Vulnerability

Vulnerability has a bad rep in our world. In fact, what we all long for is precisely the opposite: to feel invulnerable, impervious to incoming danger, safe and secure not only when we hide under our beds in the dark of night but when we are out and about in the world. But we—speaking of society as a whole but also of us ourselves as individuals—we may have moved a bit quickly in that regard and not sufficiently thoughtfully. Being paralyzed with fear about dangers that are highly unlikely to come our way—that kind of vulnerability is definitely something negative that all who can should avoid. But owning up to the vulnerability that inheres in the human condition itself is in a different category entirely. As this last pandemic year has taught us all too well, it is only a sign of maturity and self-awareness to own up to the degree to which we can fall prey to a virus so tiny that you’d need an electron microscope to see it at all and to behave accordingly. And waving away that danger as fake news because you don’t choose to acknowledge your own vulnerability is not a sign of courage or valor, but of lunacy born of a witch’s brew of foolishness, naiveté, and arrogance.

As I prepared myself for surgery last week, I was feeling exceedingly vulnerable. I lay in bed at night talking to my heart, asking why it wasn’t just doing its thing properly on its own, why it was intent on betraying me after all these years of me not burdening it by smoking cigarettes or consuming huge quantities of trans fat. Didn’t I deserve better? I certainly thought I did! But now that the whole procedure is behind me and I’m feeling healthy and fortunate to live in an age of miracles (and if having a non-functioning valve in your heart replaced without them having to open your chest and then being sent home the next day to recuperate doesn’t qualify as a miracle, then what would?)—now that all that is behind me, I see that intense vulnerability that I was feeling in the days leading up to last Thursday in a much less negative light. Yes, there are people who live in terror of an asteroid colliding with the Earth. (For NASA’s own statement about the likelihood of that happening, click here. We’re apparently good for at least the next couple of centuries.) But that’s not the kind of slightly obsessive vulnerability I want to promote as healthy and sane, but rather the kind that speaks not to fantasy but to reality. To the fact that our hearts are not made of steel and that our bones really do crack quite easily. To the fact that, despite all we do to suggest that the opposite is true, we are mortal beings lucky to be gifted with a few score years to wander the earth, to do whatever good we can, to leave behind some sort of legacy for our descendants to contemplate positively once we ourselves are no longer around to be contemplated in person. Feeling vulnerable because the human condition is vulnerability itself—that isn’t craziness or obsessivity, just an honest appraisal of how things are in this world we all share for as long as we do.

These were the thoughts I had in mind as I read the report in the paper the other day about people coming to shul last Shabbat on 16^th Avenue in Boro Park last week only to be greeted by men gathered in front of the synagogue screaming “Kill the Jews” and “Free Palestine.” Which kind of vulnerable did those people feel, I wonder—the silly kind (because there weren’t that many hooligans in front of the synagogue, because the cops showed up almost instantly, because the bad guys didn’t actually have guns with them or bombs, and because they fled the scene once they realized how completely outnumbered they were about to become) or the wise kind rooted in a fully rational appraisal of how things are in this world we share with so many who seem to feel entirely justified in their bigotry and prejudice and who appear mostly to have no problem putting both on full display for all to admire? (For an account of the Boro Park incident, click here.) I’m hardly an alarmist who sees a pogrom around every corner. But, of course, it’s hardly an example of alarmism to be alarmed when truly alarming things happen. Maybe I’ve read too many books about Germany in the 1930s. Or maybe not.

We have entered into a new stage, a dangerous and upsetting one. At first, the stories appeared random. A twenty-nine-year-old man wearing a kippah was beat up in Times Square as he tried to make his way to a pro-Israel rally. Then, a day or two later, a group of thugs wearing keffiyehs invaded a restaurant on 40^th Street and started spitting on patrons they suspected of being Jewish. Next we heard about people being attacked in the Diamond District on 47^th Street, where it isn’t ever hard to come across some Jewish businesspeople or shoppers.  Two days later we were back in Times Square, this time watching footage of a Jewish man being knocked to the ground and beaten in front of the TKTS buttke where they used to sell last-minute tickets to unsold-out Broadway shows when the theaters were open.  Nor is this just a New York thing: the police in L.A. are currently investigating an attack on outside diners at a Japanese restaurant as an anti-Semitic hate crime that occurred the same day that a family of four was terrorized in Bal Harbour, Florida, by a group of men threatening to rape the wife and daughter and yelling “Die Jews” and “Free Palestine” at them. I could go on. There have been similar incidents in New Jersey, Illinois, Utah, Arizona, and several other states. And although I’m focused here mostly on American incidents, the rise in this kind of hate crime is not specifically an American phenomenon: we’ve read of similar, even worse, incidents just lately in London, in Germany, and in Italy.

