The Oral Talmud: Episode 10 - The Obligation to Protest (Shabbat 54b-55a)
SHOW NOTES
“You’ve got to decide with whom and where your voice is going to be heeded. Where are you going to have the power to effect change? That’s your olam. If we get to this big world, we can become actually overcome with powerlessness. But I think that’s the driving question of the bottom line of this text. What’s your world? Who’s your kahal?” - Benay Lappe
Welcome to The Oral Talmud, our weekly deep dive chevruta study partnership, discovering how voices of the Talmud from 1500 years ago can help us rethink Judaism today.
This week’s episode was recorded in June of 2020, in response to the brutal murder of George Floyd at the hands of police. We turn to a piece of Talmud which SVARA shared out in the days following, a lens for understanding the enormous groundswell of protests and political action which followed in response. What is the context of this powerful slogan about the responsibility to protest? Who is in a meaningful position to speak out in different spheres? What does it mean to be impactful without being able to immediately solve systemic issues?
This week’s text: The Obligation to Protest (Shabbat 54b-55a)
Access the full Sefaria Source Sheet with additional show notes via this link. The Oral Talmud is a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please help us keep both fabulous Jewish organizations going with a one-time or monthly tax-deductible donation at oraltalmud.com/donate.
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DAN: This is The Oral Talmud - Episode 10: The Obligation to Protest. Welcome to The Oral Talmud, a co-production of Judaism Unbound and SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. I’m Dan Libenson…
BENAY: …and I’m Benay Lappe.
DAN: The Oral Talmud is our weekly deep dive study partnership, in which we try to figure out how voices from the Talmud – voices from 1500 to 2000 years ago – can help us think in new ways about Judaism today.
As with all of these early episodes, these were recording together in the Spring of 2020, and as you might remember, only a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, our world witnessed the brutal murder of George Flyod by the hands of police, and the enormous groundswell of protests and political action which followed in response. At that time, Benay’s yeshiva, SVARA, had shared a powerful piece of Talmud which illustrates the Jewish responsibility to protest, and so we used this opportunity to unpack the context and implications of the quote.
This is a more serious episode, where we were actively grappingly with the moment we were in, and we would be surprised if the conversation doesn’t have new echoes and implications for the new governmental abuses when I’m recording this intro, and the ones which may have happened when you’re listening to this. We hope that our conversation equips you with some tools and insights for processing and responding to these times.
Each episode of The Oral Talmud has a Source Sheet linked in the show notes on a web site called Sefaria where you can find pretty much any Jewish text in the original and in translation. This week in particular, we encourage you to find the links to read April Baskin’s “A Protest Prayer” and Mariame Kaba's zine "Why Protest?" which we mention in the episode If you wish, you can follow along with the texts we discuss and share them with your study partners or just listen to our conversation!
And now, The Oral Talmud…
DAN: This is a show of The Oral Talmud that is responsive to what is going on in our world right now, which has to do with–and I’m saying this in part because this is going to be listened to later, and watched later, on video and as a podcast, and I want to make sure that people understand when this is being recorded, which is in this terrible week that we’ve just experienced in America that most immediately followed the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, and the reaction to that, of protests, of all sorts of unrest, and all sorts of brutality in response. And it’s a time of great pain, great confusion, great harm.
We wanted to have an episode of The Oral Talmud that was both immediately responsive to that, and also within the world of this show. This show is about studying Talmud. This show is about unlocking some of the radical potential of Talmud, and reading texts to find some of what’s in there, both in terms of things that can matter to us right now, but also things that can matter to us as we imagine a different way to be Jewish as it goes forward, and as we’re in this time of, as you say, crash and reimagination.
Hopefully this episode will be that, will be both something that is helpful to people in the here and now, and also something that will be part of the ultimate work product that we create here on The Oral Talmud, which is about bringing a variety of texts and approaches into play that we think actually empower a much deeper grappling with Judaism. And the only thing that I’ll add before I turn it to you is that the text that we’re going to be studying today, from the tractate of Shabbat, pages 54b and 55a, is a text that we actually, in parallel, that jewishLIVE released. Lex Rofeberg put it out, and it got 112 shares, and you put it out with SVARA and we got, I don’t know, 100 shares or more. And then we thought your version of it was nicer, so we released it on jewishLIVE, and it got another fifty-plus, seventy-five, I don’t know, shares. And so clearly this is a text that’s really speaking to people at this time, and we thought let’s actually spend an hour with it, and let’s really make it really thick. So that’s what we’re going to be doing today. I want to give you a chance to say something at the beginning.
BENAY: Yeah, thank you. I think what I want to add is that we’re always looking to read the tradition through the lens with which I think it was originally created, which is a courageous, radical tradition that was laid out by a group that was oppressed and not in power, and understood what it meant to be marginalized. And when you read it as a queer person, or as a person of color, as a person who’s disabled, a person who knows in their kishkes what it means to have that experience, certain parts of the tradition jump out at you, and you realize the whole tradition really is one of a kind of critique of the mainstream from the margins, and an expansion of the insides of those on the margins to become, to center that impulse. And I think this text is one of those. So I want to read it through that lens.
And also I want to add that as always, you and I are modeling public learning. So we’re not here to be authority, this is what the text means, this is what anything means. We’re learning it together, we’re figuring this out as we go. And it’s one of the core elements of the ethos at SVARA, that the teacher never stands up at the front of the room with the presumption that, “I’ve got this locked down.” We have what we call the 80/20 rule at SVARA, which means the teacher never comes to the beit midrash having figured out for sure more than eighty percent of the text. And slowly I’m lowering that number, I think it should be less and less. Because what happens is then you’re in a mutual learning experience. Everyone in the room is like, “Oh, what can I add to help us all get closer, but never, to that hundred percent,” rather than everyone’s in the stance of critiquer.
I think it’s in that spirit that I want to remind everyone that I feel like we’re working this out, not only this text, but how this text relates to our particular moment. I don’t want to consent anyone in to, at this particular moment in history, being present for two people learning publicly. If you’re not in that space, that’s great. But if you are in that space with us, we welcome your contributions, help, so that we can all get this better. I just want to put that out there.
DAN: I want to say also if people that are watching live on Facebook, feel free to add things into the comments. We want to include other people’s voices. If you have things that you want to, that you think people should look at, we have a hard time seeing it while we’re doing this, but hopefully maybe on the Facebook post of this episode there can start to be a bit of a Talmud being created. Feel free to speak up and to add your voice, and we’ll, of course, read all that afterwards and think about it and talk about it, et cetera. We’ll also try to bring in some things that we’ve read particularly, and heard particularly from Jews of color in the last few days, into this episode as we can, as is appropriate. We’re trying to create–really this is all about–look, in many ways this is really about the next Talmud. The name of this show, The Oral Talmud, comes from this idea that the Talmud calls itself the oral Torah. What would be next? What would be the thing that actually takes the Talmud as a source text and says we’re kind of reworking it? And first we do it orally, and then maybe one day it will be put into writing. That’s what this show is called. That’s not what we’re saying… this is not the only place for that. There’s a lot of places for that, including on that Facebook page, in your minds, in other conversations. So we want to offer this as a contribution to that.
I want to read the text, Benay, as you posted it in your translation and on SVARA. We sometimes go through the text from the beginning, from the background, or whatever. Before we do that, I actually want to read the text that actually got such a response, because I want people to know what we’re starting with here. And then we’re going to backtrack and do some context and do some…. So let me read it. This is as you posted it on the SVARA website, and we stole it from you. It’s from the Talmud, the tractate of Shabbat, page 54b.
It says, “Anyone who can protest the actions of their household and does not is held responsible for the actions of their household. Anyone who can protest the actions of their town and does not is held responsible for the actions of their town. Anyone who can protest the actions of the whole world and does not is held responsible for the actions of the whole world.” As we’ll see as we look at the text, the source that we’re using, which is Sefaria, and particularly Steinsaltz’s translation of the Talmud in Sefaria–which sometimes we modify, but this week we actually didn’t have time to modify it–it’s not exactly the same translation. But that’s, they’ll use some slightly different words. But that’s the point.
It got such a powerful response. It was so interesting to me to reflect on the response. I don’t think that we’ve published anything that’s gotten that many shares. I don’t know if you have. Probably, you have a more enthusiastic fanbase now.
BENAY: No, possibly not. And I think what it’s showing is something that I learned from one of my teachers, Yitz Greenberg, which is that the tradition is super, super rich, and there are… there’s a lot of stuff in it. At any one given time, you don’t take certain things that you don’t think are that powerful and throw them away. You keep everything, but you lift up different pieces. And this is a piece that has been hanging out there for a long time, and people haven’t been paying attention to it. I think it’s time for it to be lifted up as one of those pillars of what it means to be Jewish. It’s been there for 2,000. It’s not like it’s a new teaching. It’s just like, oh, wow.
DAN: Almost 1500.
BENAY: Fair enough.
DAN: Lex actually, Lex Rofeberg, when he published this, and he published this on his own Facebook page initially, and said something like, “I don’t know why this isn’t one of the most quoted pieces of the Talmud. Why don’t people know this one? Because they know things like ‘justice, justice shall thou pursue,’ or whatever, but they don’t… ‘If I’m not for myself, who will be for me? If I’m only for myself, what am I?’ People know those, but they don’t really know this one.” And I think our response to it was, yeah, let’s change that.
It's interesting, what you’re talking about, that there are things that are kind of hidden. That are forgotten, but that are there. That’s a reason, like you say, not to throw things out, is to…
BENAY: Yeah. I think what it speaks to is that traditions begin as expressions of protest from those on the margins. And then as traditions grow, they become solidified, they become the property, or taken over and fossilized, by those with lots of power. And those elements of the tradition that represented that marginalized insight become suppressed. And those who are in control of this now-solidified tradition aren’t really invested in those pieces of the tradition that are about revolution or radical re-envisioning. They become invisible, and we need to re-visibilize them. I think this is a moment to lift those back up, because we’re in another one of those moments of, I think, revolution.
DAN: I’m not sure exactly the right way to go about digging into this, but I actually think that it actually is valuable–I think it will be valuable for our conversation to put this into its context in the Talmud. Because we read this text the way it’s quoted out of context. And I want to come back to that, because quoting out of context has been a theme of this show over the course of the show. So I don’t think quoting out of context is in any way bad. It’s actually very, very traditional and wonderful. But when we take a quote out of context, and we think that it very clearly means that we should be standing up against injustice. Whoever doesn’t protest injustice is held responsible for that, and even if the injustice was perpetrated by someone else. That’s the statement of the Talmud here. I think that is the statement of the Talmud, and in context it’s actually about a much more mundane matter–or at least it seems mundane to certain of us.
BENAY: First of all, it’s so much richer. That’s why learn Talmud as opposed to learning slogans. It’s so much richer, and it brings out really important strategic and practical matters. But yes. This slogany piece of our tradition came about in a conversation that relates to Shabbat. Should I set the stage a little bit?
DAN: Yeah, please. I think it’s quite wonderful and sort of cute in an interesting way. I think it’s a helpful way of almost humanizing this text.
BENAY: Let’s remember we’re in the tractate about Shabbat. The previous text was discussing what is permitted and prohibited to do on Shabbat. One of the things that we know about Shabbat is that you are allowed to wear certain items which you aren’t actually allowed to carry. So you may have seen, for example, someone walking to shul wearing their tallis. It’s because you are allowed to wear clothing, you are allowed to wear items as clothing. You might see someone wearing a necklace with a key. That’s because you’re not allowed to carry a key. And people wearing their tallis as they walk to shul are wearing their tallis because you’re allowed to wear this item that you aren’t–you wouldn’t be allowed to carry your tallis in a traditional understanding of the law.
So there’s a discussion about what actually can our animals wear and carry, because our animals are actually subject to the same laws and sense of rest on Shabbat that we are. So an animal is also allowed to wear, but not allowed to carry. This very mundane example comes in. Can a cow, or can your cattle, wear certain elements of… I’m not even sure what the various straps and ropes are for.
DAN: I think it’s some kind of strap between the two horns.
BENAY: Right. That’s the question. There’s a strap that goes between the two horns, and I’m not sure what exactly the purpose of that is. But that was part of the conversation. The rabbis said, “Is that clothing for the cow, or is it something the cow is wearing, which would therefore be prohibited?” If it’s “clothing,” the cow can walk around with it on Shabbat. If it’s…
DAN: I think they’re also saying if it’s a way to keep the cow from running away, then you can have it. But if it’s just to make the cow look pretty, then you can’t.
BENAY: Right. It could be that the strap is part of the harnessing, work aspect of the cow, in which case if it’s that it can’t wear it, because this cow has got to rest on Shabbat. They have the same kind of conversation about wearing a sword on your belt. Is wearing a decorative sword, is that clothing, and does it embellish my image? Or is this an implement of war, which you certainly wouldn’t wear? They have these discussions about the real nature of items and what they say about our relationship with the world, particularly on Shabbat when they’re trying to create….
That’s the driving question. And it turns out that they critique Rabi Elazar because of his cow. Now they’re talking about Rabi Elazar’s cow. It’s like, Rabi Elazar’s cow! Rabi Elazar’s got 12,000 cows! What are they talking about, Rabi Elazar’s one cow? And it turns out that the conversation about Rabi Elazar’s cow is really about his neighbor’s cow. And the issue is that his neighbor’s cow is wearing this certain kind of strap, which the majority of rabbis deem to be something a cow shouldn’t be wearing on Shabbat because it’s one of these prohibited items of non “clothing.” But Rabi Elazar’s cow–actually Rabi Elazar’s neighbor’s cow–is wearing it.
As they clarify who’s this Rabi Elazar’s cow, they say, oh, it’s the neighbor’s cow, but we’re going to hold Rabi Elazar responsible. In fact, call that cow his cow, because he didn’t protest against his neighbor for allowing their cow to be wearing this non-Shabbosdik, Shabbos-appropriate thing. That drives this framing of what we are responsible for. Rabi Elazar’s responsible for not having spoken out against his neighbor about his neighbor’s cow. And he becomes the owner, figuratively speaking, of this cow. That drives us into this teaching.
DAN: Fundamentally, it’s this idea that… we think about, and we are thinking about, this text as being…. Terrible things are happening, where police officers are killing African Americans. The idea is that this is a text that we’re holding up and saying that means, basically, we’re all responsible–certainly unless we’re protesting, and probably even if we are protesting. That’s maybe another text about how you’re responsible for your society as a whole, whether you’ve protested or not. That’s how we’re talking about it. It’s interesting that it emerges out of a question of am I responsible for my neighbor basically breaking Shabbat if I didn’t protest. And the protest is not that I went to the authorities and protested. The protest is that–or that I led a march outside the neighbor’s house. Just that, basically, what the text means here is that I didn’t go to my neighbor and say, “You really shouldn’t be doing that.”
Actually, I think that that smallness of the initial framing is something that we shouldn’t lose. I think that we think a lot about the protest. I think people are reading this–and again, I’m not saying wrongly. I think it’s there too, and it becomes there later, as we should be on the barricades. But it’s also that there are smaller things that we should be doing, and that if we aren’t doing those small things, it may actually be worse to not do the small things that are actually in our power, like telling a person something.
A friend of mine has recently been engaging with a friend from childhood on Facebook who’s posting insensitive postings on Facebook. Not even so much that the postings themselves are so offensive, but they’re actually not in context. Meaning, they’re only posting one side of things. And my friend has been trying to engage with that friend, saying, “Actually, this friend has a lot of followers on Facebook, has the opportunity to impact a lot of people.” And is trying to just influence that one friend, a Facebook friend, to maybe consider a little bit of a different course. And is sort of saying to that person, “I believe you are a good person. I don’t believe you’re a hateful person. Maybe you just haven’t considered that you could do, you could even say your political views that I don’t agree with, but if at least you would also express that your heart breaks when these people are being killed, then you would be actually doing good for the world.” That’s a form of, I think, the kind of “protest” that is being talked about here. Just talk to your neighbor.
BENAY: Absolutely. I think that’s going to become extra-extra clear when we bring in the Rashi on this text. I want to be sure to do that. If we read this text closely, I think it is not only also talking about “small” directed acts of the people with whom you have influence, but precisely talking about that. I definitely want to get at that.
And I want to do a very close read, because one of the costs of the sloganification of any traditional teaching is that you lose the richness of what’s being said, beyond what the words in a nice translation mean in our language. And the word “protest” is an example. It happens to speak to us at this moment of enormous public protest, but it doesn’t, as you said, it doesn’t only mean that kind of protest, even though a translation using that word right now will seem to only be saying that. I want to really flesh out what the various words mean, because I think they’re going to help us operationalize this text in a more effective way than just the sloganification of it.
DAN: Where would you like to start that close read?
BENAY: Let’s start with all who have the possibility, or all who are able.
DAN: Here in the Steinsaltz, the translation says, “Anyone who had the capability to effectively protest the sinful conduct.”
BENAY: I want to first of all protest against this translation!
DAN: Yes.
BENAY: I apologize for not having looked at it beforehand, because I think that the effective word here is extremely misleading. Because the text doesn’t say “effectively protest,” it just says “protest.” Now, of course we can unpack what “effective” means. And here I want to draw attention to and lift up a really fabulous zine written by Mariame Kaba called “Why Protest.” What it brings out is that there are multiple reasons to protest, not only just to make effective systemic or policy change. So there are lots and lots of reasons to protest. To show our support for, to love, to add our voices to. There are all sorts of reasons. And the word “effectively,” we need to be effective in those ways. But this translation shouldn’t be understood to mean “succeed in changing policies.”
I think one of the powerful points of this text is it does not say, “Anyone who can change their family but doesn’t, anyone who can change.” It doesn’t. You have to protest regardless of whether you’re going to be effective at achieving the change that the problem is-
DAN: We’re going to get there in about twenty minutes, and we better, because if we don’t… we’re going to watch the clock very carefully, because the end is very important here.
BENAY: Okay. So anyone who has the capability. That capability, that possibility. In the Hebrew it’s “efshar,” to be possible. That’s important. So you have to ask yourself, where do I have possibility? Where do I have power? Where do I have influence? Where am I able? When am I able? With whom am I able to do this protest and speaking out?
On the word “protest,” I just want to go inside the word a little bit, because again, it’s not only about public protest. The root of the word in Hebrew, protest–and the root is macha, mem khet yud. It means, actually, to wipe out, to erase, to cancel. And I don’t think it only means to cancel the problem. There is an issue that ultimately you want to erase, but there’s all sorts of things that our speaking out erases. It erases our powerlessness. It erases the illusion that the people who are being directly hurt are alone, and that only they care. Okay.
The first question of this text is who has the power. Who has the ability to speak out against the people of their household? I always ask myself the question, if you have a father who is abusive, do you have the possibility, knowing that you might be physically harmed or abused if you speak out against that father? It’s not so clear about how we define possibility, possibility to be protesting. If I’m going to get schmeised by my dad, when is it okay? When am I obligated? When do I have the possibility? I think is a question that the text leaves open.
I think another thing we want to look at is there’s this kind of triptych of a text with larger concentric circles of responsibility. And what’s that about? Why didn’t the text just jump to the punchline and say anyone has the possibility of speaking out against, protesting the actions of the whole world? It doesn’t. I think that’s interesting.
DAN: Now I’m blanking on what’s that reminding me of. I feel like there’s another text somewhere in the Talmud that talks about these concentric circles. Maybe I’m thinking about the idea of giving charity, that first you give to the members of your family, and then to your members of your city, and then to the wider. So there are these concentric circles of care, and maybe also concentric circles of capacity. I forget. There’s a term for this also in the world of social justice, that there’s where you care and also where you can be effective, and those aren’t necessarily the same.
BENAY: I’m not sure if the first circle that it talks about is your family because that’s where you have the most possibility, or is that where it’s the hardest, or that’s where it’s the most effective. I’m not sure. We can leave that open. I just want to note that. Okay. Back to our translation.
DAN: Back to the text? Okay.
BENAY: Anyone who is, in this translation, anyone who had the capability to protest…. right. And the assumption is the sinful conduct, or some negative act. And let’s also bring out the fact that this text is not focusing on the question of whether what someone in your household or your city or the world is doing is wrong. That’s not even on the table. That’s a given. The given is that you know when that’s happening. And now the question is what do you do, and what’s your level of responsibility.
If you have that ability to protest against the negative conduct of the members of your household, and you don’t, that person is in what our translation said was held responsible for those actions. As if you’re… I think what it’s saying is your silence makes you culpable as if you had done those things yourself. And in fact the Hebrew, the word for “held responsible” is nitpas. It means grabbed by, seized by. You’re seized by those actions. They implicate you, they affect you also. Rashi clarifies that this means punished for, but I think it’s not only punished for. It’s, they kind of invade your moral and spiritual being if you remain silent. That they seize you.
DAN: I want to add one comment about the capability part. It’s on my mind for various reasons. A few things. One is that I’m thinking about COVID, and I’m thinking about, to the extent that we translate protest, that we think protest means I’m out in the streets, then one might say, actually, we may not have the ability to do that right now, because there’s a plague that will be exacerbated. One doesn’t have to say that, but I mean, I think that one might say that. I think that this text actually gives a certain amount of compassion towards those who would say, either, “I’m afraid,” meaning I’m so afraid that I really can’t do it. Or, “I think that the cost to society of all these people–especially our people–getting COVID would be too high.” So that’s one possibility. And another possibility-
BENAY: Who do you mean by “our people”?
DAN: I mean the protestors. I mean, I don’t want anyone to get COVID. But if the idea of us all being in the streets together is that precisely the protestors are going to end up getting COVID, that’s not a good outcome. And/or there are people who, just because of their personal characteristics–maybe they have a disease, maybe they have… maybe they’re just… they don’t feel effective that way. Maybe they feel they can be more effective doing something else. I actually think that this text, in a way, it doesn’t let them off the hook, but it says that your protest should be calibrated to your effectiveness. We’ll look at some of the things later that suggest other lenses. But I do think there’s something to be said about the idea that you have an obligation to protest in the way that you’re capable of.
BENAY: That’s right. I think it’s not… again, let’s make sure that “effective” isn’t read as “accomplishes the solution to the problem,” solves the policy issue of systemic racism in this case, or whatever. That’s not what we mean by effective. We have to really interrogate effective as being about with whom, for what. And there are all sorts of ways to be impactful without “solving” the problem. And they’re all little pieces of solving the problem.
I think we all have to be careful that we don’t either over-inflate or under-inflate our sense of power, and say, “What is my voice going to do? What can I do? What’s it going to do if?” We can’t be there, nor can we be in, “I have the ability to change the whole world.” Yeah, you do, but you got to figure out what your world is. We’re going to get to that part of the text in a minute.
DAN: Back to the text?
BENAY: Back to the text. Okay, so now we get to the second, bigger concentric circle. Anyone who has the possibility to speak out, call out, protest against, or rebuke. One of the questions for me in this text is to what extent is this word that we’re translating as protest, how is it different from another word which the tradition uses, most famously in the Torah, where it says to rebuke, l’hochiach, as opposed to l’machot. The Torah makes this grand statement that, yeah, we are our brother’s keepers. It is our obligation. Unlike Western civilization that says it’s none of my business, but the Torah says, yeah, it is your obligation to rebuke, reprove, to call out your fellow person. Although it’s not quite clear, your brother, who’s your brother is what the Torah says. I think the rabbis are way expanding that teaching.
All who have the possibility of protesting, calling out, speaking out against the people of their town, but don’t actually do so, don’t protest, call out, speak out against the sins, the transgressions, the negative harmful acts of the people of their town–they are seized, held responsible for, culpable, liable for those very actions. So you don’t get to look at what the people in your city, other people in your city, are doing and say, “Well, that’s not me, so I’m innocent,” if you remain silent. If you remain silent, you actually are innocent. And it’s precisely the silence-
DAN: You’re not innocent.
BENAY: Sorry, right. It’s the silence that makes you not innocent, that makes you culpable, as if you had done it yourself. That’s a-
DAN: That’s the big thing.
