The following drasha was delivered by Rabbi Ariana Katz on Yom Kippur Morning, September 28 2020/ 10 Tishrei 5781.
I want to begin with a very simple truth:
The harm that was done to you, the people you love, your ancestors and community, should not have happened. It was wrong, the harm that was done to you. You did not deserve it. You are so loved, and worthy of love. The people, institutions, countries, that betrayed you, you did not deserve.
This is the starting ground we are rooted in today. This immutable truth, that you did not deserve the harm that was caused. Today, as we gaze back into the shocking, infuriating, life giving, life taking past, as we look into the unknowable future with great trepidation, this moment which is the presence of all color and no color, all heartbreak and repair, all permutations of what could be...we honor what was, and honor what is unfolding.
Which is to say: our realities are shifting.
Which is to say: nothing is ever permanent.
Which is to say: wisdom for a year we cannot anticipate, a year that keeps us up at night, that demands our skills to face it head on, has to understand harm, what can be repaired, and how we do it.
On Yom Kippur we are called to account.
And all who come into the world pass before you like sheep for the shepherd--for just as a shepherd numbers the flock, passing the herd by the staff, so do you make us pass by before you, and number, and count, and determine the life, one by one of all who have life breath within. (1)
The liturgy describes every human being’s essence being noticed. Of note.
This is the theme of our spiritual work on Yom Kippur, perhaps our theme of this wider revolution/pandemic time too--accountability. I want to talk about the harm we do to one another, and the ways in which we are able to find accountability, and the ways in which the world can be transformed.
Survivor, if this leaves you cold, take a lap, return in 15 minutes. Or bring yourself closer, bring yourself comfort, stay in it with me. Trust yourself.
On Yom Kippur, we are called to account before the holiest being we can conceive of: the Holy One of Blessing, our own sense of justice, our community, ourselves. We pass before this holiest being we can conceive of, and are noticed. Checked in with. Called to account. For harm caused, and harm experienced. A Jewish sense of justice is predicated on an understanding that all wrong doing, b’meyzid or b’shgaga, on purpose or accidentally, must be named, repaired, repaid.
We do not live in a time where there is such truth telling and reconciliation. The news is full of perverted truths, the courts are as unjust as they ever have been, the highest office in the land purports undeniable lies to the whole country. Murder is documented, reported, and yet the courts say otherwise--On Wednesday a Kentucky grand jury indicted just one of the officers involved in the murder of 26 year old Breonna Taylor not for her murder, but for wanton endangerment of neighbors. The two other officers involved in the raid were not indicted. We live in a world of absent accountability, and absent justice. This is not justice.
This week in the United States over 200k people have died from the Novel Coronavirus, some of those our own beloved dead. That staggering number could have been prevented from rising so high, so many people did not have to die, were it not for the immoral, ignorant, death-dealing response from our local and federal governments. We live in a world of absent accountability, and absent justice.
We do not live in a time where there is truth telling and reconciliation. Our response to harm caused is to lock away the first person that could be accused of causing it (2). Prisons do not offer a place for healing and repair, they exist to lock people away that society fears, and make money for the private prisons and governmental bodies that jail human beings. Those needing mental health care, community care, access to employment and education, receive only punishment. Black and brown communities are overpoliced and over represented in the numbers: for every 100,000 people in each racial and ethnic category, 2,306 Black people are incarcerated, compared to 1,291 American Indian, 831 Latinx, and 450 White (3). Prisons exist to find someone to blame, instead of a society in which imagines vengeance as the only response. We live in a world of absent accountability, and absent justice.
What you work to repair reveals what you cared about in the first place.
Pirkei d’Rabbi Elizer taught in the 1st century that before the world was created, teshuvah existed. Teshuva--the return/repair/re-engagement rhythm that our Jewish tradition understands to be the response to harm caused. Imagine that. Before the entirety of existence came into being, the raw materials that floated in the world included teshuvah. How holy that before there was creation, and destruction, repair was already waiting. It is not that we will never harm each other, but we can reach to our primordial knowing about how to repair when we do. That we would harm one another and stretch to teshuvah was a part of the world conceived by the Holy One of Blessing before time began.
