Community Blog

Shabbat Shalom! This week’s Torah portion is Parashat Vayera and contains the story of the Akeidah which we read on Rosh HaShana. In accordance with my message on Rosh HaShana, Rabbis Against Gun Violence led by Rabbi Menachem Creditor has issued a call to action that this be a Rabbis Against Gun Violence Shabbat or Gun Violence Prevention Shabbat. You are likely more familiar with Rabbi Creditor’s music than his activism or grassroots organization, as he is the composer of the song Olam Chesed Yibaneh. Originally composed in the weeks following 9/11, it re-emerges regularly to coincide with times of political mourning. I first heard it in 2014 in response to the Ferguson Uprising. It is regularly sung among Jewish groups at marches and protests, and in Jewish meetings for GOTV campaigns. Although the tragedy that originally inspired it was not one of gun violence, Rabbi Creditor invokes it again now in response to our nation’s practice of child sacrifice in the deadly service to the idolatry of gun lust. 

When I was in Iceland a few years ago, I met someone who was traveling from China by way of England. We became friendly and spent about half of our trip together. At one point she said she wouldn’t want to visit America because she was worried it was unsafe, citing the amount of gun violence she’s seen in the media, even since moving to Europe and having more access to free media than she might have had in China. And although most of us don’t walk through our lives in constant fear of being shot, she’s not wrong. We have a very high rate of completely preventable deaths in this country. And when we are faced with the reality of the threat of gun violence, our fear response is often to double down on the need for more firearms, rather than the preventability of the violence in the first place. This take is partially outside of logic entirely - it comes from the animal instinct part of our brain that fights, freezes, or flees when it senses danger. The idea of more guns makes us feel more safe in a way that doesn’t have to do with our humanity or higher cognitive abilities. But where logic does come in to justify that instinct, the logic is based more on individual responsibility and safety rather than community care and healthy social living, though the latter are highly valued in Jewish culture.

This week’s Torah portion is about social responsibility and the greater good. Not so much in Abraham’s decision to sacrifice his son, but earlier in the parasha, when Abraham welcomes in the strangers and when tries to advocate for Sodom and Gomorrah. We see that Abraham does value community care, that he is concerned for the possible innocents swept up in the collateral damage of God’s Justice, and that he seeks to build bridges while the people of Sodom seek to build walls. The rabbis teach that the central sin of Sodom was their inhospitality, and Abraham shows the exact opposite of that sin when he welcomes strangers into his camp, washing their feet and making them a feast. 

Welcoming others into a broader community is very important and it may help to alleviate violence, as perhaps those who exhibit antisocial tendencies may be softened by the kindness of others and come to realize that other people feel pain and have lives that should not be cut down. But more likely, that’s not the sort of social responsibility and community care needed at this moment. Rather, like Abraham challenging God’s idea of law and order, we too must be willing to prioritize the safety of innocents over the sweeping ideas of law and justice. The 2nd Amendment protects gun ownership, but does it need to be so unrestricted, so totaling in its ability to wreak havoc?

Further, Abraham arguing with God about the destruction of Sodom is one of the earliest examples of Jewish ethos in practice. Growing up, I often heard that Abraham was considered the first Jew because when told that God would be laying destruction upon entire populations, he challenged God, unlike Noah who accepted the warning of the Flood without passing on the information to others. This doesn’t really hold, because God offers the covenant to Abraham before his challenge to stay God’s hand at Sodom and Gomorrah, but the fact that this juxtaposition captured the attention of Jewish teachers in that way says something about the value we place on being able to wrestle with the Divine. As Reform Jews especially, we know that our sacred text is not exempt from our powers of critical thinking, that everything is up for debate, that sometimes the best way to honor the spirit of a law is to change the practice of it. If we can do that with the very decrees of God, surely we can do that with our constitution. Currently, of 200 constitutions in the world, only three still include a right to bear arms, and the other two come with much heavier restrictions than ours do. Certainly ours too could be further updated to respect the right to self-defense that our country’s forefathers intended, without allowing such free access to automatic weapons that they could never have imagined. 

While looking at some of the materials the Rabbis Against Gun Violence shared for this Shabbat, I came across something that I think I’d read before but it hadn’t really stuck until now. At last Sunday’s talk on the afterlife, I quipped that the place the rabbis believed all souls must go through to be purified before being reunited with God is called Gehenna, after an actual place in Israel that must have been truly awful that the earliest sages looked around and said, “Yes, this literally hell.” But what made Gehenna hellish to the Jews of antiquity was that it was where the shrine of Moloch was, a place where children were sacrificed and all manner of human refuse burned to honor the Canaanite god of the Underworld. As I said on Rosh HaShana, one of the most traditional readings of the Akeidah was that in staying Abraham’s hand, God and the angel were sending a message not only to Abraham but to all Canaanites who may hear of this tale later: Stop sacrificing children. And, as I also said on Rosh HaShana, it seems we too often are still willing to sacrifice children. We sacrifice children for the newer idols of gun worship and greed, and we refuse to entertain the idea that there may be a better way forward. Like Abraham, may we be willing to engage in some political theater to get the message across that we will no longer be willing to sacrifice children. Like Abraham, may we speak truth to power and call to account those who would willingly sweep away the innocent with the guilty, favor wanton destruction over nuanced complexities. And most of all, may we build this world with love. Amen and Shabbat Shalom.