Yitro 5779: Shame and Murder

We read this Shabbat about the 10 commandments. We tend to think these are ingrained in the fabric of our society—just look at people trying to plaster them on the sides of courthouses—we think they are the basis for Western morality. But the fact is, many of them are flouted.
The first commandment, which Rambam says is to know there is a God: many people nowadays say they are atheists. The truth is, the God they don’t believe in, is a God I don’t believe in and in fact the overwhelming history of Jewish thought rejects. There is no invisible guy way up high in an invisible castle. Believing in God means believing in goodness, in right, that there is something toward which I personally strive that is greater than myself, and toward which we try to move the world.
Sadly, murder seems to be becoming more common—most recently, the bank shooting up the road in Sebring, where a gunman pointlessly murdered 5 victims on cold blood. I do not believe our society is adequately teaching the sanctity of life.
The Talmud says that there is more than one way to murder somebody. According to the Talmud, public shaming—halbanat panim—is a form of murder. Why is shaming a type of murder? On a literal level, halbanat panim means to make one’s face white—if I shame you and make your face pale, I have shed the blood from your face.
On a more figurative level, we are social animals. My livelihood, my experience in society, depends on what others think of me. Destroying someone’s reputation is destroying the life they built
I have been thinking this week about the video of the student from Covington, who smirked at older native American drumming. A picture of this was put on twitter with a very judgmental caption claiming the student was harassing the native American. The tweet went viral, was even re-tweeted by the congresswoman from Minnesota. This led to threats of expulsion from the school, and even a death threat against student.
It turns out the student was not harassing anybody. The elderly Native American had approached their protest, and was drumming in their faces. They just stood their ground. Should they have smirked and been silly? No, they were disrespectful, but they did not deserve to be dragged over the coals in front of millions of people.
We cannot let ourselves be recruited by the forces of judgment, into believing shameful things about others. The Jewish tradition teaches us to give the benefit of the doubt, and this will take the ammunition away from the forces of judging and embarrassing. Pictures can always be interpreted multiple ways. Giving the benefit of the doubt means to question the caption, and assume the best—they were kids, thought it was funny, and were singing along. Nothing about the video suggested anything more.
We live in a society where people are judged & shamed, and lives & livelihoods are ruined. To not kill, is to not participate in killing, in ruining another’s life, by believing in the positive, giving the benefit of the doubt, and helping build, create life rather than destroy

Passover: Speaking our way out of shame

According to a recent article in the Atlantic, “the secret shame of middle class americans,” many more Americans are cash-stapped than we are accustomed to believe. For example, 47% of Americans can’t round up $400 for an emergency. Most can’t afford the accoutrements of middle class lifestyle: house, cars, health, vacation—which costs an average family $130,000, double the median family income. You’d never think—those who have these things talk about them, we hear about all sorts of family vacations, but those who don’t have don’t talk about it-it’s too shameful.
How many Americans are living in this kind of shame, unable to speak about the pain they experience?
The Haggadah instructs us to start the narrative with shame (gnut), and end with praise (shevah). The Talmud (Pes 116a) reports a debate about what shameful situation is meant. Rav says “shame” refers to idolatry, so he starts the Maggid narrative with terach’s idolatrous family. Shmuel, on the other hand, starts in Egypt with avadim hayyinu, “we were slaves in egypt.” What’s the difference?
Maybe for Rav, shame is when we do something truly bad, so he reaches back to idolatrous days. For Shmuel, on the other hand, shame has nothing to do with whether it is our fault; it is being in an embarrassingly low situation
What’s the shame in that? Why do we feel bad about ourselves when we are down & out? Why do people feel ashamed of not having money, live in silence?
Maybe the shame is really like Rav: fear that others will see it as a moral failure. The OED defines shame as “a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.” Jeremy Seabrook, in the Guardian, recently argued that we used to blame poverty on God, but now we blame it on the people.
Or perhaps Shmuel feels that even if it’s not my fault, I still experience it as shameful. I know others will look down on me. Also, I can’t see myself as being needy, weak, etc. None of us wants to see ourselves as poor, vulnerable, down and out. We certainly don’t want others to see us that way. So we suffer in silence.
Just like when we were slaves in egypt, We are shamed into silence. Shame is a contemporary Mitzrayim
What truths do we have that we are not speaking?
What truths are those around us suffering but too ashamed to speak up?

There is a classic midrash on the word “pesah,” that interprets it as peh sah, a mouth telling. On a simple level, the ‘mouth telling’ is reading the Haggadah, telling the story of the Exodus. On a deeper level, however, the mouth is gaining the ability to speak through the process of the exodus. Gaining the ability to speak is itself yetziat mitzrayim, leaving egypt.
Now we get a little technical:
The Zohar distinguishes kol, inner truth that we need to speak, the voice of our heart, from dibbur, the words that actually leave our lips. If the universe is divine speech, self-expression, then kol is the voice of the divine heart, and dibbur is the actual expression of the divine into the physical universe.

Exile is a rupture between kol and dibbur. On an individual level, this means that my inner voice is not articulated into speech. On a divine level, this same rupture happens to God.

The Zohar says that the Jews were constricted like the embryo of a donkey in its mother’s womb. They could not move. Redemption started when they cried out: They cried out, and god heard their cry.

Really embryos do move, so not a great metaphor; maybe donkey embryos move less than human embryos, or maybe the point was that an embryo can’t talk. But the idea was that egypt is a constriction that prevents the dibbur, the articulation of deep truth—they were not not speaking their truth. Only when they cried out, in an unarticulated cry, did the redemption start

The invitation: speak our way out of our personal mitzrayim,
To speak our way out of shame