The question is how to respond, not whether we should. The fantasy that complaining only makes things worse needs to be laid to rest permanently and irrevocably. (The Jewish community could learn a good lesson in that regard from Black America, where it was once also imagined that responding publicly to racism would only make things worse. It’s hard to imagine any Black citizens putting that argument forth today, yet I hear it from Jewish Americans regularly.) Nor can we allow ourselves the luxury of imagining that this dramatic uptick in anti-Jewish violence is “about” Israel. Israel’s recent war with Hamas was, in my opinion, entirely justified. I can see how people might feel otherwise, and even strongly so. But I know too much history—and specifically too much Jewish history—to indulge in the fantasy that anti-Semitism is “about” anything other than the hatred of Jewish people, Judaism, and Jewishness itself. No matter how many shows an actor appears in, he’s the same person under all of the costumes he gets paid to wear on stage.

I myself have lived a blessed life. Born just eight and a half years after the Nazis were murdering up to twelve thousand people a day at Auschwitz, I have hardly ever encountered real anti-Semitism directed directly at me personally. (And I speak as someone who spent several years living in Germany in the 1980s.) Nonetheless, sensitivity to anti-Jewish rhetoric and violence is the hallmark of my Jewishness, the foundation upon which my eager willingness to live my life as a public, fully-identified, and unambiguously-identifiable Jewish person rests. And that is why I am disinclined to wave away the latest series of anti-Semitic incidents in New York and elsewhere as a random set of creepy one-time events—nor would anyone describe that way who has ever read a book about the history of anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism. For people eager to dine at my table, I recommend Walter Laqueurs’s The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day  as your appetizer, Léon Poliakov’s four-volume History of Anti-Semitism as your main course with a side serving of David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. For dessert, I  recommend Deborah Lipstadt’s Antisemitism: Here and Now. I can promise you that you won’t be hungry when you’re done.

There have been encouraging signs too, of course. President Biden has spoken out sharply and strongly against the uptick in anti-Semitic incidents, calling them despicable and condemning them unequivocally as “hateful behavior.” We have heard similarly supportive rhetoric from Governor Cuomo, Mayor Di Blasio, Senators Schumer and Gillibrand. So that’s good. But will any of the actual sonim out to harm Jews hold back because of a presidential tweet or a senatorial press release?  On the other hand, there were seventeen thousand tweets disseminated by Twitter last week that contained some version of the words “Hitler was right.” Just wait until they find out that the President considers them despicable!

I don’t mean to sound unhappy that supportive, unambiguous language denouncing anti-Semitism has emanated from the highest offices in the land. Just to the contrary, I am thrilled that our leadership has spoken out so boldly and clearly. But I also don’t imagine it will matter until it is deemed just as unacceptable to speak disparagingly about Jews in public as it is—at least in all places that decent people gather and live—to espouse hate-fueled violence against Black people or Asian-Americans, or any other American minority. And that will take—at least in some quarters—a sea change of attitude that can only be accomplished through the kind of ongoing educative process capable of moving society forward. How to do that, I’m not sure. But I am sure that that is the challenge the new normal has laid at our feet. And I am as sure about that as I am that these recent incidents, for all they come dressed up as part of the Israeli-Palestinian controversy, have nothing at all to do with Middle Eastern politics and everything to do with the unique place anti-Jewishness continues to occupy in Western culture as the one remaining version of bigotry to which otherwise normal and nice people can still openly subscribe without suffering much for their views. Or at all. 

Har Meron

There’s a lot to learn from the fauna with whom we share the planet. Last week, I wrote about the precipitous decline in the North American bird population and why it seems to me that we need to care—and to care a lot—about something that, at least at first blush, appears not to be too relevant to (or too likely impactful on) human beings at all. And now I would like to bring to bear to other recent experiences I had learning about the animal kingdom in my effort to find some way to grapple with the nightmarish disaster that befell those poor people at Har Meron last week—and,  if possible, to learn something from the contemplation of the catastrophe.

The night just before the horrific events in Israel was our UJA reception at Shelter Rock. It was a lovely evening, one that honored our Shelter Rock cantor, Ḥazzan Larry Goller, and which raised a very respectable sum for the UJA. And then it was over and Joan and I had some dinner, then sat down at the end of a long day to watch something on television. And what we ended up watching was Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed’s 85-minute documentary, My Octopus Teacher, featuring Craig Foster as the film’s sole human actor. I can’t recommend it highly enough—the film, a documentary, is engaging, very interesting, moving, and deeply satisfying—but the specific part I’d like to write about here is the segment featuring an attack on the octopus (who is definitely the star of the movie) by a pyjama shark (yes, there really is such a thing, click here). It’s a little gruesome, but we’re made to understand that that’s how things go down in the deep: there’s a food chain and the basic principle is to eat for as long as you can avoid being eaten. But the octopus successfully escapes the shark by hiding in its den, or mostly it does because one of its eight limbs protrudes outside the den and the shark, willing to take something instead of nothing, bites it off and carries it away to its own den where it presumably serves as the main course at dinner that night.Ḥ

But the part I want to write about has to do with the octopus, not the shark. The octopus has been dealt a terrible blue, but it seems naturally to know what to do. It first sets itself to adapting to its new normal and then to rejuvenating that missing limb and growing it back to a state of full usability, which is exactly what happens. In other words, it sizes up the situation, accepts how things are, take stock of its options, realizes it can move past the tragedy and with tools it already possesses…and then, slowly but fully naturally, it does just that. In other words, the octopus lacks our human inclination to allow the fragility of our human condition to enrage or infuriate. Instead, it understands its own vulnerability to be part of who it is…and also part of what it can be. So that’s what I learned from My Octopus Teacher. (To read more about the movie, click here.)  And then, the next morning, we heard about the disaster at Har Meron.