To do teshuvah is to be transformed, not to go back to how it was before rupture. Teshuvah is transformative justice. The twin teachers Transformative Justice and Tesuvah teach: “We don't want to go back to how it was, we want to do the alchemy of creating something new.” Teshuvah is the holiest place we can reach in this world, when that which has been destroyed is composted into something new.
And, teshuvah is not always possible in this lifetime.Sometimes, the kind of personal healing that has to happen is far more necessary than repair with another person. Restoration to what things were like before is not ever possible, restoration to be in relationship after violation is not always possible. Some things are not meant for this world, but perhaps the work of the world to come. Some people do not need to be in your life, regardless of if there has been accountability. Teshuvah, repair, is often wielded as a cudgel against one another, demanding a distorted accountability process or forced forgiveness. Sometimes an apology is demanded without any real work or transformation on the part of those who cause the harm. The expectation that the impacted will do the work to forgive and rise above the harm that was caused is too often then distorted to turn harm causer into victim. Some hurts just need more time to soothe. Or a proven track record of change. Or a community to witness what was done. Writer, prophet James Baldwin said it clearly: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” In each moment, we must discern how teshuvah can be made, what work must happen, and if it is yet time. There are rare times that even this lifetime is not enough time.
But of most other places we cause and experience harm:
When looking for stories of how our ancestors have handled falling apart and making sense of the pieces, been in need of accountability, there is no better place to start than the heartbreaking season before and after the destruction of the second Temple.
On Tisha b’Av we ask: how could the Jewish people, the Holy Temple, have been destroyed? The Gemara (4) tells us, “And Jerusalem was destroyed on account of two men: Kamtza and bar Kamtza.” How, you might ask? Well, it is my pleasure to tell you.
This is as there was a certain man whose friend was named Kamtza and whose enemy was named bar Kamtza. This man threw a huge party, maybe even a wedding, and told his servant: Go bring me my friend Kamtza. The servant went and mistakenly brought him his enemy bar Kamtza.
Now what are the chances, right? Regardless of who they are, there is unresolved conflict, we know not from what in this text. And we’ve all been there--two people in your mutual friend group or family are not talking. Maybe one is not safe around the other. Maybe there was a small infraction years ago that has been left unattended and blossomed into a feud. What I know to be true: always, this results in real pain for all parties, someone is an enemy, someone is a friend. What I also know to be true: people love drama, even when it is rooted in acute suffering. When we are part of the group surrounding the conflict, we are so much readier to gawk, gossip, have unsolicited opinions, and even fan the flames, instead of asking, “how can I help make repair?”
So you’re having a party, and you can only invite one. Well in this case, the host meant to invite Kamtza, but Bar Kamtza showed up instead.
The man who was hosting the feast came and found bar Kamtza sitting at the feast.
The host said to bar Kamtza, “You are my enemy! What then do you want here? Arise and leave.”
Bar Kamtza said to him, “Since I have already come, let me stay and I will give you money for whatever I eat and drink. Just do not embarrass me by sending me out.”
But the host insisted. “No, you must leave.”
Bar Kamtza said to him, “I will give you money for half of the feast; just do not send me away.”
The host said, “No, you must leave.”
Bar Kamtza then said to him, “I will give you money for the entire feast; just let me stay.”
The host said to him, “No, you must leave.”
Finally, the host took bar Kamtza by his hand, stood him up, and took him out.
A whole scene happens at this party. Now we never know what Bar Kamtza did to be such an unwelcome guest.
But we see a whole mess of hurt people hurting people.
What we also know, is that he was humiliated.
After having been cast out from the feast, bar Kamtza said to himself, “Since the Sages were sitting there and did not protest the actions of the host, although they saw how he humiliated me, learn from it that they were content with what he did. I will therefore go and inform against them to the king.”
Notice what flips here. Bar Kamtza is humiliated by the host, but who is he mad at? Not the host, though I’m sure he’s on the list. The Sages, who were sitting one table over having a hilarious schmooze at this simcha (joyous occasion), without a doubt hiding behind their goblets to watch the conflict. Again, note the way we love to watch violence play out, without getting involved. And how violent is is when people in power do not intervene. We call that “institutional betrayal,” and it is its own unique harm.
