The Border of Babel

Today’s episode is a Shabbat Replay of our service on October 24th. Chicago has been laid siege by federal forces. The America they are building, one of dehumanizing borders between nations, peoples, and neighbors, has a lot in common with that most infamous building in Jewish lore — the Tower of Babel. How can we build another America, another world?

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

Everyone. Hi, Rabbi Steven, thanks. Rabbi Lizzi, this sounds like the beginning some kind of bit. I think that was the whole bit. That was the whole bit. That was it.

So I'm curious, has anyone been to the Art Institute to see Rabbi Shah's Paradise Lost. Okay, a few folks, if you have it, you should go. It's there until January 19. And this is a, it's a monumental painting. And like, when I mean monumental, I mean not only in the amount of work and effort and detail that has gone into it, but it is, it is over 100 feet long, this thing dominates the space that it's in. It's really, it's really quite something. And while, while it borrows its title, I feel very echoey.

Okay, you got me great. I'm gonna keep talking. No. Thank you. Thank you. Rabbi Lizzi, this is also part of the bit. Do you want mine in the meantime, sure is any better yours.

And I've been on, I think, I think you know what, we have somebody who knows what they're doing back there more than, more than I certainly do. So thank you, Patrick. So about this painting, while it borrows its title from the 17th Century Poem of the same name, it's not a retelling of this work. It is actually named by the artist, who was born in Calcutta and raised in Kashmir and then fled with his family to New Delhi before relocating to London. It's named as such as a memorial to paradises lost over a lifetime childhood innocence or freedom or sense of belonging. When he was interviewed by the museum, he said that this is not just my story, it is the story of each of us and the story of our times. And so as I was standing in front of this masterpiece, I became very aware of everything that was happening just outside the quiet sanctuary of the Art Institute, and I began to feel some of the losses of this moment, a loss of safety, a loss of certainty, a loss in the belief that the arc of history inevitably bends towards justice. There was a painful irony I felt in contemplating a work of art created by someone who has experienced displacement and migration, knowing that only a few miles away, if only a few blocks away, masked agents were patrolling the streets of Chicago, targeting our migrant neighbors. Since the federal government launched Operation midway blitz in September, ice has shown up at homes and businesses and schools, markets, shelters and hospitals. They have detained hundreds of people without cause, including US citizens. They have assaulted bystanders. They have arrested reporters. They've used violence against protesters. I feel like the entire city seems like it's on edge. People pulling out their phones to document any unmarked van that stays in one place for too long, or the sound of whistles going off to indicate that a federal agent might be nearby. And just today, ice was spotted here in Lakeview, just actually down the street on the corner from here, where they unleash tear grass on the gathering crowd. I grew up believing that the story of this country, a country that was supposedly founded by immigrants, was a paradise for any person who dreamt of a better life. But today, that version of the American dream feels like a paradise lost. So on one panel of this painting Shah includes the Tower of Babel nestled among the snow capped Himalayas. It is illuminated by fire, and whether this half built structure is glowing with life or burning to the ground is unclear. It's left up to the viewer to determine which we actually read about the Tower of Babel this week. At the end of our Torah portion, the Parsha begins, as Rabbi Lizzi mentioned earlier, with this catastrophic flood that nearly annihilates humankind. And Noah, who is described as a particularly Righteous Man, if only of his generation, is commanded to build this ark to serve as a refuge for his sons and their families and a mating pair of every living creature, and for over a year, they weather this storm until the water recedes and they're able to stand on dry land again. Now, generations later, the descendants of these survivors gather together in one place. Come they say to each other, let us build a city with a tower that reaches into the heavens to make a name for ourselves, lest we are scattered all over the world. And so they begin to build this tower out of bricks. And God looks down and sees what they're doing and decides that this project. One must be stopped, if this is how they act. As one people speaking one language, God muses, then nothing, nothing will be outside of their reach. And so God descends and confounds their language, and as foreshadowed in their rationale for building this very tower, scatters and disperses this people across the globe. And thus the Torah explains how humankind came to speak many languages as many peoples. But what exactly was God's problem with the tower? It seems actually quite absurd. As somebody pointed out in minion this week, it seems absurd that God would fear a united humanity. It is, after all, the whole point of what we're doing, folks, right? It's the hopeful promise of our tradition. This is what we're working toward. We're working toward a repaired world where we peacefully coexist as one human family. We're going to literally sing about it in about, let's say, 18 minutes from now, in the Aleinu, rather, it must have been what the people sought to do with the tower. And so some thinkers have proposed that it was a matter of hubris. Right? The people say, Let us make a name for ourselves that humankind believed that they could bridge the natural divide between heaven and earth. And others have said that it was a direct violation of God's command to Noah and his family to prove or voo shiratsuba aret to be fruitful and multiply and spread out over the earth, not to remain fixed in one place, right, but to spread out. But maybe the problem wasn't with the tower itself, then how the people went about constructing it. There is a story told by the rabbi's that because there was no stone to use for construction, the people had to painstakingly bake bricks until they were hard enough to bear the immense weight of this colossal project. And so the tower had two steep ascents. Had one on the east side and one on the west side. And laborers slowly took the bricks up the east side and then carefully, carefully descended the stairs on the west side. Now if a person, the Rabbi say, felt their death while climbing, the other workers kept working and said nothing. However, if a brick fell, everyone would stop what they're doing, and they would weep, and they would say, oi, Lanu ale a Keith, tak teka, woe is us. When will another come in its stead? So here's the thing, there was nothing wrong with the people's dream of building something strong and durable. This is a people who grew up hearing stories of a flood that nearly killed all of humankind, and so they want to build a city with walls high enough to protect them and a tower that would stand above the highest waters, a beacon that would guide them home, should they be separated and lost, let us make a name for ourselves, they say. But the word Shem in Hebrew is not simply about being known or being famous, but it is legacy. Memory. May we leave a legacy? They say, for all who come after us, they might say, no matter what storms we may have to weather those people, they did something great, yet in their desire to do something great, to build something larger and more lasting than anything that they could have accomplished as individuals. They forgot the value of the individual. The tools of the trade became more important than the people who bore them. They no longer saw the humanity of those standing right next to them. They saw greatness, the tower that would reach the heavens and for what the people set out to build a city that they could call home, but when the project of this city became more important than the people who inhabited it, then it was right that the structure should crumble and fall brick by faceless brick. The sin of Babel was not hubris or defiance of the divine order, but dehumanization, it is, in some ways, the first example of idolatry in the Torah, people worshiping a thing rather than cherishing God's most fundamental way of showing up in the world, which is through us, human beings created in the divine image. This is, of course, what makes this moment in history so heartbreaking to see people treated as incidental, as contingencies to the equation, rather than as human beings. Dehumanization is also the sin. One of our time in its quest for greatness, this administration has employed a callousness that chips away at the moral foundations of this country, and we are seeing as millions of people stand to lose access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP as Medicaid is gutted, as the cost of living skyrockets, while a golden ballroom is being erected on the remnants of the people's house, how the whole structure has started to buckle, how it teeters on the edge of collapse.