Earlier in the week, I had read—and had been fascinated by—an essay published on the LiveScience website (click here) about a new discovery regarding a mystery concerning the kraken, which is the name popularly given to Architeuthis dux, the world’s largest squid. And to call this animal large is hardly to say anything at all: at its maximum size, A. dux can grow to be 46 feet long, the size of a semi-trailer. (The paper announcing the discovery, written in language only a serious scientist could love, appeared on the ScienceDirect site. To take a look, click here.) So the issue under discussion was just how these creatures have managed to hide from the world so successfully that up until just a decade ago there was serious weight given to the contention that these squids didn’t exist at all, that they were “just” another kind of made-up sea monster willed into being by the mythological imagination. But they do exist…and one was finally photographed in 2012. And then another one was photographed in 2019. So the basic issue, since they clearly are real, is how have they managed to hide so effectively over all these many years that people have been looking for them. And the answer has to do, here too, with adaptation. Architeuthis dux has eyes the size of basketballs, about three times larger than the eyes of the animal with the next largest eyes. (By comparison, the eyes of grey whales are about the size of baseballs.)

It’s dark down there at the bottom of the ocean and these giant eyes serve two functions: they allow the squids to maneuver around on the sea floor without coming to any harm, but they also allow them to see even the slightest light from a human visitor in a research submarine or from an underwater camera. In other words, these creatures would be almost fully blind if they had eyes that matched their size. But they don’t…because they have evolved these gigantic eyes that are able to keep them safe not by denying their vulnerability but by addressing it. How scientists were able to fool giant squids on two separate occasions to come out of hiding is the subject of the papers referenced above. But my point here is not that these huge creatures are vulnerable because of their size, but that their vulnerability, rather than paralyzing them, propelled them over the millennia to develop the kinds of eyes that could see in the almost absolute darkness of the ocean floor and that could thus make and keep them safe.

In other words, both the octopus and the squid faced real or potential disaster that derived directly from their vulnerability, from their fragility, and from their inability to overcome the innate precariousness of their existence in the world. But they evolved into creatures that can build on that vulnerability and create the possibility of self-assurance in a dangerous world: octopuses evolved into creatures that can regrow severed limbs (something we humans only wish we could do) and giant squids eventually developed giant basketball-sized eyes that could detect even the faintest ray of intrusive light in the pitch darkness of the ocean floor.  Samson said it best: mei-az yatza matok, which means that from disaster can come insight…and also resolve and also the ability to morph forward into creatures all the better able to deal with the precariousness of their native situations.

And now, Miron. A disaster that could surely have been averted. A horrific loss of life that could just as easily not have happened. Whom to blame is an open question! Some are blaming the police for not having prevented this disaster in advance. Others have preferred blaming the government for not closing down the site in the first place, especially given that people have been calling it a death trap for years. And, of course, there are plenty of people in line to blame the victims—didn’t those people know they were courting disaster (pandemic and otherwise) by coming together, mostly unmasked, in such large numbers and in such a small space?  There will be an official inquiry that will decide where to lay the blame, so there’s no need to second guess them in advance. Instead, I suggest we respond, not with recriminatory rhetoric or with self-righteous invective, but with a renewed sense of awe at the human condition.

We are fragile things, we human beings. We break easily. We can be crushed in a moment by people without even a single one of them actually wishing us any harm. We can be felled by viruses so tiny that even regular microscopes are unable to see them clearly…or at all. We don’t age all that well either, succumbing to various ailments and weaknesses as we grow older, only some of which can be deferred, let alone defeated. And we human beings are all subject to the awful brevity of life itself, to the natural limit our humanness imposes on our beingness. When I read about this catastrophe in Israel, I too was at first outraged and eager to apportion out the blame. I still am wholly in favor of the government getting to the bottom of things too, and certainly to determine if this nightmare could have been averted by people doing their jobs correctly. But what I personally am taking away from this—and what I recommend that you too consider as your personal takeaway—is a renewed sense of just how friable it all is, just how ephemeral, just how evanescent. We feel so mighty and so invincible, so strong. We think of ourselves naturally as the kings and queens of our tiny domains. But, in the end, we live by the grace of God’s breath within us and we are gone in an instant when our time is up. A renewed sense of awe at the precariousness of the human condition is what the tragedy of Har Meron brought to me personally. And I offer it to you all as well as a way of responding to a senseless disaster and its tragic loss of life not with anger or with a rush to judgment, but with humility.

Sincerely,

Rabbi Martin S. Cohen