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Adversity, Apartheid, and Achievement

02/11/2022 12:47:27 PM

Feb11

Shabbat Shalom! This week’s Torah portion is Parashat Tetzaveh, continuing the instructions for the building of the Mishkan. This week’s set of directions focus mostly on accoutrements - the menorah, the oil, and the priests’ vestments. The very first line of the parasha is “You shall further instruct the Israelites to bring you clear oil of beaten olives for lighting, for kindling lamps regularly.” The Talmud comments on this: “Just as the olive yields light only when it is pounded, so are man’s greatest potentials realized only under the pressure of adversity.”

I don’t generally feel super comfortable with the glorification of trauma as a means through which someone learns a valuable lesson or comes out stronger. I think that trauma can lead to that, and it can also lead us to feel broken, sad, frightened, and cause commonplace necessities of life to feel arduous and/or painful. These are both true, sometimes within the same person, and they are both valid responses or personal outcomes of trauma. Trauma is something that happens to us outside of our control, and is preferably avoided for those who can manage that. It is not something that we need to go seeking, to live through, in order to become strong fully actualized humans. You can rise to great potential and have a successful, praise-worthy, kind life even if you never feel the pressure of an adversity like an olive being pounded into oil. 

That all said, it is true that some of history’s most famous heroes did arise out of such great pressure. On this date in history, February 11, 1990, one such hero was released from prison. Nelson Mandela was arrested and sentenced to suspensions, probations, hard labor, and short-term jail sentences a handful of times before finally being sentenced to life imprisonment by the South African Apartheid government for various crimes of treason. While in prison, he managed to keep in secret contact with many of his comrades in the African National Congress and continued organizing liberation struggles despite being very much not free. Finally, as the winds of global change shifted and a new president of South Africa saw that apartheid was unsustainable, Mandela was freed from prison. He continued his work with the ANC, but also entered negotiations with President de Klerk to end apartheid. 

It’s hard to say exactly when apartheid ended officially, legally, and practically. Negotiations moved forward for two years, then faced significant backlash from the white nationalist parties who sought to regain control, before finally pushing forward to culminate in South Africa’s first fully democratic election in 1994. Nelson Mandela won, and was sworn in just over 4 years after his release from prison. 

Every person of color who lived in apartheid South Africa was pressed as olives squeezed into oil. We don’t know all of their names, and we cannot know how each of them met their greatest potential under this pressure of adversity. I very much doubt that every person affected by such violence and oppression is able to come out of it like a fine and pure olive oil. Surely some just feel squished. We may honor Mandela’s strength, persistence, bravery, and capacity for forgiveness. And we should honor and remember all those killed by the violence or who died poor and forgotten by a country that did not serve them. 

These are important lessons of the past, not only because they were big moments of history and this is Black History month. We have so much to learn from stories of apartheid because similar things continue today around the world. Any country where a class of people are unrepresented, unable to vote, pushed to the outskirts of society, kept separate whether by law or by lived realities leftover from history - this is a country that still needs to learn what South Africa learned in their Truth and Reconciliation Comission. 

This Shabbat let us ignite the lights distilled from the pressure of adversity, and burn away the darkness of oppression anywhere it still lingers. May we find ourselves renewed after our own struggles, and may uplift others still in the midst of theirs. May we find compassion, patience, and forgiveness for those who have had it beaten out of them, and may we come together to pray in a mishkan of peace and justice. Amen and Shabbat Shalom.

Thu, March 28 2024 18 Adar II 5784