people.

As for being implicated in racism, let me just offer one example: I pay taxes, and my taxes pay the police. To the extent that there is racist policing in this country, I am implicated in it. I think often of one of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s favored apothegms: “In a free society, not all are guilty but all are responsible.”

Rav Yitz writes that antiracists are guilty of “wholesale condemnations” and that they “indiscriminately impeach all members of a group.” I am sure there are some radicals who do this but in my experience it is extremely rare. Rav Yitz is concerned that foundational tenets of the antiracist movement “contradict the hard-earned lessons of Jewish tradition that each person should be judged by individual behavior.” But again, I don’t think the point of racial justice work is to condemn all white people and declare them hopelessly racist. The point is to address systemic racism. Here, I fear that Rav Yitz has succumbed to caricature — in decidedly uncharacteristic ways.

There are undoubtedly some on the left who are unwilling to brook dissent, just as there are some on the right for whom that is the case. The issue here is not the left, but human nature, and how attached people can become to their orthodoxies (please note the small “o”), political and otherwise. But I do not think this characterizes most (or even many) of the people I know who are passionately committed to racial justice. If anything, I think most advocates of racial justice simply want to do what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., did, which is to summon America to be more true to its self-proclaimed ideals.

The larger problem with Rav Yitz’s essay, at least as I see it, is that it has always been easy for white people to advocate patience and moderation. (And, to be sure, patience and moderation are sometimes virtues.) But I think it is past time for white Americans to stop preaching patience to the oppressed when they call for justice. I can’t look a Black parent in the eye and tell them to wait patiently for the day when they won’t have to have “the talk” with their children about being careful in interacting with the police; I can’t tell African-Americans to wait patiently while their voting rights are again assailed and undermined.

I used to advocate for patience and moderation too, until I started listening more carefully to African-American leaders and activists, and until I started reading Dr. King in a serious way. Rav Yitz warns that “one-sided or extreme policies that will damage one group in service of another and that can erode the trust and mutual interests upholding democratic institutions.” The problem, simply, is that one person’s “one-sided and extreme” is another person’s “urgently morally necessary.”

I could go on, but let me conclude with this. If Rav Yitz’s point is that activists ought to be politically wise about what types of legislation they can and cannot get passed, that is one thing — and in my opinion, a conversation worth having (though here too I would remind us that what seems impossible now may be quite possible a decade from now). But I fear that some of the other things he says fail to reckon with the sheer enormity of racism and bigotry in this country.

Hadar has many alumni who are actively engaged in the work of pursuing racial justice in this country. Many of them are animated by a deep-seated conviction that Tzelem Elohim and human dignity are klal gadol ba-Torah, the great principle of Torah. I could not be more proud of them.

I write all of this inspired, as always, by Rav Yitz’s vision of Tzelem Elohim. I am proud that he is my rav muvhak, my most important teacher. I hope that my tone, and the content of what I have written does honor to the Torah we both hold so dear.