'We' Shall Make Restitution - Reparations© Parashat Naso 2020/5780Rabbi David Baum
What if everything you owned, everything you knew, was taken away from you? Your family taken away from you, shipped from one part of the world to the other in darkness.
Your possessions, your livelihood, and not just taken away from you, and not just you, but from your children, and your children’s children.
This is the black experience in America.
The New York Times created a special project called 1619. The series challenges us to add 1619 to the list of years that seem vital to us as Americans, like 1776. 1619 was “when a ship arrived at Point Comfort in the British colony of Virginia, bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s very origin.” Jake Silverstein writes, “Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, its diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day. The seeds of all that were planted long before our official birth date, in 1776, when the men known as our founders formally declared independence from Britain.”
The project forces us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.”
In the podcast, host Nikole Hannah-Jones begins with the following:
I don’t know, thinking about what they went through.
I don’t know. I just wonder a lot what it was, what it was like.
They say our people were born on the water.
When it occurred, no one can say for certain. Perhaps it was in the second week, or the third, but surely by the fourth, when they had not seen their land or any land for so many days that they lost count. It was after the fear had turned to despair and the despair to resignation and the resignation gave way, finally, to resolve.
They knew then that they would not hug their grandmothers again, or share a laugh with a cousin during his nuptials, or sing their baby softly to sleep with the same lullabies that their mothers had once sung to them.
The teal eternity of the Atlantic Ocean had severed them so completely that it was as if nothing had ever existed before, that everything they ever knew had simply vanished from the earth.
Some could not bear the realization. They heaved themselves over the walls of wooden ships to swim one last time with their ancestors.
Others refused to eat, mouths clamped shut until their hearts gave out.
But in the suffocating hull of a ship called the White Lion, bound for where they did not know, those who refused to die understood that the men and women chained next to them in the dark were no longer strangers. They had been forged in trauma. They had been made black by those who believed themselves to be white.
And where they were headed, black equaled ‘slave.’ So these were their people now.”
I know many of you are waiting for me to bring up the killing of George Floyd by police officers in Minnesota, or the protests, or the looters, or whether we as Jews can say Black Lives Matter or not, or a hundred other things that are in the news NOW, but that is not as important as what came before and what needs to be done. And why is it a Jewish issue, you may ask? Because we have a shared experience.
It’s an experience that is ingrained in the hearts and minds of anyone who is a survivor of the Holocaust, ingrained in their children, and grandchildren.
I have often told the story of my grandfather who was imprisoned in a concentration camp with his father and brother. His father would often tell his sons, “when we are freed, we will get everything back. My business, our house, our lives, we are all going to get it back.” My grandfather often spoke about this as one of the things that kept my great-grandfather going. He died just days after liberation. What he never saw, thankfully, was that this imagined future of restitution would never come about. The business he had, the house he built, everything he hoped for, would never go to his children. All that was left were pictures on the wall - the only way our family will return will be on Google Earth.
But there is a major difference between our two communities, but before I get there, first, some Torah:
In our parashah, Naso, in chapter 5, we read the following:
"The LORD spoke to Moses, saying:
Speak to the Israelites: When a man or woman commits any wrong toward a fellow man, thus breaking faith with the LORD, and that person realizes his guilt,
he shall confess the wrong that he has done. He shall make restitution in the principal amount and add one-fifth to it, giving it to him whom he has wronged.
If the man has no kinsman to whom restitution can be made, the amount repaid shall go to the LORD for the priest—in addition to the ram of expiation with which expiation is made on his behalf.
So, too, any gift among the sacred donations that the Israelites offer shall be the priest’s.
And each shall retain his sacred donations: each priest shall keep what is given to him.”
Some things to take note of here - we see here that God is anticipating conflict that will arise, what happens when a fellow human harms another? Not only is it an affront to the person, but an affront to God. The person who wronged the other is required to confess their actions - that’s how restitution begins. Then they do something physical, a fine is paid. We see here something interesting - there is a mechanism to repair, it’s a process. Then, the person has to make it up to God - —a ram of expiation (איל הכפורים)—to repair the spiritual component of the sin.
My teacher, Rabbi Danny Nevins, teaches the following, “The rabbis notice that back in Leviticus 5:21 a similar law is taught, but there the victim is identified as “one’s kinsman,” namely, a fellow Israelite, so this passage comes to be known as גזל הגר, “stealing from a stranger.” Even if the victim has died before the thief can be forced to restore the stolen property, and even if the victim has no heirs, the stolen goods must still be repaid, in this case to the public purse of the priests. The “stranger” is claimed as “one of us.” They are protected from theft, and if robbed, they are owed apology and restitution.”
Although slavery and the Holocaust are two very different matters because we were marked for annihilation, what we have in common with the black community here in America is that both of our communities were enslaved. Jewish labor and wealth helped funded the Nazi regime and enriched Germany even after their defeat.
The difference between our two situations is that we received reparations. There was a debate in the post-War Jewish community - do we take reparations from Germany or not? In 1952, first Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion argued that the reparation demand was based on recovering as much Jewish property as possible "so that the murderers do not become the heirs as well". His other argument was that the reparations were needed to finance the absorption and rehabilitation of the Holocaust survivors in Israel. According to the website of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, or Claims Conference, "In response to calls from Jewish organizations and the State of Israel, in September 1951 Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of West Germany addressed his Parliament: "... unspeakable crimes have been committed in the name of the German people, calling for moral and material indemnity ... The Federal Government are prepared, jointly with representatives of Jewry and the State of Israel ... to bring about a solution of the material indemnity problem, thus easing the way to the spiritual settlement of infinite suffering.”
The Claims conference is supporting survivors to this day, both here in South Florida, as survivors like my grandfather receive help, and in Israel.
There was a great debate in the Jewish community in general about reparations from Germany. How could you place a monetary sum on a life? And yet, our Torah does this, because they knew that there had to be a possibility for repair.
And so I come to the black community in America, and here is where I want to share a radical idea, imagine if I sent this Tweet to the President:
“I look forward to privilege of being present at meeting tomorrow. Likelihood exists that black problem will be like the weather. Everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it. Please demand of religious leaders personal involvement not just solemn declaration. We forfeit the right to worship God as long as we continue to humiliate black Americans. Church synagogue have failed. They must repent. Ask of religious leaders to call for national repentance and personal sacrifice. Let religious leaders donate one month's salary toward fund for housing and education for the black community. I propose that you Mr. President declare state of moral emergency. A Marshall plan for aid to black Americans is becoming a necessity. The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.”
I changed a couple of words, instead of Negro, I wrote black, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel could not Tweet it, but he sent it to President Kennedy as a telegram.
Rabbi Sharon Brous of Ikar in Los Angelas gave a stirring sermon about this subject: She wrote:
“There is 2,000-year-old rabbinic dispute over what ought to be done if a palace is built on the foundation of a stolen beam. One rabbi, Shammai, argues that the whole structure must be torn down, the beam retrieved and returned to its rightful owner. No home can flourish on a foundation built illegally and immorally. Another rabbi, Hillel, offers a different take: What sense does it make to demolish it? Let the thief pay for the beam, considering its full value as the foundation of what is now a beautiful home. Neither argues that you can pretend, year after year, generation after generation, that the beam wasn’t stolen. Neither suggests that time rights the wrong. Both understand that the theft, unaddressed, threatens the legitimacy of the whole enterprise. Something must be done to rectify the original injury. Our country was built on a stolen beam. More accurately, several million stolen beams. Only they weren’t beams. They were human beings. The palace they built was magnificent, but they have never been compensated for their labor.”
And so while I think we should continue to talk about criminal justice reform, police reform, justice for those black Americans killed by police officers and white supremacists, how we speak to each other about race, how we react to protests and riots, I think we have to have a difficult conversation as a country, and we, the Jewish community, are a part of that discussion: how do we right a wrong that began in 1619, that even if we were not there, but we have benefited from? The work begins with acknowledging the wrongs that have been committed to our fellow citizens.
As a faith leader, I don’t have the answer to the best way on how to write this wrong. Democrats and Republicans can come up with what they believe is the right formula, and they will likely look radically different.
However, I know that problems of racial injustice will not be solved in a tweet, or a protest alone, and definitely not a riot; our 'evolution' will not be televised - it will come from difficult conversations and debate between with each other. It is going to take courageous conversations and moral courage; and as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, ‘moral grandeur and spiritual audacity’. I will end with the words of Rabbi Tarfon (from The Ethics of Our Fathers) that is so ingrained in us as Jews:
לֹא עָלֶיךָ הַמְּלָאכָה לִגְמֹר, וְלֹא אַתָּה בֶן חוֹרִין לִבָּטֵל מִמֶּנָּה.
It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it;
May G!d give us the strength to bring Peace, Shalom, wholeness to our country.
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