Seeing the Blessing and the Curse

Seeing the Blessing and the Curse
Rabbi Sarah Berman

“See, this day I set before you blessing and curse.”
This is how this week’s portion, Parashat Re’eh, begins.
And, as advertised, the text is full of both blessings and curses.
Among the 55 mitzvot in this portion, we are commanded to celebrate and make offerings joyfully seven times--this is more joy than in any other single parasha.
But Parashat Re’eh also commands us to dispossess and destroy, displace and replace other people, with whom we disagree on fundamental truths.
Dispossess, destroy; displace, replace…
It would be easier to look away, to ignore these passages, to think only about the prettier parts of our tradition;
The parts that call us to love and justice and care for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger;
To embrace only the joy.
But as we are on the verge of entering Elul, our month of spiritual preparation for the High Holy Days, we need to acknowledge difficult truths:
They are part of our tradition, too.
We have been called to joy by the same God that calls us to displace and replace.
The Torah teaches us complex and sometimes contradictory messages.
As Jews and as humans, we are equally full of nuance.

The fullness of the world is one of its great blessings.
And telling the stories of a complex world is one of the blessings offered by museums and cultural institutions.
For decades, the Smithsonian--America’s national cultural institution--has built a legacy of telling the historical, artistic, scientific, and cultural stories of our complex nation.

Last week, the Smithsonian received a letter from the White House, warning that all current or future displays are under review, and that any exhibit that deviates from “the president’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism” must be changed or replaced.

Yesterday, a list of exhibits that offended the White House was sent as well.
This unsigned list included a painting of a desperate family, trying to seek refuge by crossing America’s southern border.
It included an exhibition about a fictional utopia in which women who escaped the Middle Passage find safety under the ocean.
It included a display about Benjamin Franklin, that acknowledges the Founding Father as a slaveholder.
It included a portrait of Dr. Anthony Fauci, a Pride flag, and first-person accounts by undocumented immigrants.
Diverse narratives, multiple perspectives, and the experiences of women, people of color, queer folks, and others are in the crosshairs--as if they are not, cannot be, American stories.
I understand the letter, the list, and their authors to be asserting that their version of American history is so fragile that it requires dispossessing the experience of Black and Asian and Latinx and queer and Muslim and Jewish Americans.
I understand their message to be that our national public spaces are only “safe” when presented from one perspective, and are destroyed by acknowledging the variety of people and cultures that inhabited these spaces, from long before the first European explorers landed on our shores to today.
I see it as a demand for erasure; as an attempt to paint our country’s Founders solely as visionaries, displacing any hard-won nuance in our understanding of them as morally complex men and women of their own time, who believed in slavery as deeply as they believed in their own right to freedom.
I see this as a replacement of diversity with an imaginary racial, religious, and political monolith, or--worse--hierarchy.

Last week’s letter to the Smithsonian says that we must “restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.”
I agree with that; but as a longtime museum professional, I have a different understanding of what earns such confidence.
Facing new perspectives and engaging with nuance is at the heart of building trust--and understanding-- through museum displays.
The world is complex, and the very same historical situations that are a blessing to some, are a curse to others.
Acknowledging only the blessing doesn’t erase the curse.
When we lose the ability to engage with complexity, we end up with a distorted sense of reality.
When we ignore what (and whom) we find difficult, we destroy the fullness of a world shaded in gray, and may actually begin to believe it is drawn in only black and white.

Even worse--when we ignore or erase the broken parts of our history, we lose the chance to make them better, and begin to heal.

The Torah, our sacred, foundational text, teaches over and over that it is our task as humans to hold complexity.
As true as that is in shared museums and cultural institutions, it is even more true of our individual hearts and spirits.
Parashat Re’eh is traditionally the opening parasha of the month of Elul (which begins on Sunday evening)--
A month that ends with the shofar blast announcing Rosh Hashanah and the start of a new year.
This is the beginning of the season when we are called to turn inward—to examine how we bring both blessing and curse into the world, how the choices we make impact ourselves and others.
This is the Shabbat when we begin to make teshuvah (a process of returning to our best selves).
As we begin this process, what dispossession, destruction; displacement, and replacement might we need to acknowledge?
How have we let bias dispossess assuming good intentions ?
How has inattention destroyed relationships we once valued?
When have we allowed fear to displace our curiosity and wonder?
Where in our lives have we replaced flexibility and change with intractability?
The month of Elul creates the space for us to ask ourselves these hard questions.
Parashat Re’eh reminds us that we can’t find our way back to our complex, challenging, contradictory, authentic selves if we don’t face our whole selves--
Both the blessings and curses.
When we oversimplify, when we only seek or acknowledge blessing, we lose the real complexity of life.
We lose the chance to make our broken parts better, and begin to heal.
We have to look straight at our own messy parts in order to engage them, in order to heal them, in order to make room for the joy, in order to make teshuvah.

Our work begins now.