We see the fault lines of dehumanization breaking apart this city here in Chicago by seeking out illegal aliens, their term not mine, our federal government refuses to recognize that the people they are targeting are human beings, people like you and me, and this posture has real impact in how ice treats the individuals they assault and detain. We know that there is a direct line between dehumanization and violence. The conditions of detention under ice are intolerable, even deadly. It is a moral stain on our nation, and something that we as a country will have to answer for far into the future. And these, these are human beings. Ruben Torres, a father caring for a child battling cancer, or Laura Morillo, a woman who has been selling tamales on the same streets for years, a teenager on his way to high school and hundreds more whose names we don't know, human beings who are part of the fabric of this beautiful city, and this fabric is being torn apart. People do not feel safe, and businesses are closing, and folks are missing work, and children are absent from school. And I don't mean to be alarmist, but sometimes it feels like everything is on the verge of falling apart. And to be clear, our immigration system was already broken. It needs fixing. Our legislators have tried and failed again and again to work together to solve this problem in ways that are humane, that help people who have been here for many years, people who have careers and communities in this country achieve legal status, or facilitate the safe arrival of asylum seekers, or simply make the process more efficient and more accessible, and in their failure, our elected officials have given this administration the opportunity to choose callousness and cruelty, to instill fear and terror, to uphold ideology over our shared Humanity, rather than actually solve America's systemic immigration challenges. So how do we keep this whole structure from toppling down? Because I do actually, perhaps naively, still believe in the promise of this country. I don't actually think it's ever been realized, but the dream is there, right? The Dream an America that welcomes the tired and the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free a country of immigrants that honors and lifts up the people who are here before us, the people on whose land we stand, grand cities and small towns of many people speaking many languages. This is the future that I want to build, a future that I feel kind of vaguely peripherally proud of as an American, and the one that I imagine God was envisioning when God scattered humanity instead of letting them construct a tower on the bodies of their fallen neighbors. This is I want the name America to mean. This is the legacy I want us to leave behind. One response to policies of dehumanization must be an insistence, our insistence on the humanity of other people. This begins, of course, with how we treat and approach those who are being spoken of or addressed as a problem. One of the best ways that we can support our migrant neighbors is to show up, is to bear witness, of course, to moments when they're being targeted, and ensure that they're not facing ice alone. But also to be present in their neighborhoods, which, to be honest, are our neighborhoods as well in the city, to eat at their restaurants, to buy things at their stores. This not only provides essential economic support when businesses have been compromised by concerns for safety, but gives us the opportunity to build real relationships with the other people who call this city home. There's a Mishkan Knight Lizzi Becker who has made a beautiful and helpful document to give us ways to do that here in Chicago, it's in our newsletter from this past week. So there is an action step after the sermon, I promise we must refuse a rhetoric of us and them, even if the distance between the two seems small or benign, it's in our power to close that gap. That is an easy gap to close. But I'm also going to propose something even more radical. So so bear with me. Here is where I ask your grace and patience. I. We must also insist on humanizing those who have been twisted by the lies of hatred and bigotry. It is very tempting to project evil onto the masked faces, tearing apart families and disappearing people off the streets of our city. And do not get me wrong, what they are doing is evil. But while we can and we must condemn their actions we cannot, and we must not utilize the same dehumanizing rhetorical strategies that they do. With respect to Audre Lorde, I have a lot of respect for Audre Lorde. In this case, the tools that built the master's house can certainly tear it down, but the structure will collapse on top of all of us, if we are going to build a better future, if we are going to create something that lasts, we must do it another way, because behind the masks, as hard as it is to see, sometimes those agents are also human beings, and so are the people designing these policies. And now I want to be very clear about this. This is not to excuse their actions. What