What is going to happen to us in 2024? I want to know. I want to know that democracy will be preserved. I want to know that the forces of antisemitism, hate and extremism of all kinds will be defeated. I wish for an end of death of so many innocents in wars that have nothing to do with their souls or lives. I want to know that the “bend” in Dr. King’s long arc of history will at some point start to, well — bend.
Right now, history’s curve seems inverted. We Americans, to say nothing of residents of Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Ukraine, Russia, China, North Korea, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran, Syria and so much of the rest of the word seem perpetually immersed in dread. Pandemic weariness, gender-based violence, economic inequality, war, climate disaster, racial and sectarian hate and worstening structural inequality stalk the land like a modern iteration of ra`abh / famine. We feel unable to chart a course along the path of justice and lack, in many cases, the leaders who might show us how to do this.
So — what reason could we possibly have to hope in 2024? What would hope even look like right now? How would it work? I’ve been thinking about these things over the past couple of weeks, and here’s what I’ve come up with …
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At the beginning of Parashat Vaera, the Israelites find themselves in a state of hopeless exile in Egypt. They are tired, beat down and unable to imagine a positive future. They have lost political protection too — the ruling regime has become antisemitic,and conditions are getting worse. Their own community leadership, which is to say the children of Amram the Levite, seem incapable of any kind of relevant action. In the case of Moses, we have a leader that perhaps even unable to even speak to the people in their own language. Nor does history provide any inspiration. Tales of the founding Patriarchs and Matriarchs, when recalled at all, seem like the inscrutable myths of a far-off past. No living Hebrew in the community has set foot in the Land of Israel in many long years, at least that we are told of. Jacob was the last to be buried there several hundred years before. Joseph, also long dead, has been mummified and submerged in the Nile — a fate he shares with the god Osiris. The Hebrew people for their part seem maximally disconnected from their own culture and religion. Exodus 6:9 describes describes this disconnection as מקצר רוח. Their spirit/life force (רוח) is constrained or “crushed” (מקצר) by their predicament.
Rebbe Nachman notes מקצר רוח also means “shortness of breath.” (see Likutey Moharan II 86) or in the parlance of recent years we might translate this phrase as: I can’t breathe.
I invoke this phrase with trepidation. It has become sacred. But it has also become universal. Without doubt, the words of George Floyd relate specifically to the black experience in the United States in recent times and in all times. But the phrase has been sanctified by real and continuous struggle and has acquired additional power with every passing year. As a universal liberationist idea it has acquired the specific power too — it is becoming a cry for rescue that can be used by all who follow in the wake of black liberation to identify all injustice, for all injustices spring from the same root.
To admit that we are having trouble breathing right now at the dawn of this decisive year is the only possible first step in re-acquiring some measure of life. To admit this is also to begin to breathe back new רוח/life into the ancient story of the Exodus. We are told that the Israelites were short of breath. Lack breath is a medical emergency. I think we must take this idea seriously, both with respect to our own sense of constriction and the desperation described the Exodus story. There is no time to waste. We must breathe for those who were and are in exile, into those who were and are in exile, and through those who were and are in exile by whatever means we can manage. To do so is a positive commandment in Torah.
But the victims of history and exile can be hard to locate. The enslaved Israelites in the stories of Exodus 6-9 are a missing, silent, deeply passive people — a non-nation, an un-character in the narrative. The action of the plagues, the diplomatic and magical war for freedom, the curses and demands, the hardening of the ruling heart … all of these events take place on the level of great leaders and gods — Pharaoh, Moses and Aaron. The people, when mentioned at all, suffer or do not suffer by dint of great events that occur far above them.
מקצר רוח/I can’t breathe can also mean “impatience”. According to Breslov tradition the people in exile have lost the mentality required for engagement with the core of life. “When one’s awareness is in exile,” writes Reb Nosom, “so is one’s speech.” Thus the “hard labor” of slavery is not really that of brick-making, but of prayer. This is to say that religion itself has become an enslaving rather than liberating force. Abraham Joshua Heschel, speaking in a voice that directly recalls his Alter Rebbe grandfather, reminds us that this kind of speech/prayer death, even and especially in the halls designated for religious use, continues to this day. “The synagogue, he said, “is where prayer goes to die.”