BENAY: - very powerful statement.
DAN: It’s very powerful. It’s not saying it would be nice if you spoke up. It’s not even advising it would be more effective. It’s like if you don’t speak up, or you don’t speak up in the way that you’re capable, whatever that means, you become the guilty.… Somebody wrote recently, I think it said something like if there are a thousand good police officers and ten bad police officers, but the thousand good police officers don’t turn in the ten bad police officers, you have 1,010 bad police officers. I thought that was very powerful and very right.
BENAY: Absolutely. Not protesting puts you in the category of the perpetrator. That’s a very, very, very powerful statement, which then makes it actually a mitzvah. It makes it… in the language of April Baskin, who is a Jew of color and wrote just a beautiful protest prayer, which let’s link to afterward. She said, “Remember that protest is a sacred act.” A sacred act is a mitzvat. You should understand that speaking out isn’t just a nice to have. It’s not just it’s good to do, you should do it. It’s an obligation, and not doing so when you know something wrong is happening makes you the perpetrator of that thing.
Okay, now we get to the largest circle. The text goes on to say, “All who have the possibility of protesting against the actions of the world entire, the entire world, and do not do so, are held responsible, are seized and grabbed, culpable, liable for the acts of the people of the entire world.”
And that was where I think I want to go to Rashi’s clarification here. You can be facile and say, “Yes, I’m responsible for the whole world.” What does that mean, exactly? There’s a way in which that can be disempowering, because it seems so big, and it is so big. It just, I think, requires us to think more about what does it mean to have that possibility.
On this, Rashi says, “All the world entire.” He says for them, that meant all of the people of your community. He says, “Bechol Yisrael.” All the people of your community. For example, the king or the nasi, the head of the community, that had the power to be protesting or rebuking, because the people in their world feel a sense of awe and fear before them–in other words, really take them seriously and are impacted by them–and will carry out and hold up their words. So I think what Rashi is trying to get at here is who’s your olam. The entire world, who’s your world? You’ve got to decide with whom and where your voice is going to be heeded. Where are you going to have the power to effect change? That’s your olam. If we get to this big world, we can become actually overcome with powerlessness. But I think that’s the driving question of the bottom line of this text. What’s your world? Who’s your kahal? First of all–right?
DAN: Right. It’s interesting, because a later part, and I don’t know that we’ll get to it in the actual reading part of the text, is that later in this text they talk about the head of… he’s called the reish galuta, or the exilarch. Basically, he’s like the head of the Federation of Babylonia. He’s the head Jew of Babylonia. It says that his family is judged for the sins of the entire world. And it’s interesting, because when I first read that I was like, “That seems unfair. He's only the head of the Jews. He’s not the head of the whole world.” That reading actually helps you understand–he’s held responsible for the sins of his world, which is, in this case, the Jews of Babylonia. That’s his world.
BENAY: That’s right. For the first time–for years, actually, I’ve been reading this Rashi and bothered by it. And my colleague Laynie Soloman really helped me get my new temporary take on this Rashi. Which is… because I was always bothered by the fact that Rashi seems to take the whole world–which, I love that. I love the idea that you’re responsible for the whole world. And he says, “Nah, not the whole world. It’s just this, this piece of the world.”
I think what Laynie helped me understand is that’s really… we gotta stay in our lanes and pay attention to the place where we really can have important impact on problems that affect the whole world. Like Black folk are saying, find your cousins and talk to them. My daughter came to me the other day, and she had learned that what you should do is talk to your Republican uncle and ask them why they’re voting this way. Ask your uncle who’s a Trump supporter, “Tell me about this.” Have a conversation. I think we all have to find who our world is, and then really… that’s where we can have impact. So it’s not exactly a narrowing of impact for the world. It’s sort of like organizing principle, it’s smart organizing. And if we all do that, that’s going to take care of the big world.
Now, there’s a twist to this text, which is that word–again, that word “effectively.” And elsewhere in the Talmud, there’s a saying that says, a teaching that says, “It’s your obligation to call out, to give rebuke, to someone who can hear it. But it’s your obligation to refrain from rebuking someone who cannot hear it.” That also bothers me a little bit, but I also get it. We all make choices in our lives with people we know, who you know it’s just going to be useless if you call them out, or if you critique them in a certain way. And we make the choice not to do that. The postscript of this story of Rabi Elazar’s cow, which then comes to this slogan-y piece, I think addresses in a really beautiful way this issue of, but am I going to be effective in the simplistic sense.
DAN: There’s some good stuff here in between. We talked about how the exilarch is held responsible for the whole world. But the setup for the story that you want to talk about is… and I don’t know if you were going to mention this part. The setup is that there’s this whole thing about the exilarch being held responsible for the sins of the whole world, and so then there’s this issue that comes up where one of the rabbis, someone’s telling the other, “Hey, you should go talk to the exilarch, because he’s doing something bad!” And he basically says, “Well, they’re not going to listen to me.” And they say, “You should do it even though they’re not going to listen to you.” And then there’s this other part that I think you want to talk about.
BENAY: Great. Okay.
DAN: That’s given as an example of why you should do it, even though they’re not going to listen to you.
BENAY: Perfect. So the story is–and I’m going to do it a little bit outside of the translation here–it’s kind of this fantastical scene in which we have God instructing Gavriel, the angel, to make a mark on the foreheads of those who are completely righteous, so that that will protect them from bad things happening to them and being punished for the sins of the wicked. And Gavriel says, “No, I don’t want to do that, because those who are perfectly righteous are guilty, because they’re not calling out the ones who are wicked!” And then God comes back and says, “No, I want to defend the righteous. Their protest against the wicked wouldn’t be effective.”
DAN: “And I know, because I’m God!”
BENAY: Exactly. “I know, because I’m God!” This reminds me of the oven of Achnai story, where God comes down and says, “What’s your problem with Rabi Eliezer? He’s right. He agrees with me. I’m God, and what he’s doing is right.” So God says, “Their protest wouldn’t be effective. I know that.” And then Gavriel-
DAN: Just to reinforce what that means, he’s saying, “I know, because I know everything. I’m omniscient. I know that if they had protested, those people wouldn’t have listened to them. It would have literally not been heard and taken into account. And therefore why should I punish the people for not protesting when I know that the protest would have failed?”
BENAY: That’s right. And then Gavriel comes back, the angel comes back, and says, “But they didn’t know it, and so they are held responsible.”
DAN: They didn’t know that the people wouldn’t listen to them.
BENAY: That’s right.
DAN: “You know, God, but they didn’t know, and they should have thought, ‘Maybe there’s a chance,’ and they should have tried.”
BENAY: That’s right. And I think it opens up the possibility that actually, we can change the reality that God knows. It’s not just that they don’t know, and in their naiveite, or their ignorance, they should have acted and it would have been ineffective. But that it just might have been–I think it’s opening up that possibility. And I think it’s destabilizing the simplistic notion of effectiveness that I really want to get at, which is to be able to protest isn’t–the criterion isn’t, am I going to solve this systemic problem. Because there are lots and lots of, as I’ve said, lots and lots of benefits to protesting, and your single voice isn’t going to solely solve the problem. Yeah.
DAN: First of all, I absolutely love that. And it’s funny, because I sort of have two thoughts that are in some… kind of conflict, but that are both true, I guess, in true Talmudic fashion. One of them that I want to start is the way that we started is to say, look, really this whole text was talking about whether a cow could go out on Shabbat with a strap on its horns. And you guys are taking this completely out of context, and saying, “And that’s why we should be on the ramparts protesting, COVID be damned,” however you want to take it to the most extreme version. It’s so weird that the Talmud itself takes this text, which is ultimately to something that at least arguably… I mean, the truth is is that when they say “the sins of the world,” and who are the righteous, you could argue that they’re still talking about the level of sin is whether you carried things on Shabbat that you shouldn’t have carried, and whatever. It doesn’t really explicitly, it’s not talking about injustices, and people being harmed and killed and insulted, et cetera.
But it also seems to clearly have that valence towards the end. You really do have this feeling that it’s about things that are more important than cows’ horns having straps on them. And yet even if it wasn’t, even if it was much more clearly in the realm of cows and straps, and we pull this quote out of context…. Let’s say that we did that. Let’s say that when we posted this the last few days, it was completely out of context. This quote only had to do with cows’ horns on Shabbat, but we liked how it says, “If you don’t protest against your neighbor, or against your family, or sin for that, in the world.”
Then I go back to things like the oven of Achnai story, or the first text that we looked at–or the second text that we looked at, which was the text about the mountain being held over the heads. And they misquote the book of Esther there. And I would say, “That’s the tradition!” In other words, the rabbis misquoted the Torah in order to try–or misquoted the book of Esther–in order to try to make these quotes about these ideas about how they were reimagining Judaism and reimagining the Torah. And we talked about that they weren’t hiding that from anyone. Anyone who could read back then knew what they were doing. So the tradition is that we take things like that out of context because they mean something to us now, but we like to have that tied to tradition. We believe that maybe it was really actually there, it was in the people’s minds. There are ways in which we see that thread of connection, and we want to emphasize it. Now that everybody is well-educated, or the vast majority of people are well-educated, we’re not playing games here. We’re happy to admit that this was mostly about cows and straps. But for the future, that’s not what it’s about anymore.
BENAY: That’s it!
DAN: Our svara tells us that that’s not it’s about anymore, but nevertheless we want to lift up this quote from the Talmud because…. That’s where, fill in the blank. Because we have this desire, but it’s also a true sense that we’re continuing this story. And we’re making this, it’s not about cows anymore, and that’s okay.
