When Are We?

Embracing the Rawness of Exposure

I had a whole post planned for this week on a recent Gallup poll and its implications for the religious sphere and then this week actually happened. It was not normal, or maybe it was? On a day in which coverage was wall-to-wall of the trial of a police officer that murdered a Black man, we had news breaking of another murder of another Black man by a police officer, which was then merged into the coverage of another school shooting. There is something deeply broken about our system when this is normal.

As all of this was unfolding, I was reading a book called “Emergent Strategy” by Adrienne Maree Brown when I came across this jaw dropping poem titled “when are we”:

When are we
I feel I, we, all mine
Are lost in time

They raised the battle flag
In Avon Minnesota today
To show the borderlessness
But we already knew
Everywhere is war

But when

And why
Do we hear bugles
Do we smell smoke
When we hug black bodies?

Oh, the church is on fire
No another one
No another one
No another one
No another one
No another one
No…another one

It’s those ghosts again
Their children’s children are
Non-linear haunts

But
Isn’t this the future

How are a million eyes open
But no one will look…
When can we run go hide

When are we

These days of ashes
We wake up wary

Which illusion is killing us
Which construct
Is it our flesh hunted
Or our time

Each moment fills up with smoke
We are catching fire
Again

We feel the rocking of ships
The grief of the sea
We stumble
We moon walk in chains
We dance free

But when could we
Just be

It’s that first clause and that last clause that jumped out at me. The sense of feeling lost in time is real, not just for covid reasons but because we keep facing the same events over and over and wondering, didn’t we just do this?! What year are we in that Black bodies continue to be ravaged by the State? The attack at Columbine was in 1999 and here we are again, facing death in our hallowed halls of learning.

People just want to live regularly. They want to go to the store. They want to drive. We want to go to school. People of color would love to be able to walk around the block. They and we just want to be.

There is a rot in our country that has spread deeply. It’s one that will require bold and courageous decisions that may ruffle feathers at first, involving gun control and policy enactment in the areas of racial justice and reckoning. Real conversations need to be had. Things need to be exposed in order to heal.

It is fitting then that the Jewish people around the world read about the Biblical concept of Tsara’at this weekend. Often translated as leprosy, it describes some type of disfigurement that can appear on the skin. Where it differs from the other bodily afflictions of the book of Leviticus is that it can also manifest in clothing and in one’s home. In other words, its rot also spreads to three levels. The question is asked why exactly it spreads beyond the body.

Amid their many attempts to link the bursting forth of this affliction to our own sins and failures, one of my favorite rabbinic answers comes from the Kli Yakar

¹

And one who has all these coverings removed from her is considered wild and exposed. Therefore the plague of the skin is mentioned first, and then, the plague of the clothes, and finally the plague of the house, in order to remove all of her coverings, one by one, until she is completely wild and exposed.”

What he is suggesting is that this awful and painful situation offers a chance to actually expose what is lurking beneath. In my eyes, it’s the very same opportunity we have as a country. Can we handle the cover being stripped away?

Can we actually enact some form of an assault weapons ban that doesn’t contain as many loopholes as the one from 1994? Can we have a real conversation about the 2nd amendment and its role in our society? Can we actually talk and do something about systemic racism? Can we address policing and creating a real system of accountability within it? Can we get real about taking some of the money that goes to PDs and diverting it for other social needs like education, mental health, and criminal justice reform?

Can we do the things we need as a country so that people can just be and stop asking, when are we?

1. Rabbi Shlomo Ephrayim Luntschits-Chief Rabbi Prague 17th century.