Dear Friends,
In rabbinical school, they teach you to “write from the scar, not from the wound.” In most circumstances, that is pretty good advice. It can be hard to find or communicate meaning in an injury or injustice when the wound is still raw. But I think it would be a mistake to wait to talk about our city and what has happened to it this past week.
One of my favorite Instagram accounts for funny DC memes has, in the past week, basically turned into an account for spotting federal police and National Guard activity in the city, and some of the videos have left me shaken. One shows a guy around my age who had just been knocked off his scooter by a vehicle door get handcuffed with his hands behind his back while he gasps in pain, surrounded by police, waiting for an ambulance. Another shows a man bowing his head while he is shuffled into an unmarked car. Although I am heartened by the fact that people walking by these scenes – FedEx drivers, moms in leggings, teenagers – are taking videos and asking questions, I get the sense that the incidents they’re recording with their phones are meant to leave us feeling helpless.
On Wednesday, somebody close to me was involved in a hit and run. He and his child were driving around the Union Station roundabout when a van collided with them, knocked off the bumper, and drove off. Or, at least, attempted to drive off. The van was immediately stuck in traffic, which can be bumper-to-bumper even when the roundabout isn’t a staging ground for the National Guard.
My friend caught up to the van, took a picture of its license plate, even recorded a video of a very brief conversation with the other driver before he finally broke free of traffic and sped off. Sped past two police cars. In front of a plaza that is now patrolled by the Drug Enforcement Agency and the National Guard. In a city that has been occupied by federal troops we are told are here for our safety. Days later, my friend (who immediately called the police!) is still waiting for them to give him any indication that they are pursuing this dangerous driver. Surrounded by so many people who say they are here to help, but clearly not helping, we can forgive him for being frustrated to the point of feeling crazy.
And I am right there with him. When I’m faced with a scary situation, I don’t really go into fight or flight – my reaction is always to freeze and then fawn. I get deferential, I get people-pleasing. Watching all these videos is really making me examine that tendency. When each of the people in these videos do something or say something: what’s behind that choice? What is it about them – their personality, their beliefs, their story, etc – that brings them to whatever they’re doing in the video? I want to be the kind of person who is able to be calm, thoughtful, compassionate, and smart in the face of a perceived threat. Watching someone being taken out of the blue. Watching a car hit my car, or somebody else’s. Watching horrible news, here and elsewhere. We probably don’t all agree on what trouble looks like, and we definitely won’t all agree on what a compassionate, strategic, wise move looks like in the face of it – but we should probably all be examining our engagement with trouble, because trouble, everyone seems to agree, is at hand.
I want to react to these things in a way that aligns with my values. I want to bring my training and my best strategic thinking to the problem. I want to be calm, thoughtful, and compassionate in a situation that calls for calm, thoughtfulness, and compassion. I’m just not sure I can reliably be any of those things right now. I need to sit with my feelings – anger, disappointment, grief – and make sense of them, at least as a first step.
We are so close to Elul, the final month of the year, and we’re supposed to be engaging in a cheshbon hanefesh, an account of the soul. We are asked to do the hard work of taking stock of who we are and how we react to the world around us. This is some of the realignment I’m trying to do within myself: I want to examine how I respond in the face of trouble, and see what I can do to prepare myself to respond better. Maybe the situation in our city can give us some extra clarity in that project. Maybe it’s left us a bit of a mess. Maybe both of those things are true at the same time.
This Shabbat, I am wishing all of us the space to breathe, to envision peace in the District of Columbia, and to ground ourselves in a beautiful exploratory beginning to Elul. It is okay if it takes a little bit of work to get there before Shabbat begins. It’s a mitzvah, and it’s worth it, and every one of us deserves it.
Shabbat shalom and chodesh tov,
Rabbi Hannah