ice is doing in our city and in places across the country is a moral wrong, one that compromises the integrity of our nation's founding promise and is an affront to the ethical call of Judaism as well as the teachings of our neighboring faith traditions. We absolutely must hold the perpetrators of harm accountable for their actions. We can and we should be angry about the treatment of our neighbors. So I am asking you protest and resist in whatever capacity feels right for you, and let me know what you're doing so I can join you. And when the time comes, we will, we will seek restitution for the damage that has been done, but as we resist the inhumanity of what they are doing, we must not give into the temptation of dehumanization ourselves. Shortly before the raid started in Chicago, I read an article in The Atlantic about an ice hiring Expo in Dallas, like the author, I was morbidly curious, how could people sign up for such a thing? What would drive people to sign up for such a thing? But as I read stories about the people showing up to wait in line and submit their resumes, I realized that they were driven by the same fears and concerns that I felt looking at the crumbling structure of this country. They also lived in a Paradise Lost. They were also watching their livelihoods disappear and their grocery bills go up and their windows of opportunity shrink, and were left wondering what tomorrow would look like for themselves or for their kids, and like the people of Babel, they wanted to build something better, right? They wanted to make America great again, a lasting legacy of peace and prosperity for future generations. The problem is, the problem is, is that somewhere along the way, they were told the convenient lie that someone else was to blame for this problem and that removing those people would be the solution for fixing it. We cannot, and I know that so many of us probably think we're immune to this, but I truly believe we are not. We cannot give into that lie. Either it is such an easy lie to believe that one person or one group of people is the source of all ills, and how convenient would it be if that were actually true? But it's not true. A better future for us does not come at the expense of a better future for them, however we might draw the line between us and them, and these lines have been drawn in so many directions recently. We not, must not. We must not build our own tower or our golden ballroom for that matter indifferent to the suffering of the people we don't like or disagree with. If this structure is going to last, we must build it together, as challenging as it might be, and it is challenging, but I trust the people in this room, and I am going to challenge you. I am going to challenge you because I believe that we have the capacity in our hearts to do this. So in addition to protesting and advocating and bearing witness, let our response this moment also be rehumanization. Not dehumanization, but rehumanization, a radical reclamation of the humanity in ourselves and in others. This must this means that we must look behind the distortions of anger and division to see each other as people, human beings who have a stake in this fight and are really scared about what tomorrow might bring. It is a painstaking and painful and often deeply inconvenient process to slowly correct the lens through which we and others view the world. It means speaking out against dehumanization, even the casual joking kind. It means standing up, sometimes at great discomfort, to friends and family and co workers. For some of us, it means putting our safety on the line to fight for what we believe in. And it also means, and this is the hardest part that we look at ourselves. Us to examine our own biases and recognize where we have heart in our hearts as well. Sometimes rehumanization can be as small as looking the stranger in the eye and learning their name, if you don't know it, maybe even hearing a bit of their story. The Stranger might be your favorite barista, or, better yet, your least favorite barista,

or the person who cleans your house or the crossing guard outside your child's school, or the individual who asks for money on the street corner every day, it might be your neighbor who you never got around to meeting, or someone in a neighborhood that you have never visited, at least not yet. It might be someone who agrees with you, but it might be someone who really doesn't to see the humanity in another person. May seem like a small thing, especially right now, but this small thing, I believe, can be a radical and even holy act, especially in this moment, and it takes effort, and it takes time, but brick by brick, we can build something that will resist the flood of dehumanization, not a tower, but perhaps a lighthouse, guiding us back to the simple but profound truth. We are one human family, all of us together. And because it's all of us together, it is either all or none, and I hope you'll join me in choosing all Shabbat shalom. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai