Do All Lives Matter?

In partnership with Kevah and Limmud Bay Area

Intro:

You are camping in the woods. You needed to get away from the city for a bit. So you’ve gone deep into the woods, hours away from home, no wi-fi, no cell phone reception.

As it turns out, you weren’t the only one feeling the need to disconnect for a bit. As you are trailing, you hear a faint noise. You approach the source of the noise and hear a person crying for help. They have been critically injured and need immediate medical attention.

Question, which may be obvious, but let’s give it a shot – It’s just you two. Do you cut your camping trip short, make your way back to the car, and bring them to the closest hospital?

Rewind. You haven’t gone trekking alone. You are with a friend. She is critically injured needs immediate medical attention. As you are heading back to your car to head into the city, you hear someone else – a stranger – also critically injured. You can only save one. Do you save your friend or this stranger? What if you had to decide between a friend and a sibling?

Just a question to poll the room – if there were two strangers, equally suffering – one was a member of your faith community, and one wasn’t – would that at all enter into your calculus as to who to help first?

Questions on #1:

• What do all human beings have in common, according to Rabbi Akiva?
• What do you think being in God’s image means?
• What are the implications of this idea for how we see ourselves and how we see one another? (Benefits/Costs)

Transition - so it would seem like all lives are equally and infinitely valuable and unique, and that through the idea of Tzelem Elokim, we are charged to see each other as such. And this works in the creation story, before much drama emerges, but as history developed, to me at least, it seems *at first glance* that this value fell to the wayside.

[I want us to dive into this text a bit, and challenge us all to try, just try, to read this text charitably, if we can, to try and understand what would drive the rabbis to make such a claim. [something might be helpful] I want to share a teaching that I learned from one of my rabbis, Rabbi Harold Schulweis. He pointed out that the word Respect means to “Look again” - re: spect. So let’s try and look at this text again.]

Questions on #2:

• What might be problematic about this text?
• What drives someone to prize one’s in-group over an out-group?
• What would cause someone to categorically not support an out-group?

Questions on #3:

• What distinguishes Jews from other nations here?
• What does distinctiveness because of the Torah vs. being children to God suggest about Jewish distinctiveness? Jews as family relative to one another; shared heritage; shared values
• Does this seem like a satisfactory answer?

[Context: Romans and Hellenizers in Palestine. They viewed heretical idolaters, apostate assimilators (meshumadim), and informers to the Romans as even worse both than the oppressive enemy pagans.]

Questions on #4:

• What do we think or feel about this categorical statement about people of other nations?
• Is fear for one’s life a serious motivating factor or simply a pre-text or prejudice?
• How far can fear of another go? Does this go too far or does it just reach the line of what is a reasonable reaction to seeing a threatening person in need of help?

Question on $5:

• Does fear/prejudice, or unethical/lawless character - justify devaluing the life of someone else? Can one ever lose their rights?

[To recap where we’ve been, we explored some of the universalistic tones in the Torah - all human beings are created and are forever in God’s image - and yet, somewhat in the Torah and emphasized in later rabbinic literature, it seems like Jews valued their own lives over others. But still, we tried and saw rabbis trying to make sense of these for one reason or another, to limit the application of this rule to those who Jews were afraid of.

Which three fit you and which don’t?]

[This last text is a bit more hopeful and promising for us, and I hope we can take the message with us that no matter how hard it might be, we can have strong personal or particular identities while seeing our own lot - and liberation - as tied in and dependent on others.’

I didn’t teach this class because I felt like I had an answer - for myself or anyone else here - but because I feel Jewish texts can add nuance to the very modern challenges we are facing right now, be it about immigration, nepotism, or oppression, isolationism.]