Because of the humiliation Bar Kamtza experienced by his community and the rabbis, he became an informant:
He went and said to the emperor, “The Jews have rebelled against you.”
The emperor said to him, “Who says that this is the case?”
Bar Kamtza said to him, “Go and test them; send them an offering to be brought in honor of the government, and see whether they will sacrifice it.
Now if you needed a source text to talk about the Jewish people’s strategies and mistakes in navigating a precarious relationship with the State, we would stop here.
So the emperor chooses a choice calf, and while Bar Kamtza is bringing it to the Temple, he makes a מום, moom, a blemish on the calf, knowing that it would not be accepted by the priests, but that the emperor would see this only as a rebuff.
The priests receive this blemished offering, and panic.”The blemish notwithstanding, the Sages thought to sacrifice the animal as an offering due to the imperative to maintain peace with the government.” “But if we do, people will say that blemished animals may be sacrificed as offerings on the altar,” and the trust and law of our observance will be called to question.
All this concern and lament over what offering can be brought, what kind of blemish is permissible, but the sages had nothing to say when Bar Kamtza was being humiliated? All this investment in Temple sacrifice, but when social cues needed to be bent to accommodate human dignity, no one was around? “Is this the fast I desire?” They learn it was bar Kamtza who caused the blemish.
So the Sages said “If we do not sacrifice it, then we must prevent bar Kamtza from reporting this to the emperor.” They thought to kill him so that he would not go and speak against them.
Rabbi Zekharya said to them: If you kill him, people will say that one who makes a blemish on sacrificial animals is to be killed.
As a result, they did nothing, bar Kamtza’s slander was accepted by the authorities, and consequently the war between the Jews and the Romans began.
The war that would cause the Holy Temple to fall. A war caused by a man so humiliated. By an invitation to the wrong house. To an unrepaired rift between men. Apocalypse.
No one is blameless in this story. Harm done in our communities is our collective responsibility. The Romans and their colonization and destruction.The Priests, trapped between a ruling power with teeth bared ready to attack and the moments notice, and the life dignity of a single man. The rabbis, bystanders unable to understand the opportunity they had to intervene. The host who humiliates Bar Kamtza. Bar Kamtza, and his unmanaged conflict with the host, betrayal of the entire Jewish people.
I often think about harm and accountability in the context of the philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Betham’s work on the panopticon. He envisioned, grotesquely, an efficient system of control, a design for a prison. “The concept of the design is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched. Although it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the inmates' cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that they are motivated to act as though they are being watched at all times. Thus, the inmates are effectively compelled to regulate their own behavior. The architecture consists of a rotunda with an inspection house at its centre. From the centre the manager or staff of the institution are able to watch the inmates” (5). He imagined this plan could apply to hospitals, schools, asylums, but it is the prison he truly visioned this for.
When we begin to limit our behaviors because of the perceived expectations and punishments of a disembodied power, we have entered the Panopticon (6).
If we believe in a world where every human being’s essence is noticed, we cannot villanize and dispose of one another.
If we are visioning a world where true responsibility, accounting or our action, and healing is possible, we are chiyyuv, obligated, to reach for a world beyond police. This also means we cannot be police to one another.
And so enters the Stanford prison experiment. When humans socialized to discard and enact violent power are given the authority to do so, we begin to do that to each other. When we fully embody a feeling of responsibility to uphold white supremacy, allistic (7), “normative” power. When we demand perfection of one another, cultivate a culture of urgency and immediacy, when we do not make room for neurodivergence, adaptivity and disability, dissent, conflict.
Over the past few years, a new name to describe cherem--that is, social banishment, and the power of calling truth to power, has emerged. Cancelling, cancel culture, bringing to the fore the truth about someone’s damaging actions, and a public, often immediate “cancelling.” Now I am not against cancelling--it is, as adrienne marie brown teaches (check something off your bingo cards, folks) that cancelling is an “emergency break” (8) when other processes of accounting for harm and attempts at repair cannot work.
But it is not the first step on the road to justice or teshuvah. And the ways in which we deploy that break keep us bucking and lurching without progressing anywhere down the road. The fear of being cancelled is an experience of being held accountable--what are you fearful of being called out to account for?
But the fear of being cancelled is also an experience of being policed--constantly fearing the punishment to come, being deemed unable to change, unworthy to support transformation. When deployed poorly, as it so often is (because we are hurting,) cancel culture upholds policing our own communities, and is the inverse of transformative healing.
An expectation of rupture, repair, return, is an experience of being human. For community to really matter, we have to be called to account when we cause harm. For a group to matter, we have to be ready to continually transform within it. For us to trust one another, we have to be able to make teshuvah however possible.
Bar Kamtza was not disposable, though the Sages suggested that his death was the only option to save the Jewish people. Nor was the host, for whatever conflict he had with Bar Kamtza, worthy of letting him off the hook without repair.
I believe that human beings are not disposable, no matter who they are. And that is the teaching of this story, the results that would end with the entire Temple being destroyed: we cannot throw away those that we deem unwelcome, unworthy, unfixable. To treat one another as disposable destroys the entire world.
This is not a message I feel ready in my body yet, fully, to share, I have joked for years that there is a 10 year clock on my restorative justice sermon. I believe last year, the clock was at 6 years. Because I have witnessed profound harm done to the people I love most in this world. And I want those who harmed them to suffer. Profoundly. My mind and spirit believe that no human being is disposable, my heart is not fully there yet. But we can be imperfect and still move forward. In fact, we must.
If no one is disposable, and we cannot cancel one another, we also cannot let one another off the hook. If we express values that human life is inherently worthy, that transformation is possible, then we must also demand more of one another.
And in this season of our lives when how much agility we can move with as a group will be so vital, being able to name, account for, accept responsibility, commit to change is a survival skill.
But it raises an uncomfortable tension. If we believe that no human being is disposable, deserving of being imprisoned, medicalized without their consent, shunned, but we still want to see justice and accountability for harm done, how do we get there? How could a machine so violent and destructive have swept so many into its undertow? How could holding one another in relationship and commitment to repair what breaks on such a small level promise to bring great transformative world changing justice?
Just because we don’t know exactly what to do, does not mean we stop moving forward. So instead, what do we know:
This stuff is embedded. The harm we have experienced, the desire to feel safe, and how naturally we want to blame, externalize, avoid responsibility, cancel. So where do we start? Noticing the very essence of every human being. Including your own. Noticing and refusing whenever possible to surveil, punish, demonize, isolate, or discard yourself or another person. To reach for teshuvah, whenever possible, to build something new where things have broken. Engage in an act of teshuvah you could never imagine possible. Not all forgiveness and transformation can be expected of us in this life, but, for all of us, there are places we can stretch. Teshuvah existed before the world and all her shattering did. Reach back to that time before time. The world is truly in a Great Turning. And we need this community tool honed on our way to getting there.
May this year be a year of deep accountability. In which Bar Kamza and his host can come to a new place of truth, whether or not they want to dine together.
May this be a year we realize that despite his betrayal, we do not have to expel Bar Kamza.
May this be a year we rise up when we see him being locked away.
May this be a year when we can allow ourselves to be messy and forming.
May we have the opportunity to be called to account and transform
May we have the opportunity to transform and receive healing and justice.
Unetaneh Tokef, liturgy from Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, as translated in Machzor Kol HaNeshamah
“Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020,” Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, 3/24/20
Ibid
Talmud Bavli Gittin 55b-56a
“Panopticon,” Rabbi Wikipedia
See: students in online schooling.
“10 Autistic Phrases Explained: The Meaning of Words Like Allistic and Neurdivergent,” Vanessa Blanchard
“unthinkable thoughts: call out culture in the age of covid-19”, adrienne marie brown
Further learning:
“unthinkable thoughts: call out culture in the age of covid-19”, adrienne marie brown
”I Hope We Choose Love: a trans girl’s notes from the end of the world” by Kai Cheng Tho
”The Broken Teapot” zine in print, and audio recording
”Fumbling Towards Repair” by Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan
Image created by Maksheyfe Besalel