Jewish Renewal: A Path of Healing and Transformation

Chapter One

Cruelty Is Not Destiny

The Jewish people came to historical consciousness in a world dominated by great imperial powers, first in Mesopotamia, then in Egypt. No wonder, then, that the first issue confronting them was how to understand the nature and meaning of cruelty. One can read the Torah as a first, conflicted, sometimes ambiguous but often enlightening meditation on how to handle the cruelty that the Jewish people were encountering in the world. But this was not only external, something imposed upon pure and noble beings by the outside, but also it was in us as well, and distorted us even as we sought to transcend it.

Abraham, Moses, and later Ezra were themselves products of the world of cruelty. Their perceptions and the ways in which they heard the voice of God were shaped by the ways they had been distorted by the cruelty that reverberated through their own lives. Yet What they heard when they heard the voice of God was a message that was very different from that heard by most of their contemporaries.

The ancient world was full of religious systems that validated the wonder and mystery of the natural order. The cycles of nature were revered and feared. But most of these religions saw the social world as another part of this same natural reality Existing class systems, unfair distributions of wealth and power, were as much a part of the natural order as the sunset. Throughout much of recorded history the oppressed have been socialized to believe that cruelty and oppression are inevitable, an ontological necessity, part of the structure of reality. Spirituality forthem became identified with reconciliation to a world of oppression: either through learning to "flow" with the world as it is or through imagining that the material world in which they lived was a prelude to some higher nonmaterial world, and that the task of the living was to escape material reality into this spiritual realm which embodied the purity and deeper reality that could not be imagined on this earth.

What the Jews heard was a very different message: that this worldcould be fundamentally transformed. Spirituality and morality werenot features of some other reality apart from this world, but wereinherently ingredient in this world, because the God who created theuniverse is also the God who brought morality into the world, and weembody God's spirit by being made in the divine image. Cruelty wasbuilt into social institutions and into the psychological legacy ofhuman beings. It appeared to be an "objective fact" about, humanreality only because oppressive social arrangements are very hard tochange, and psychological legacies are very hard to uproot. But "veryhard" is different from "impossible." One need not be overly optimis-tic about how quickly it is possible to overcome the legacy ofcruelty — that might take thousands and thousands of years. But fromthe standpoint of this Jewish sensibility, what we do, how we live, thekind of society we build, can contribute to the defeat of cruelty.

Recovering this revolutionary message is one of the central tasks of contemporary Jewish renewal.

Not that Torah has some naive notion of how easy that might be. Very early in the childhood of the human race, cruelty and violence emerge, so, as Genesis tells us a few chapters later, yetzer ha'adam rah mee ne'urav, which can be roughly translated as: there is some part of human beings that was already distorted from the experiences of our youth. The early experiences of the human race have left a legacy of pain that is passed on from generation to generation, creating a tendency toward malevolence that is also part of our situation.

What causes that distortion? Torah does not tell us. What it points to is the pain, anger, and fury that come from nonrecognition. Cain seeks God's acknowledgment that his contribution, his sacrifice, is as valuable as that of his brother Abel, yet he does not get that sense of being recognized as valuable and contributing. In his pain and fury he kills his brother Abel. When confronted by God and asked, "Where is Abel your brother?" Cain responds with what became the classic line of distorted consciousness, as much the line of those who turn their backs on the homeless and the starving of the world today as it was of those who have in every age allowed themselves not to see the pain of others: "Am I my brother's keeper?" Torah's unmistakable implication is that the moment one recognizes one's "other," one must simultaneously recognize the obligation toward caring and mutual concern. But what Torah does not explain is why that recognition breaks down. If blame is to be assigned at all, it is to God, who failed to give Cain the recognition that he so badly needed; and it is perhaps out of this understanding of His own culpability that God does not kill Cain but instead only banishes him. Yet in raising the question about responsibility and in recounting Cain's punishment, the Bible makes clear that it does not accept evil as some inevitability that must be accepted, but as a distortion that must be combated. This is not part of God's scheme, and it causes God shock and upset to discover this kind of behavior.

We have the germs of what might be called a Biblical theory about the origins of violence. Cruelty is made possible when human beings do not recognize in one another the image of God that is the essence of their own being — and hence turn away from others; do not hear their pain. Once this process begins, it builds upon itself, becomes a powerful force that is transferred from generation to generation. The people living in material abundance, fearful that they will not have enough if they share with everyone who is hungry, protect themselves from knowing others' pain by allowing themselves to believe that these others are really not human beings like themselves. Hence it is okay to turn their backs on others' pain.