What will be the name we make for ourselves?

So on Friday night I had one of the best nights of my life! The Beloved Community got together and created such a transformative and fantastic atmosphere of warmth, love and diversity. I am just so grateful for the many people who were there physically and those who were there in spirit that gave me strength and blessing the entire way through.

Here is the link to the archive of the celebration as well as the text from my d'var Torah:

Shabbat Shalom!

My portion is titled Noach and it is famous for a few things you might remember.

One is the story of the flood that wiped everything and everyone from the face of the earth except those in the ark with Noah and his family.  G-d apparently was so upset with the chamas, the violence of our ancestors, that G-d decided it was time for a do over. There didn’t appear to be anyone righteous except Noah and his family so they were the folks G-d was going to reestablish humankind with.

After the flood, G-d seems to have a change of heart about humankind.  G-d is recorded stating that never again will G-d bring doom upon the earth on account of what people do. That even though the human mind is inclined towards evil from the time of their youth, G-d won’t destroy the earth again. That’s fantastic news! According to Gen 9:9-16, G-d went so far as to make a b’rit or covenant represented by the rainbow.

Yet another story is the Tower of Bavel and it is here I will spend the bulk of my time tonight. This is in fact the part of the Torah that I just chanted. It is the recounting of this very interesting tale that for me used to make little sense.

After we are given the narrative about the flood and the naming and counting of all the new humans who came from Noah’s sons, we jump right into this story about some of these newly established humans building a tower. This short story, only 9 verses, begins with lots of sameness. The people are speaking the same language.  They use the same words. They decide to work together and build a tower so that they can make a name for themselves and not be scattered across the world. G-d took one look at what was happening and said: “If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach. Let us, then, go down and confound their speech there, so that they shall not understand one another’s speech.” Thus G-d scattered them from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel, because there G-d confounded the speech of the whole earth; and from there G-d scattered them over the face of the whole earth.”

So what exactly does it mean to build a tower so you can make a name for yourself and why the heck is G-d so angry?

According to some of the sages, the people were building this city and tower to settle down as it were, so they would not have to wander around without a home.  They were building this tower so they could keep watch over this city and protect it. And should someone or something come to hurt them, they would be able to see them from afar.

So what exactly was the name they were making for themselves? I’m going to go with protector, people who care about their community. Well, it turns out that if you settle down in one spot, then you aren’t really being fruitful and multiplying the earth. So this is what some say G-d had a problem with.  Remember that covenant that G-d made after the flood?  I guess since G-d was in G-d’s feelings about destroying the earth, G-d wanted to make sure that it was repopulated everywhere. However, we humans are a communal people.  We wanted to be with each other and when we reached for one another, we wanted others to reach back.  So we stayed in one spot and thought that would be good enough.  But G-d was not pleased so G-d did what we wouldn’t, G-d scattered us all over and confused our language and our words.

I believe this scattering was to remind us that we don’t have to fear what and who we don’t know. Our family is varied and reaches to the far edges of this planet. Take a look around this room. Not one of us is the same, yet, we are family. And we have so much to learn from each other. Why not take G-d up on this challenge to find family wherever we are?

But I think there is more to this story. I think the building of the city and the tower are representative of what is familiar, not what is liberating.

G-d destroyed the earth with the flood because we couldn’t figure out how not to be violent with each other and we seem to still have this problem today.  We are not only violent via physical assault, murder and this unconscionable rape culture. We are violent with our words and actions in community with one another. We hate on each other because of our appearance, our size, our gender or not conforming to gender norms, our sexuality, who we fall in love with, our ethnicity, our culture, our religion or lack of religious practice, our skin color, our perceived intelligence, the way we speak, our like or dislike of a presidential candidate, and I could go on.  And while we may not physically hurt someone, we can do and say some of the vilest and nastiest things to each other and keep it moving like nothing happened. We often hide behind the computer and smart phones while enacting violence on each other. And it has become so happenstance that we don’t even notice when we are doing it.

So, in the name of settling down and conforming to the sameness that will no doubt become violent to those who don’t fit into these neat boxes we make for people, we build a city and a tower were we can protect this way of life. 

What is the name we make for ourselves?  

I’ll go with xenophobes.

See, we find comfort when people are all the same, they all dress alike, have the same skin tone, speak the same words and the same language. When we see difference we often want to oppress it. And G-d knows we are really good at establishing oppressive systems. And G-d is not pleased. And our towers will keep falling because they are not about liberation. 

Why is that?

I believe the Seal of Solomon/Star of David, gives us a clue. Rabbi Tirzah Firestone teaches us that “it consists of two interpenetrating triangles of equal sides, one planted on earth and pointing upward toward heaven, the other suspended from heaven and pointing downward toward earth.  Our ancestors knew that both heavenward and earthward orientations were necessary for wholeness.  They realized that neither approach alone was sufficient; rather, both are mutually dependent and have an affinity for one another. It points to the balance we must have in ourselves and with each other.” 

I would go a step further and say that now is the time to push beyond these binaries that often become towers for us --- masculinity or femininity, black or white, democrat or republican, Black Lives Matter or All Lives Matter, you are either with the Palestinians or with the Jews. We are a complex people and in this complexity, we find beauty and the possibility for less rigidity, more fluidity, less conformity, more diversity, less violence, more wholeness,.

I grew up in Kansas City, MO in the 1980s. I had no idea what it meant to be trans, Jewish or queer.  I did however know what it was to be Black in America. To be Black was to be marginalized, feared, killed and left for dead. The tower of racism was already high around me.  And as I began to discover my queerness as a young person, I learned that being queer was to be laughed at, sucker punched, isolated and damned to hell. The tower of gender conformity and heteronormativity made it difficult to live in this world and not want to exit and there were many, many times that I made attempts to leave. The violence that was wrought upon me from the community, my family and friends was too much to bear. I entered into and ended relationships that created chaos not only in my life but in the lives of people I care deeply about. It became difficult to maintain a violence free life. The fear of being assaulted, fear of being the laughing stock of my peers, the fear of my own uniqueness and authenticity kept me on edge.  I was short tempered and uneasy. I said things I wish I hadn’t. And while I don’t recall being physically abusive, I have no doubt that I emotionally abused people with my words and actions.

On August 9, 2014, all the towers merged into one. It hadn’t been that long that I emerged as KB. I was trans, gender non conforming, queer as all get out and on August 10th I grabbed my drum and started marching on the streets of Ferguson cause my life and the lives of all Black people depended on it. I was misgendered (and I still am), folks couldn’t figure out if I was a Muslim, and I seemed to be fighting anti blackness on every front in queer spaces and in Jewish spaces and fighting queer and transphobia as well as anti-Semitism in Black spaces. It felt as if every space I occupied had no place for ALL of me.  There was no place to feel and be whole. I had to lose some part of me, conform to the group, in order for folks not to be offended that I was taking in oxygen.

But there comes a time where you have to tear down towers of oppression in search of liberation. When you can no longer afford to live in the comfort of conformity because my family’s lives are on the line, my life is on the line.

I challenge you as I have challenged myself to get real about the violence you are unleashing on yourself, your family, your friends and your community because our world is but a reflection of what we are doing in our own lives.

Oppression has tried to beat every bit of human dignity out of us, and it makes it feel like all we can do is fight.  But what if instead of fighting for our freedom, we wake up EVERY DAY knowing we ARE free?  What does life look like when we have envisioned and felt what freedom is, what is to be liberated?

What if we had compassion for the folks we can’t stand? There is always something underneath that which we can see. The difference will be stopping to find out what that something is. How would it be to interact with other humans knowing we all have experienced trauma? Could we so easily throw each other away?

Considering even G-d needed to form a b’rit, a covenant, with G-dsself and humanity to not be violent, what will be your commitment to end violence in our time? G-d placed a rainbow in the sky, what will be your reminder to choose differently?

Let us not be tower builders.  Instead, let’s take that Star of David, which we have come to see as a seal and shield and let it be for us a sign of balance, of interconnectedness and wholeness.

As we create this new paradigm together, what will be the name we make for ourselves?