BENAY: What I think is powerful is that it wasn’t about cows for the rabbis. One of the things that we flattened was that the discussion about cows and straps was in the mishnah, was in the earlier layer of the tradition, and the conversation about Rabi Elazar and “his” cow comes at the later stage of the gemara, when the editor is putting together a revolutionary document, and creating, lifting up voices and inserting, selecting, parts of the tradition, and framing parts of the tradition, that say what the editor wants to say. What I think that the editor is wanting to say is, “This is what our tradition is about. Our tradition is about these bigger issues of justice, not just cows.”
For me, the beautiful move in this text isn’t the slogan. The move is the person who named that cow Rabi Elazar’s cow. It takes a Queer person. What I mean by Queer here is Queer with a big capital Q. A person who can see the… who can feel from their experience what it means to be oppressed, marginalized, abused, and have no one speak out for them. And to have people who could do something but don’t. Those are the people who are at the table, who said, “That’s Rabi Elazar’s cow. He’s responsible for this other person’s behavior.” That’s the revolutionary move.
That’s why, for me, it’s essential… who’s in the room, and who reads the tradition, is what the tradition becomes. It was the person who says, “That’s Rabi Elazar’s cow. He’s responsible for something he never did, because he could have said something.” That’s the revolutionary move that then results in this slogan. But what we need are the people at the table who are going to point out who… who’s the Rabi Elazar and who’s the cow that the rest of us aren’t noticing. That’s what’s essential.
DAN: I want to make one other connection. In the story that we studied recently about the removal from office of Rabban Gamliel, where they removed the guards from the gates, and the 400 or 700 benches had to be added, and they solved all the problems that were on the table… and it was all about inclusivity. And it was all about, then the next thing that they did was they allowed the Ammonite to convert to Judaism, which the Torah forbids, meaning they became even more inclusive. Well, the guy that was in charge was Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah. He was the person who replaced Rabban Gamliel. He was the person who removed the guards from the gates. He was the person under whose watch the Ammonite was allowed in. And nevertheless, he also sinned. He also…. So it’s Rabi Elazar’s cow. Meaning we kind of remember him for the great things that he did, and we also remember him for this failure.
I kind of think there’s something deep in there that I’m not sure that I’m quite ready to say or articulate what it is. It involves something like… it involves so much. Those who are, who ninety-nine percent of the time they’re trying their best to do good. I think that the big idea, though, here is that none of us… maybe this is the big idea. This is the point at the end of the thing. None of us is a righteous person. There’s no such thing as a righteous person. We all fail, and that doesn’t mean that we then say, “Wow, we all fail, so what’s the point?” It means you just keep trying, and you keep being guided by… fundamentally, the text is like, “You might end up having some cows named after you, but try to make it as few as possible.” Something like that.
BENAY: Absolutely. For me, the takeaway is, okay, what’s my world. I’m not going to be stopped in fear by, “Oh my God, the whole world is my responsibility.” Not that big world! Where’s the olam? Where’s the world where people are going to hear my voice? Where I have some ability to sway? That’s what I gotta figure out, and that’s where I have to focus my protesting, whatever that protesting looks like.
DAN: I think that I would want to end with two things. One is with a charge, sort of, to folks out there to please spread this text around, the short version and the long version. Let’s study this text deeply as a community in these weeks. It’s one thing that we can do. It’s one thing that… we’ll do a lot of things. There’s a lot of things that you and I are capable of, but this is one of them. This is our form of protest. This is our contribution. I think that one way that that contribution would be a truly effective protest is the idea that people should really study this text. Let’s elevate this text in all its complexity and in all its everything, and let’s see. Maybe this text can have legs. Maybe this text can just not be a meme that went viral yesterday [inaudible].
That’s number one. Number two, I think I would like to close, if it would be okay, to read April’s prayer.
BENAY: Absolutely.
DAN: April Baskin’s protest prayer, which I’ll share on the screen and then read, and we’ll just end, and we’ll be back next week.
BENAY: Beautiful. Let’s do that.
DAN: Thank you so much for this conversation. I hope… it’s helped me a lot, and I hope it’s helpful to others.
BENAY: Me too. Thank you.
DAN: So here I’m going to share April’s prayer. April Baskin, who until recently was at the Union for Reform Judaism working on inclusivity, on what they call audacious hospitality, and now is on her own doing the same. Her work is called Joyous Justice. And her protest prayer reads this way:
Beloved siblings striving for justice,Shma!Listen. Closely. At all times.My prayer for youis that you remember protestis a sacred act.Just as the Mourner’s Kaddishhelps souls ascend to God,May our cries soothe thosewhose lives were prematurely extinguished.And rattle the bones and stonesof leaders and institutions.Leaving no question about the factthat things are never going back, only forward.For more of us are clearthat “We have nothing to lose but our chains.”We affirm we are a multiracial people,and we will stand strong, humble, and proudas we follow and work in partnershipwith black leaders, taking steady stridesin the direction of collective liberation.
BENAY: Amen.
DAN: Amen.
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