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From the Rabbi:
One of today’s biggest meta-issues is inclusivity. People hate being “not allowed” in places or contexts where they wish to be included. While today most people readily agree that Jim-Crow laws and “no blacks allowed” restaurants were abhorrent, there are definitely those today who feel that biological males who identify as women should not be allowed to participate in women’s sports. And that is hotly disputed. So, where, if anywhere do we draw a line?
Nowadays, excluding anybody on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, medical status or disability is labeled as hateful, and institutions which treat different people differently get labeled as apartheid, racist, homophobic etc. There is now an absolute intolerance for intolerance, and exclusion has become the cardinal sin of our era.
Now, we Jews know all too well the feeling of being excluded, shunned, labeled as “other” and therefore subjected to all manner of evil. Meanwhile, you cannot look at the Torah and not see the heavy dose of exclusivity. There are countless cases in which a Jew is to be treated differently than a non-Jew. Men from Women, Kohanim from Leviim and Yisraelim. From counting in a minyan, to lending without interest, to the Nazirite in this week's parsha, we are commanded to treat certain people differently than others.
Let’s look for example in our Parsha, Nasso. Numbers chapter 5 opens with the expulsion from the camp of anyone carrying certain categories of tuma.
“Hashem spoke to Moses, saying: Instruct the Israelites to remove from the camp anyone with a skin eruption or a genital discharge and anyone defiled by a corpse. Remove both male and female alike; put them outside the camp so that they do not defile the camp of those in whose midst I dwell.
The Israelites did so, putting them outside the camp; as Hashem had spoken to Moses, so the Israelites did.”
Can you imagine what would happen today if the city of Buffalo decreed that anyone who had a genital discharge or a skin discoloration had to leave the city?
After the Covid pandemic and the divisive fervor around vaccinations it’s not so hard to believe that given the right media spin many people would simply be compliant and shun even family embers who weren't. But certainly not everyone could be dooped in hateful compliance. I would expect there would be at least some opposition to it because it would be seen as discriminatory. Would it be found unconstitutional in the US? Would that even matter to those charged with enforcing it? I suspect there would be pandemonium. Protests that devolve into violent riots. Leper lives matter! A big balagan.
Such a law would institutionalize alienation of certain people, dubbing them as “other” and removing them from our midst. This is the cardinal sin of differential exclusivity. And yet, here it is in the Torah. ‘We don’t want those people around because they defile our Holy camp’, right? But wait. Is that really so different from Nazi’s not wanting Jews around corrupting their pure German culture?
Yes my friends, it is. It is incredibly different. And that difference is at the core of the Halachic method.
Discriminatory policies and hatred of the “other'' generally come from, or are an attempt at objective value judgment. The Nazis believed themselves to be objectively superior to us. They are good, we are bad. White supremacy obviously follows this pattern. Homophobia similarly often carries with it a value judgment upon homosexuals for being somehow unnatural, perverted or morally inferior. “We don’t want to mix with them because they are bad” has been the mantra of hateful folks for as long as they’ve been around. And we Jews know the sting and stink of such hatred all to well. So we mustn't fall into that way of thinking.
Being Tamei doesn’t mean you’re bad. It most certainly doesn’t mean we don’t want you around. Quite the contrary. It means that, like God, we see you, we accept you exactly as you are and want to help. With what you’re going through, the Torah prescribes some time of solitude for you to work on yourself inwardly and then gives us instructions for a specific ritual to facilitate your reintegration into the community. It’s not about a hierarchy of value of people. It's about specialization of design. Halacha does not judge a person or an object. It doesn’t really even describe it, and it makes absolutely no attempt to be objective. Halacha is always subjective and always pre-scriptive. Something being unkosher doesn’t mean it’s bad. It means that we must relate to it in a certain way. It’s about us, not about the food. The same goes with people.
Unfortunately, sometimes a vile, judgmental and condescending attitude surfaces even among us Jews, and even among Torah observant Jews. Jewish chauvinism is both terribly common and terribly sad. In my opinion, (and I believe Rebbe Nachman’s and Rav Y.D. Soloveichick’s as well) is a terrible corruption of Torah thinking. The Torah is not bigoted! In fact, Halachic categories and distinctions is the exact opposite of good/bad value judgment.
Rebbe Nachman in Likutey Moharan and Rav Soloveichik in Halachic Man both teach that halacha is the remedy for the essential poison of the Human condition - “The Knowledge of Good and Evil" or perhaps it would be more helpful to translate it as “thinking in terms of good and bad”. This kind of value-judgment thinking is toxic to the core. Instead of thinking “this is good and that is bad”, we say tahor/tamei, kasher/pasul assur/mutar. Halacha teaches us how to relate to people and things. To first accept everyone and everything exactly as it is, and then to move towards a harmonious relationship with them based on the Torah’s instruction.
The true remedy for the ailments of Man-kind is not abolition of all distinctions and a homogenization of humanity which ignores the specialness and uniqueness of cultures and individuals. Rather, the Torah, The Tree of Living, has many parts which are all special and unique. Looking at the world in every situation with eyes of “How can I help implement God’s vision?” “What does the Torah instruct me to do here?” This is the great gift given to us mt. Sinai - the antidote to that poisonous fruit we are still struggling to purge from our collective psyche.
Shabbat Shalom,
Reb Shlomo
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