On Our Human Vulnerability

 It is often said - I have said it myself - that Judaism is an inherently patriarchal religion. The texts of tradition - the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, midrashim, medieval law codes, and so on - were written by men (as far as we know) and they often read as if they are addressed to men, with women as ‘other’. In the last fifty years some brilliant feminist scholarship has helped re-read these texts ‘against the grain’, as it were, but the patriarchal core remains. And yet there are also moments - or more than moments - when a very different sensibility in the Torah comes into play.

Take the text which occurs in the section of Deuteronomy we have reached in our annual cycle of readings: Deuteronomy chapter 24, verse 17

You shall not subvert the rights of the stranger or the fatherless; you shall not take a widow’s garment in pawn/as a pledge.

This is one of those texts that contains a Biblical theme so familiar that we hardly register how startling its message is - how radical it is not only for its time, but also how compelling its moral weight is even today, in our vastly different situation.

Stranger, orphan, widow - this trilogy of groups to be protected is repeated in the next verses. During harvesting, any grain that is left behind inadvertently must be left for “the stranger, the orphan, the widow” (verse19); and similarly with olives and grapes - what you don’t gather the first time is left for “the stranger, the orphan, the widow” (verses 20-21).

This legislation may emerge from a patriarchal culture, but there’s a clear recognition here that certain women are, potentially, particularly vulnerable: if they have been in a family unit with a husband, and that support system changes, and they are left on their own, then they need special provision. It is a very specific awareness of female vulnerability. The text links this with other non-gender-related examples of vulnerability: children/youngsters who have been orphaned (again, deprived of the security of a family unit, they are particularly vulnerable); and, alongside the widow and the orphan, there’s that existentially-present category of “the stranger”, the outsider, the immigrant, the one who is not part of ‘us’ but who arrives into, or joins themselves to, a community from the outside.

They are vulnerable too - because they don’t innately ‘belong’ to the collective. Either they don’t see themselves as belonging; or, more often perhaps, and more universally, they are not seen as belonging to ‘us’: our tribe, our group, our nation, our society. Now, as then, if you don’t belong to the majority - if you are an outsider - you are vulnerable.

It is remarkable that this injunction in the Torah is repeated so often: 36 times. A constant drumbeat is sustained, of keeping this reality in mind: that it is the ongoing responsibility of the Hebrew community, the Jewish community, to have this fine-tuned sensitivity to the stranger, the outsider. A sensitivity that isn’t just a vague fellow feeling of human connectedness - but involves a demand to translate the feeling into action. The vulnerable need something active from us. Not just sympathy.

And more often than not when we read about this demand, the text - as in our portion (verses 18 and 22) - reminds us that our alertness to human vulnerability is rooted in our historical experience. The foundational mythos of the community is the inherited memory of slavery in Egypt. This part of our story became an archetype in Judaic consciousness about one particular people’s vulnerability - but thereby it became the prototype of humanity’s innate vulnerability. The image of slavery speaks directly about the dynamic of who has power and who is powerless.

To be a slave is to be dependent and vulnerable, with radically reduced agency. And this is your history, the Torah says, this is at the heart of your story. The Jewish people’s story began in helplessness - you must never forget that trauma, the Torah insists. Is this why it is repeated so often - because there is an unconscious wish to forget, to repress, to ‘not know’ the pain of powerlessness?

It’s an extraordinary message, really, to give to a people. Your story doesn’t begin with glory, it begins with degradation, powerlessness.

And in many ways powerlessness and vulnerability have been integral to the whole of the Jewish story up until modernity, and even into it. I don’t want at all to suggest that Jewish history is a story only of eternal victimhood - what the historian Salo Baron called, disdainfully, “the lachrymose view of history”. Of course it isn’t: there was so much wit and wisdom, creativity and genius and joy along the way. But what I am focused on right now is the recognition that outsiderdom, vulnerability, and helplessness has been a transgenerational theme in our story for a very long time. All the way to the gates of Auschwitz. 

Of course Zionism was supposed to have solved that problem for us. But one of the tragedies of Jewish contemporary life is that actually it hasn’t helped us collectively to feel less vulnerable. Perhaps controversially, I would say that because of the way the Zionist enterprise has turned out, it’s made our collective Jewish lives more vulnerable - or at least just as vulnerable as we have always been as Jews in the world. You can have the most high-tech army in the world and the most sophisticated surveillance systems and security services, but once your Jewish state forgets the moral vision of Judaism then, at a fundamental level, it just adds to the historic vulnerability that Jews have always felt. (Look no further than the grey gates that surround our synagogue buildings and the security set-up that everyone has to go through to get into any Jewish institution).   

We are still slaves ‘up here’, in our minds - slaves to a skewed reading of our history, past and present. Vulnerability has become part of our psyches, unfortunately. Like a scar on the soul. But who knows - just a question - might that scar be a price worth paying if it keeps us alert to our shared vulnerability with others? That’s what the Torah seems to want us to do - keep remembering that vulnerability is built into the human condition and that we Jews have a special moral responsibility to remember this, to acknowledge this, and to act on it. The Torah texts even call it a ‘commandment’ that we remember and act on it.

In unstable times - socially, politically, financially, environmentally - we may feel our vulnerability more immediately. Each of us will feel this differently - feelings of vulnerability differ widely from person to person; and we might feel more or less vulnerable at different times of our lives.

How do we live with this vulnerability? One of the things that can sometimes help is community. Our individual vulnerability or fragility or insecurity can be held within the fabric of the collective, the experience that there is something we are (or can be) part of that is stronger than we ourselves may feel individually. And part of the fabric that makes the Jewish collective stronger is that we are rooted in a tradition that is sustained by its immersion in texts and traditions and spiritual themes that say there is a power in the universe that sustains us and nurtures us, that holds us and maintains us, even if we don’t see it, even if we can’t feel it, even if we don’t believe in it. That there is a source of strength and security underpinning our existence.

I would never suggest that the dynamics of this are simple. To feel a sense of security in life can be a hard business. But as the High Holy Days approach, Jews have the time to reflect on these themes, and see if strength can be derived by working on these rhemes collectively.

Yes, there’s our personal vulnerability, and our need to protect others who are vulnerable. But we are not on our own with this. That’s the value of community. Human solidarity is a powerful resource.  

[based on a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, August 26th 2023]