Exodus & the Price of Slavery

Rabbi Sharon Brous, IKAR Rosh HaShanah Day 2 Sermon 2017

OUR COUNTRY WAS BUILT ON A STOLEN BEAM:

THE CALL FOR A NATIONAL RECKONING

We can’t undo the past. But we can name it, take responsibility for it,
and do everything in our power to fix what’s been broken. A Jewish case for REPARATIONS.

Jourdon and Amanda Anderson had been slaves their whole lives when they were liberated by the Union Army in 1864. They moved to Ohio with their children and were contacted a year later by the man who enslaved them, pleading with them to return to the plantation. Here’s part of Jourdan’s response:

...Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for 32 years, and Mandy 20 years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor's visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to... If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense... Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire...

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant, Jourdon Anderson

What’s remarkable about this letter is not only the perfect tone (apparently they did have sarcasm in the 19th century), but the sensibly articulated assumption of wages due, remorse and recompense.

The premise of teshuvah—return, reconciliation—is that mistakes are inevitable in any relationship, family system or society. People need a way out, an exit strategy, so that the offender is not defined permanently by his villainy and the victim can free herself of perpetual victimhood.

Rabbi Sharon Brous, Rosh HaShanah Day 2 2017

What ought we do if a house, maybe even a beautiful palace, is built on the foundation of marish hagazul—a stolen beam? Shammai argues: We must tear down the house to retrieve the beam and return it to its rightful owner. You can’t build something beautiful on a lie.

But Hillel has a different take. What sense does it make to demolish the palace? Let the thief pay for the beam, considering its full value as the foundation of a beautiful home.

Both Rabbis insist that something must be done to rectify the injury. That is the only way for justice to be served...

Our nation has never contended honestly with its past. The point of teshuvah is to make it possible for people to move forward, to reconcile and begin to heal. We can’t undo the past. But we can name it, take responsibility for it, and do everything in our power to fix what’s been broken....

I love this country....

But... Our country was built on a stolen beam. Except it was several million stolen beams. And they weren’t beams, they were human beings. The palace they built was magnificent, but they have not yet been paid for their labor. Or thanked. Or fully invited to a seat at the dining room table. Now is the time to actually make this the country it always should have been, had we gotten it right in the first place.

Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865

"Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Ta-Nehisi Coates, "The Case for Reparations," The Atlantic, June 2014

Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay? But if the practicalities, not the justice, of reparations are the true sticking point, there has for some time been the beginnings of a solution...

A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions. But we are not interested.

John Conyers’s HR 40 is the vehicle for that hearing. No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.