
I participated in a meeting recently in Dorchester, a
neighborhood of Boston where many of my relatives lived and that I would often
visit as a child, not far from where I live now in the Jamaica Plain
neighborhood. The gathering was part of an ongoing effort to connect older and
younger activists. Regardless of age, a greater bridging happened around the
table, all of us coming to be joined across differences of race, neighborhood,
faith, economics and all else that serves so often to divide. We talked about
the very divides that at least for the moment seemed to be bridged among us.
Reflecting on the neighborhoods of Boston and the surrounding communities,
voice was given to the “avoidance of contact” that fosters implicit racism.
Before long, as painful stories were shared by African American partners, what
is often referred to as implicit racism seemed pretty explicit, the very terms
of reference we use serving to paper over the deeper brutality of racism.

Fostering ongoing, day-to-day, meaningful contact among
diverse communities remains one of the great challenges in the quest for racial
and economic justice and equity. Laws mandating equality do not in themselves
insure equity, and surely not contact with each other. The invidious politics
of avoidance and separation run deep. The tragic and shameful legacy of
redlining and blockbusting in the once Jewish neighborhoods of Dorchester,
Roxbury, and Mattapan insured the separation of Blacks and Jews. At a
conference I attended last June, an elder African American woman who had lived
in these neighborhoods since that time cried as she lamented all these years
later the separation of our communities.

These are painful and personal realities for Jews. We have
known so deeply what it is to be avoided, to be the other. We have known
ghettos and we have known restrictions quietly practiced and kept in place to
subtly insure that contact would be avoided. I remember as a child growing up
in nearby Winthrop hearing the word “restricted” in regard to both Blacks and
Jews. Sadly, at times, we have helped to facilitate such avoidance of others,
as in the Jewish flight from the three neighborhoods. At times, our pejorative
use of the word
goyyim, a perfectly
fine word meaning “nation” or “people,” has reflected a cathartic lashing out;
and at times a reflection of racism imbibed and made our own from the ways of
the society in which we sought to “make it.” At times our avoidance of others,
however sad, has been understandable. Separation has been a way of keeping
protective distance between our selves and those who would and did harm us. So
too, as for many minorities, separation insured a way of maintaining our own
distinctive ways and identity, offering a hedge against assimilation.

Prior to the meeting in Dorchester, at which these were all
such real questions, I had already been thinking about “avoidance of contact,”
of what it means and how and why it happens. It is a question that plays out
with painful and poignant consequences in that week’s Torah portion that is
called
Vayishlach (Gen. 32:4-36:43).
As Yaakov makes his way home to his family, he knows that he will need to
encounter his brother Esav, that one way or another a reunion will happen.
After twenty years away, having fled his brother’s anger and threat to kill him
for stealing the elder brother’s birthright, he now approaches the fateful
encounter. Wrestling through the night, whether with an angel, with God, with
the spirit of Esav, with himself, he struggles with all that has been and all
that shall be. Refusing to let go of his adversary, he is struck on the hip and
wounded, limping now toward wholeness. He is told that Esav is approaching with
four hundred men, clearly armed, the danger seeming clear. Yaakov prepares a
plan, arranging his family into cohorts, each to approach Esav ahead of him,
each bearing gifts meant to appease. As the plan unfolds, suddenly Yaakov runs
as fast as his limp will allow, making his way past the cohorts into which he
has divided his family, making his way to the front, there to face Esav alone,
no longer avoiding contact. The two brothers fall into each other’s arms and
weep,
and Esav ran to meet him and
embraced him, fell upon his neck and kissed him; and they wept (Gen. 33:4).

It is a powerful and beautiful moment, the past carried away
on a stream of tears, the brothers bathed as though in a
mikveh/ritual bath of hope. That poignant moment in the text of
Torah is not allowed simply to be, and nor are the brothers allowed to remain
in their embrace. The word for
kissed/va’yishakehu
is dotted in the Torah text, a small dot above each letter, even on the
parchment of the holy scroll itself. Some interpret the dots to mean that
Esav’s kiss was insincere, while others take it at face value, joining his kiss
with his tears, weeping seen as more assuredly genuine and harder to effect.
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch writes from nineteenth century Germany, “Tears
emanate from the inmost depths of the human soul. By this kiss and these tears
we recognize that Esau is still a descendant of Abraham.”

For all that should join the two brothers, when the time
comes to move on from the moment of reunion, Yaakov declines Esav’s suggestion
that they travel together. It is for me a deeply sad moment in Torah, one whose
consequences continue to reverberate as we seek our way in a world torn with
divisions. Yaakov says,
Let my Lord,
please, pass on before his servant, and I will continue to move at my own quiet
pace, in accordance with the pace of the herds… and the pace of the children
(Gen. 33:14). It is a beautiful thought and image to travel at the pace of the
children, but it becomes clear as Esav suggests at least leaving some of his
men for protection that Yaakov is seeking to avoid further contact with the
other. In this case, the other is part of himself, his twin brother. Perhaps
that is precisely the message that we are meant to learn here, that whenever we
avoid the other, we are avoiding part of our self.

In a beautiful teaching from nineteenth century Poland, the
Ha’emek Davar, Rabbi Naftali Tzvi
Yehudah Berlin, appears to share my sadness with Yaakov’s response to his
brother, offering a gentle challenge and reminder that we can yet take another
approach. Addressing us, he writes,
and
so for the generations, in a time when the seed of Esav awakens in pure spirit
to recognize the seed of Israel…, then we too awaken to recognize Esav, for he
is our brother…. Across time and neighborhoods, no longer avoiding contact,
may we recognize each other as the siblings we are, traveling together then
toward wholeness.
Rabbi Victor H. Reinstein
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