I love writing these notes every month -- for lots of reasons, but particularly because you all make it possible for me at times to share the things that plague and perplex me. I spill them out into the Megillah, and over the ensuing month, occasionally more, I wander through town and get to have incredibly valuable conversations in the context of a community I love and trust.
So here's my latest fixation… Many of you know that I have been active for some years now with Rabbis for Human Rights-North America, particularly with their campaign against US-sponsored torture called "Honor the Image of God: Stop Torture Now." I have chaired this campaign since right after its inception (this year gratefully co-chairing with Rabbi Joey Wolf from Portland.) It's important work, and I value Rabbis for Human Rights very much as a kind of beacon in the Jewish world.
But even as the anti-torture campaign gets more successful, I get more confused. "Successful," I should say, means that we have collected lots of signatures, written various strong Jewish legal positions and liturgical pieces and such. We've made lots of brochures and postcards. Our graphics are getting pretty good (right now there is a flurry of e-mails about whether a photo on our next brochure of Rev. King and Rabbi Heschel marching together will speak to the young folks or just to the grey ponytails…) We are active in the National Religious Campaign Against Torture. We get to play with the big kids: with the Center for Constitutional Rights and Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and other great, venerable human rights advocates. We've become the go-to address in the Jewish world about torture. (Not, unfortunately, that any other organization was racing with us to get there…)
But the more of this stuff we put out, the more weirded-out I get. Partly it is the cognitive dissonance I regularly experience of working on nice graphics about torture. Part of it is my own luddite antipathy to packaging and marketing of any kind at all. But underneath all this is a philosophical conundrum that I just can't figure out.
Whatever other small matters of social justice that I have been involved in before this have been based in a kind of witnessing. I was never homeless myself, but I knew -- up-close and in detail -- a lot about what it meant to be homeless, at least homeless on skid row in Los Angeles in the '80s. I know less, but still a bit, about poverty and race, apartheid and reconciliation in South Africa. I have been in Israel and in the West Bank a number of times over the years and know people affected on several sides of this struggle. On a more local level, I've spent a fair amount of time with sick people and in hospitals, nursing homes and more over the years. If I have opinions about healthcare, they come from things I have seen.
I find myself thinking a lot these days about the term "bearing witness.". Elie Wiesel speaks of bearing witness to the holocaust. Writers like the Chilean novelist Ariel Dorfman bear witness to political depredations that they have experienced. The Christian Peacemakers Team folks I met in Hebron speak of bearing witness to what they see going on there. When you are a witness to something, you may be right in the center of the story, or you may be over on the sidelines looking on. You may or may not be personally affected by the events you witness. But you see what you see. If you bring a report to someone, you have some degree of credibility, because you were there.
I find this position of bearing witness to be very powerful and very centering, whether it is I bringing the report or whether I am hearing another person bear witness to their own experience. Bearing witness doesn't mean that one is objective. We are all drawn to understand situations in light of our own values and experiences. We may well be highly partial to one telling of the story. That is advocacy. There is nothing wrong with this. But there is a kind of integrity in speaking what we know, what we have seen first-hand.
So how does one bear witness to the reality of torture, which is by its very nature hidden, secret, disguised and euphemized? Who am I to stand up and say I think that torture is wrong? Why should anyone listen to me? Yes, I can read documents -- government letters and position papers, pieces of legislation, reports compiled by advocates on all sides of the question. I can look at the photos from Abu Ghraib. I can read testimonies. I can follow the news. Anyone can. And if you read the documents that Amnesty International puts in front of you, you will most likely come to one kind of conclusion. And if you read the documents proffered by … I don't know, Fox News perhaps, or the National Review, you will likely come to an opposite position.
Likewise, as we all know, with Jewish sources. Our side cites the eloquent 1999 Israel Supreme Court decision categorically banning torture. We cite the restrictions on self-defense in Jewish law, the ban on self-incrimination which makes torture useless. We point to the harrowing cry of eleh ezkerah, the account of the ten martyrs tortured by the Romans, read each Yom Kippur. Another side can cite the Jewish mandate to self-defense, the permission to make war, our distinctive experience of terrorism. And so on.
So we make our pamphlets and postcards and statements. We try to get you to sign on, to hold a banner, to make a phone call to a legislator, to write a letter to the paper. And of course the other side has their corresponding pamphlets and posters, and they wage their campaign.
Meanwhile a detainee is held in secret in a "dark site." Not even the Red Cross knows that he is there. He has not been charged with a crime. He has no representation. He cannot see the evidence against him. He is interrogated according to a set of protocols which are kept secret. Not even members of Congress know how "heightened interrogation" is conducted.
How can any of us bear witness to his predicament? How can we not?
Happy Hanukkah -- season of small lights in great darkness -- my dear community.
© 2007 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Updated 11/25/2007 (rge)