Rabbi’s Message
The stories in the Book of Genesis about the Patriarchs and Matriarchs and their children often present their actions in a questionable or even objectionable light. We see that they are not always exemplars of great spiritual or moral stature
It is clear that the Torah does not want us to forget these disturbing examples of moral failure. On the contrary! They form the very substance of our Torah! And the rest of the Torah will continue to unflinchingly retell stories of Israel’s transgressions and corruptions.
It is important to take note of this. The Torah teaches – through every episode, prophetic word, and law – that sacred history cannot be confused with censored or whitewashed history.
How vital it is to take this lesson to heart in our own times – in the United States and elsewhere. Many educators work hard to ensure that we remember grim periods, long ignored or forgotten, of racism, oppression, slavery, racism, and anti-Semitism. But on the other hand, gigantic efforts are being made to whitewash national narratives so we will forget the painful facts of a truthful telling and teaching of history. In other countries, for instance, horrible facts of complicity in the crimes of the Holocaust are not to be spoken about.
In our own society, the resistance to accepting that the United States has engaged in systematic racism from its very beginnings is fueled by many factors, including racism, itself. But some resistance is borne of fear, the fear that if our Founding Fathers are shown as less than perfect, or it is revealed that our democratic institutions have functioned badly in some ways, then our faith in the values of this society cannot be sustained and we are destined for destruction.
Our Torah teaches us the opposite lesson. Destruction will come when societies insist on forgetting their sins. A society can have hope only if it insists on telling the truth about itself. But people are afraid that restoring dark chapters to our history will obscure the other chapters of light and goodness that are there. This is a fear that perpetuates injustice because it does not believe in the capacity of people to become better than they were. The falsehood of a whitewashed (- pun intended) history of the United States is actually based on a lack of faith. Either the false belief is that materially successful people do not need to seek redemption, or the false belief is that materially successful folks cannot really learn from their sins and redeem themselves. For too many, the preference is for a false history that claims that white folks have always been just fine (though that would make such people other than human.)
The Torah is a sacred document, a sacred history, because of G-d’s faith in humanity – without any false notion of human perfection. The ancestors of our people were heroic because even when they were guilty of real sins, they still hoped that by remembering their sins, and retelling their stories, they could redeem themselves and bring redemption to this troubled world.