Last fall, I heard a 2017 interview with the author and journalist Ta-Nahisi Coates on the radio show On Being.  Coates, who is Black, was chafing that he was being asked to give hope to his audience in the face of racial injustice against Black Americans. 

“I was trained as a journalist,” he said. “Journalists go out and look for things that are wrong in the world, and then they write them....  That’s my training.”[1]

I have been thinking about that interview for months.  Not offer hope?  Not offer optimism?  Why would Coates not want to talk about the world-as-it-should-be and the path for getting there?  Instead, throughout the conversation, rather than giving advice or consolation, Coates made a demand to talk about the world-as-it-is—

 “If I were a kid right now…,” he said, “I would want to understand, why did they kill Eric Garner? Why is that OK…?  I don’t need you to make me feel good about that, but I need to know what happened.”

He was right.  I should not try to make anyone feel okay about that.

Unlike Coates, my training is not as a journalist.  My training as a rabbi is always to be ready to offer a nechemta—soothing words of consolation that make it clear that, despite harsh truths about the world, there is always reason to be hopeful; despite harsh truths about ourselves, we can always grow and be better, and that, fundamentally, we are worthy, we are whole, we are okay just the way we are.

Okay, maybe that last one wasn’t my training as a rabbi.  Maybe it’s really that I spent my childhood watching a lot of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.  But, Mister Rogers had it right too.  If you don’t remember the episode when Mister Rogers dipped his feet in a kiddy pool with François Clemmons (a Black, gay, opera singer playing a police officer on the show), I beg you to go Google it after services tonight and to remember what that meant at that time. 

At any rate, I am someone who tries incredibly hard to see the good in people and in the world, and I try to reflect that back to others wherever I can.  So, when Coates refused to offer a nechemta for the harsh realities he sees in the world, it gave me pause for thought. 

He’s right.  There really are things we have to look at square, as they are, and make sure that we are feel the discomfort of them.  When we realize that we may be incredibly kind, well-intentioned people but that that doesn’t mean we don’t play into and benefit from structures that oppress people—that oppress our own neighbors—that’s not something to try to find hope in.  That’s something to sit with the knowledge of uncomfortably until we can’t take it anymore and have to get off our couches and try to do something about it, even if it means acknowledging that we are not as guiltless as we wish we were.

So, I’ve been sitting with my guilt, and trying hard not to let myself rush to a nechemta.  And, now, while there’s been the opportunity to stand on a street corner with a sign, in a facemask, my family and I have been doing that too.  It’s not much, but it’s a small start.

So, you can imagine my surprise when I heard another interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates last week, in which the first question he was asked was, “What do you see right now, as you look out at the country?”, and his answer was:  “I can’t believe I’m [going to] say this, but I see hope. I see progress right now, at this moment.”[2]

He went on to talk about the huge difference between now and 1968, when his father was a young man—as Coates put it, “it was mostly black folks in their own communities registering their great anger and great pain.”  Now, he says, “I don’t want to overstate this, but there are significant swaths of people and communities that are not black… white folks in Des Moines, Iowa, in Salt Lake City, in Berlin, in London… that to some extent have some perception of what that pain and that suffering is.”

With that understanding, across the country and world, the work is not done—it’s barely even started—but in that solidarity, ally-ship, ability for empathy across boundaries of skin color, Coates is finally seeing a glimmer of a reason to imagine the world-as-it-maybe-one-day-could-be.

In the Torah portion we’ll read tomorrow, Moses sends scouts to take a glimpse of the Promised Land.  They come back with grapes clusters so big that they have to be carried on a frame, pomegranates, figs, reports of a land flowing with milk and honey.  But, they report too that there are mighty troops in the land who will cut them down, and they are afraid.  Seeing the world-as-it-was, they reported the truth as they saw it:  that the Israelites were weak and without allies.  That there may be abundance in the Land ahead, but that it would not be theirs for the taking. 

Only two of the scouts saw things differently.  Caleb and Joshua had seen the grapes, the honey, and the troops and saw reason for great optimism.  With God on their side, they said, surely the Israelites would be able to prevail. 

But, the other scouts’ message of realism was too convincing.  The people sided with the scouts who saw the threat inherent in the Promised Land.  Instead of going straight there, the Israelites remained in the Wilderness for another 40 years, a full generation.

In reading this text, we are usually inclined to think that Joshua and Caleb were right, and that the other scouts were foolish and wrong.  We are usually inclined to think of the 40 years in the Wilderness as a punishment.  But, it was during those 40 years that the Israelites learned to be a people.  It was during that time that they learned, slowly but surely, to take responsibility for themselves and to care for each other.  It was there they learned about how to show honor to God and human alike.  By the time those 40 years of being in the Wilderness-as-it-was were done, they were ready to look ahead to the Promised Land, with the glimmer of what-could-be.

It has been 52 years since 1968, and only now is America maybe a little bit more ready for hope about racial justice in our country.

And it’s not only that.  It has been 51 years this month since the Stonewall Riots, and look where we have come since then in our country’s understanding of what it means to be LGBTQ+.  We are certainly not fully there, but the turning point came when most people in America could imagine and embrace the idea of same-sex marriage.  (Happy Pride Month, everyone.)

It’s similar to the way that, slowly, most people in America are now seeing that skin color should not be—must not be—a death sentence. 

The Promised Land is always a ways away, but we get glimpses. 

So, maybe there is reason for hope after all:  the kind of hope that comes out of acknowledging where we are wrong, and the places where our structures are broken, and the parts we play in them, and when we can name our pain and fears, and feel our discomfort, and then get off the couch and be together on a street corner, in our face masks, honoring each other’s humanity. 

Rabbi Sally Priesand, the first female rabbi ordained in America, wrote last week: 

[Pirkei Avot says,] “When truth is spoken and justice is done, then peace is established.”[3]  For truth to be spoken, each of us must learn to listen, opening our ears to hear one another’s truth and our hearts to understand it. For justice to be done, it must exist for everyone, rich and poor alike, those of every religion, race, culture and background, those with power and those without. Only then can we find the wholeness that true peace represents.[4]

There is a nechemta after all:  There is reason to hope.  Wholeness is there to be worked toward, with empathy, solidarity, and feeling our brothers’ pain.  So, work we must—and we will.

Shabbat Shalom.