Galut ha-dibbur is the Hebrew phrase expressing this idea. It means “exile of speech” but can be imagined to express something more fundamental — a brokenness of all possible meaning. This is a disconnection so complete that the very thing that makes us truly human – the creation of meaning with words — ceases to function. As the scholar Aviva Zornberg explains:
In the exiled state, language is repressed. A Pharaoh who does not know Joseph has denied vital links with his own past history. A traumatic absence haunts his realm. His edicts blunt feeling and awareness, even the awareness of pain, even in his victims.
Zornberg, Moses: A Human Life, 2016
The actions of the tyrant have supernal effects. Evil deeds of oppression, violence and genocide can create dead zones in history and memory in both oppressor and oppressed. When a people suffer through a truly epochal trauma like the Shoah the human soul itself can be a casualty. Or perhaps the body, too, is partially destroyed. Perhaps the lips are so damaged that they become incapable of prayer, or the hands are so destroyed that they can no longer do good deeds. Memory, too, can be a casualty of terror. There are some events that should not be recalled by those who survive them.
Therefore, the repeated injunction in Torah mentioned above — that we should remember our own past oppression in Egypt — cannot always be fully enacted with reference to memory — which is to say history and story. A trait of evil is that it consumes even the capacity to fully describe it. For instance, in the Lithuanian town from which some of my own ancestors fled, the destruction of the community in 1941 was so complete and systematic that many details of its fate are simply not known and never will be. Examples like this teach us that in extreme circumstances of soul-casualty we have no choice but to invent a new way of remembering, a new kind of history.
But how?
A Hasidic tale, famously recalled by Elie Wiesel in his Nobel Prize lecture in 1986, illustrates this using the character of the Besht (the Baal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism) himself. Expelled to a far away land for meddling in divine affairs with only his servant for company, the Besht finds that he has forgotten almost everything — how to pray, how to think, how to perform miracles — everything. Implored by his servant to pray or enact a miracle to remedy their exile, he responds:
“Remind me of a prayer – any prayer .” “If only I could”, said the servant. “I too have forgotten everything”. “Everything – absolutely everything?” “Yes, except – “Except what?” “Except the alphabet”. At that the Besht cried out joyfully: “Then what are you waiting for? Begin reciting the alphabet and I shall repeat after you…”. And together the two exiled men began to recite, at first in whispers, then more loudly: “Aleph, beth, gimel, daleth…”. And over again, each time more vigorously, more fervently; until, ultimately, the Besht regained his powers, having regained his memory.
Even the greatest among us must return to the א-ב basics when nothing makes sense. We may only have what is in front of us: letters, numbers, every-day objects, the immediate facts of our surroundings, the people we live with and near. If and when disaster comes (and let’s hope it does not) we are required to use whatever scraps we can find as a proxy for the hope and knowledge that history and tyranny have stolen from us. It is by naming the reality that we still can access — א-ב — that we somehow breathe רוח/life back into the holes that have opened in ourselves and our communities. This gap is the space left behind by the people and parts of ourselves which have been permanently silenced through death or spiritual erasure. These are people with real bodies that are no longer able to breathe and real souls which have been damaged. I’ll be bold here and name some examples: the collective millions whose lungs were drowned in the waters of the Atlantic slave trade, choked the poisoned earth of unmarked residential school graves or turned to ash at Auschwitz. And I also include those whose mouths breathed their last at Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7 and those who gasped for air in the rubble of Gaza in the months since. And I include too, in a different way, all who have permanently turned away from our tradition in the contemplation of such things.
In the words of the writer Masha Gessen
The only way to make good on the promise of ‘never again’ is to be constantly checking whether we are actually falling into darkness.
This “checking” is another version of the Besht’s א-ב. We are commanded to check! We are commanded not to look away! Who is the stranger NOW? Who is in exile NOW? Who is incapable of speaking NOW? Who can’t breathe RIGHT NOW?
[continued in part 2: Ibn Ezra’s secret, Hasidic “descent” and the purpose of the prophetic soul]