A Journey Within A Journey

Rabbi's Notes - April 2006

by Rabbi Margaret Holub

Two weeks ago I set off on a little journey-within-a-journey. People here often say that Cape Town “isn’t Africa.” I was itching to see a little bit of Africa. Not only that, but many of the black Africans I have met don’t originally come from Cape Town. They have migrated, like rural people all over the world, from small villages to the city in hopes of a better life. Many come specifically from the coast of the Eastern Cape, from the former “independent homelands” of the Transkei and Ciskei. Poring over my Lonely Planet, I found myself yearning to go that direction. Friends of mine here, Americans on sabbatical, in fact, had friends in King William’s Town. “That’s definitely Africa,” they kept saying.

That’s how I came to be pulling up to a little parking space outside a simple-looking cemetery, in the company of Reverend Makarabo Mfenyani and a friend of hers who was driving us around. Makarabo is an Anglican priest, a Xhosa, and the pastor at the church which was once attended by Steve Biko. Biko was the powerful young spokesperson for Black Consciousness, tortured and killed in prison in the seventies, probably the most famous martyr of apartheid. The cemetery here has a sign, Steve Biko Memorial Garden. And a municipal worker is mowing the grass around the little parking area. Other than that, it doesn’t look too different than any other graveyard.

There is a little gravel path to Biko’s small and unassuming grave, and Makarabo leans down and picks up a pebble. “It is a Xhosa custom,” she explains, “to leave a rock on someone’s grave.” I laugh a little, as I have already tucked a lovely little cowry shell into my pocket for the same purpose. At the grave, there are small stones and a few shells laid out, just as you can see in the Jewish cemetery in Mendocino.

Leaving the cemetery, Makarabo instructs our driver to make a stop at a nearby house. “We will stop and ask for some water,” she tells me. “It is our custom that we wash our hands when we leave a cemetery.” Again I smile at the familiarity of the practice. We stop, as it happens, at the home of Steve Biko’s brother, who had died and was buried just a week ago. Makarabo points out the muddy spot where people leaving the cemetery had dumped basins of water after the funeral.

South Africa is a country made up of tribes – black Xhosa and Zulu primarily, also Sesotho and Griqua and Swazi and others, coloured Cape Malays, white Afrikaners and British, and a few others as well, such as the Jews. Each has a language, customs, morals and lore. Each has a history, often a history of conflict with the neighboring tribes. Each tribe teaches its children that it has a great culture, that its practices are right and must be followed to insure the tribe’s survival and the well-being of the world.

It’s been interesting for me to think about Jews as a tribe among tribes. It illuminates some things better than does thinking about Judaism as a religion among religions. For example, it explains how Jews can believe all kinds of different things but still feel strongly identified as Jews. (I can’t tell you how many times I have stumbled around here trying to explain this point when Christians ask ‘Do Jews believe’ X,Y or Z?) It helps me make sense of the intense anxiety in the Jewish world about demography, about intermarriage. It helps me understand the passion to pray in Hebrew, when few of the world’s Jews can understand the words we pray. It helps me to feel good about the pleasure and comfort I feel (usually!) in the company of other Jews. We are a tribe, an extended family, making our way in the world amongst the world’s other peoples, sometimes at peace, sometimes in conflict, sometimes fat, sometimes lean.

I would contrast this sense of the Jews to the one I heard articulated by Johan. I spent a night visiting with a Dutch Reformed Church minister and his family (his wife, Thea, is my friend and coworker at the Desmond Tutu TB Centre. Lovely, delightful folks, whom I’ve enjoyed getting to know better over my stay…) As I arrived they told me that a friend of theirs was very anxious to meet me and would be coming by shortly. Johan is in his seventies, and he has the confident air of a successful businessman at the end of his career. Indeed, I was told, when Johan retired he dedicated his life to Christ, and he has a particular passion for Israel. He sat right down and started asking me questions to which he obviously expected enthusiastic agreement: Don’t I see the Jews as “a light to the nations,” as Isaiah prophesied? Don’t I think that the strength and preeminence of Israel is a sign from God that the Jews are chosen? Isn’t it crucial that other nations support Israel militarily because of her role described in the Bible? Don't I see the present conflicts there leading to the End of Days?

He grew visibly disappointed as I kept shaking my head from side to side. Yes, I agree that the Bible says… But I assume that every tribe’s bible paints that tribe in the center of humanity and history. Every people sees itself as a light to the nations. And every people should try to be one. Every tribe sees its prosperity as a sign of divine favor. I treasure the Bible (may I please call it the Tanakh?) because it is ours, the sacred text of my tribe. And I assume that other tribal people treasure their own teachings as I do mine.

This is a paradox at the center of having a particular identity in a modern, pluralistic world. We have the intellectual task of loving, teaching and passing on our own heritage while at the very same time respecting that other peoples treasure and teach their own heritage. This is why I might wish that every religious grouping would see itself in some measure as a tribe. A tribe copes with this paradox. It is able, for the most part, to revere its own cosmology without universalizing it. It understands that the next tribe worships differently and doesn’t really want its neighbors to appropriate its gods or its language. A tribe doesn’t evangelize. A tribe puts its own survival and prosperity at the center of its agenda without expecting the rest of the world to do the same.

But we do live in a modern and pluralistic world. And this creates a new set of paradoxes. Our fate is not uniquely our own concern, and the fate of other peoples is more mixed in with ours than it may have been at any earlier point in history. We have much to offer other peoples and much to gain as well. Early in my visit I met with Jean Duff, the Director of the Center for Justice and Reconciliation of the Episcopal Church. She was in Africa organizing African clergy to address world poverty. It seemed perfectly clear to her and her colleagues that the Church has a role in relieving suffering around the planet. In what way, I kept asking myself, is Judaism concerned with African poverty? I found myself struggling to articulate, as a Jew, our role in world affairs. That conversation unsettled me profoundly.

At that time I was reading Community and Conscience, by Gideon Shimoni – a brilliant and disturbing study of the South African Jewish community during apartheid. Essentially Shimoni illustrates this paradox: a disproportionate number of leading white anti-apartheid activists were Jews. But those Jewish activists, almost to a one, disparaged Judaism’s role in the stands they took. At the same time the official Jewish community assiduously avoided involvement unless the issues directly affected the Jews. It was overall a fairly reactionary force. So somehow all these Jewish iconoclasts felt themselves called to relieve injustice, even though they didn't think that Judaism had anything to say in the matter.

Meanwhile I am seeing here how a certain luminous brand of engaged Christianity, such as that practiced by Archbishop Tutu, is able to be a force for justice and peace for a nation and world, not just for its practitioners. I have wondered many times here what Judaism would offer in this setting if it had the equivalent power of numbers?

Questions questions questions… And we are coming up to the Night of Questions. We might ask ourselves at our seder tables: in what ways are we Jews forces for justice? For reconciliation? What in our Judaism best prepares us to face our world? What tools ought we to take with us as we journey? What do we want the next generation to keep alive as they face their own social landscape?

Meanwhile, God willing, I will be home to celebrate and contemplate with you all just a week from now – sad to be leaving a remarkable experience but oh-so ready to return to all of you, my tribe, my people, my world! All blessings for a most inspired Passover…

© 2006 Rabbi Margaret Holub

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