Tag Archives: racism

Living in the Dystopia: When Fools Dare to Speak

king and heschel

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

“Even a fool, when he keeps silent, is considered wise; When he closes his lips, he is considered prudent.”

–Proverbs 17:28 (NASB)

Every time you speak to someone you have the power to choose words that will strengthen, lift up, energize, elevate, inspire, encourage, enlighten, support, benefit, and help your listener in some way.

Misusing words to insult, hurt, belittle, slight, offend, disparage, put down, and cause needless pain to other human beings is a violation of the Torah prohibition against causing pain with words.

A lot of people don’t realize that it is an actual Torah violation to cause pain with words. Insults, putdowns, mocking, making fun of, and any form of non-verbal communication that causes emotional distress is included in this Torah prohibition.

When you use your power of words to make someone feel good, you are doing an act of kindness. You are elevating yourself spiritually and emotionally. You are making a friend or strengthening an already existing friendship. You are doing a great mitzvah. You are being a positive factor in someone’s life.

When people misuse the power of words to make someone feel bad, it is an act of meanness and even cruelty. They are lowering themselves spiritually and emotionally. They are making an enemy or strengthening hate. They are committing a serious transgression. They are being a negative factor in someone’s life.

Be careful not to cause pain with your words, and encourage other people to be careful not to cause pain with their words. This awareness is very important for parents and for teachers who serve as role models for their children. Those who utilize their power of speech in positive ways will have children who emulate their positive patterns.

-Rabbi Zelig Pliskin from
Chapter 46 of his book
Encouragement

I’ve written about this before in my short essay Living in the Dystopia: A Nation Divided. I recall the news stories and broadcasts from when I was a child, about the civil rights movement. Some stories were about peaceful marches and demonstrations, and others were about violence and riots.

And yet there was always the idea that through this process, things would eventually get better. People generally believed, especially as I graduated from high school in the early 1970s, that our nation would achieve an ever greater measure of racial equality.

Sure, it was a time of great unrest, uncertainty, and even fear, but I believed that when I became an adult, when I got married, when I had children, I would live in a time that was better for all people in our country, not just some.

What the hell happened?

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Living in the Dystopia: A Nation Divided

dallas shootings

AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez

Supposedly in response to police shootings of African-American men Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, Micah Xavier Johnson, age 25 allegedly gunned down multiple police officers in the city of Dallas, murdering five of them. Johnson later was supposedly barricaded in a parking garage and, although the details are subtly different depending on which news agency report you read, Dallas P.D. sent in a bomb defusing robot armed with a bomb to kill Johnson. Other reports say that Johnson had the area wired with bombs and police used the robot to detonate one of them.

All of this goes back to “Black Lives Matter” vs. “All Lives Matter”. It’s easy to see why the concept of black lives matter makes a lot of sense, but at the same time, the actual enactment of the movement spawned by the sentiment is so dangerous, to police, to African-Americans, and to the rest of us.

This isn’t the first time populations have been separated within a nation and deliberately put at odds with one another. This isn’t the first time such conflicts have been used as an excuse to disarm citizens who legally own firearms.

I’m currently reading Elie Wiesel’s Night, his landmark chronicle of his personal experience as a survivor of Hitler’s Holocaust. The Jews were vilified in Nazi Germany and made the scapegoat of everything bad happening in that nation.

It was subtle at first. The Nazi’s first step wasn’t rounding up the Jews and shipping them off to the camps. That was the last step. The first step was marginalizing one or more populations from one another. If diverse populations in a nation are united, they cannot be overcome by the government. If the non-Jewish German citizens had stood by their Jewish counterparts, could the Nazi government have perpetrated the Holocaust?

What about us?

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