How Can We Do Tshuvah for Concerted Social Misdeeds?
by Rabbi Arthur Waskow
Dear friends and companions in the Jewish struggle to make real the pledge L’Chayyim, To Life!
As we assess our shortcomings and missings-of-the-mark in the coming days of Rosh Hashanah, let us remember that partly as individuals and for sure as a whole nation, we have failed to deal with one of the worst human misdeeds in our history.
That is the exploitation of our Earth so totally uncaring as to bring on our cousin life-forms and ourselves the climate chaos and thousands of deaths, even as I write and you read these words.
The Al chet sheh’chatanu l’fanekha — the misdeeds we have misdone in Your Face — is the heart of our self-accounting. The “we” is deliberate — but it does not focus on a collective social misdeed. It says “we” to assert that many of the misdeeds we mention are shared by many of us, acting as individuals. For instance, we may confess to talking nasty about our companions — which literally means “the people we break bread with.” But thousands chose to do this, each on their own. It is important to notice, and to turn away from this destructive habit.
But we also need to deal with what “we” have done by acting and planning together, deliberately or unconsciously. That is not really addressed in our Rosh Hashanah liturgies or practices, not about past social misdeeds nor even about those collective systemic misdeeds we are misdoing right now.
Let me give an example: Enslavement of the Black community, a concerted act the Unites States as an entity did, seemed to undo through innumerable gallons of blood in the Civil War, apologized for and claimed to do tshuvah for in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and then allowed in large part to revive.
The US slave system had tentacles almost everywhere. If you bought a cotton shirt, knowing and accepting that the cotton came from enslaved labor, you were part of a vast conspiracy to do misdeeds that hurt and killed people. Even if you wanted to stop, it was hard to stop. Where else could you get a shirt?
But the Heart of the enslavement system began to have heart attacks. Enough enslaved people made their secret ways to freedom for the Slave System, in fear of a flood, to impose the Fugitive Slave Act. That turned shirt-wearing Northerners into active enslavers. They didn’t like it. Resistance blossomed.
The Slavocracy decided it needed to expand or suffocate. It insisted on the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, opening up territories to slavery that had long been reserved against it. Opposition swarmed, soon resulting in the election of Lincoln. And the Civil War.
The Rosh Hashanah practice is not shaped to deal with collective misdeeds. So far as I know, the only religious liturgies of tshuvah for slavery and its aftermaths, are pilgrimages to Edmund Pettus Bridge near Selma, the museum of lynching in Montgomery, and the like. Do we need to create new such liturgies as we create actifests?
To take another example: Much the same dynamic we have seen in US slavery is going on right now in Israel. with the enormously important difference of the use of massive civil dissidence instead of sticking to elections or resorting to massive violence. The Occupation of Palestine by the Israeli Army and violent settler “civilians” requires destroying the independent Israeli judicial system. Many “shirt-wearing” Israelis are infuriated by that threat to their own freedom and democracy. So there emerges almost nine months of civil disobedience by hundreds of thousands.
We could come to see these concerted acts of civil disobedience as versions of a modern Rosh Hashanah liturgy, and/ or we could absorb them into Rosh Hashanah itself, expressing an “actifest” (from “activist festival”).
In the United States, the electoral system and the “Inflation Reduction Act” have so far been able to meet the needs of “oil-wearing” Americans, but a summer of extreme heat domes, not only destructive wildfires but smoke poisoning the air thousands of miles away, floods and mudslides, all resulting from the burning of Earth for bigger and bigger profits.
More and more people refuse to accept old hierarchies: Big Oil brings forth the September 17 mass climate emergency demonstration in New York; millions of women change their votes to defend abortion rights; Black-led multiracial crowds insist that Black lives matter.
So large parts of the political system spring to the defense of the old ways. “Wokeness” becomes a curse. (Forget the days when religious folk were so proud of the Great Awakening.) Books are banned. Free and fair elections are denounced as frauds.
What to do?
The September 17 climate-emergency March in New York was called for the second day of Rosh Hashanah by climate activists. Communal committed Jews were informed, not consulted. Many felt that the March expressed their values better than a second day in synagogues; others felt that out of a year of drive and impulse, a few days of calm and meditation were deep needs that in themselves were opposition to the Corporate Carbon Pharaohs and their Plagues. This year, individuals made their own choices.
One lesson we could learn: The need for “actifests” (activist festivals) is great; the Jewish community, the Christian community, the Muslim community, the Buddhist community, should decide which, when, and how to make each festival fit the deepest needs of our community, our country, our planet.
What other lessons could we learn?
We could pay attention to the multiple aspects of civil disobedience that our Israeli cousins have invented. Not just mass vigils at the offices of fascist politicians newly elevated to cabinet ministers, not just mass blockages of highways, but strikes by doctors, by military officers, and other blocks to a system meant to subjugate. We could learn from how the Israelis exert the people’s strength in a small country how to do this in a region, or a metro area of a continent-wide society.
And let me add an idea that woke me this morning, and that needs more thought and planning: What institution do we have in place already that is de facto world-wide, equipped technologically to build windmills and solar cookeries and rescue victims of hurricanes and wiidfires, well-paid, well-disciplined, used to serving the nation’s needs when the nation has decided what they are??
The [Un]Armed Forces of the United States. Could we make the Armed Forces into the Unarmed Forces, aimed to heal the planet in convulsions we ourselves have caused?
I leave you with this gift of a wild idea for wild times, needing much more thought. I welcome your comments, long and short. And I welcome from you and with you the prayers for a year of creativity that learns new paths from our most ancient wisdoms; a year of food and homes that we make sure that everyone can live amidst; a year of Love that calms and dissolves whatever Greed we bring to hopes of wealth and power.
Blessed are You, the One who is the Interbreath of life, Who has filled us with Your Breath, Your life, has carried us dancing to this moment.
Brucha at Yahhhh, elohenu ruach ha’olam, sheh’hechianu v’ kimanu, v’higianu lazman hazeh!
Shalom,
Arthur
Photo by Ethan Ableman, licensed under CC BY 2.0.