What would you say if Ye went DEFCON 3 on you? (Questions I had during Shabbat)
On the evening of Friday Dec. 9, a week after Ye praised Hitler on Alex Jones’ InfoWars, I went to Shabbat services at Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation (IHC).
It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a service for Shabbat, which is the start of the seventh day, a day of rest and study, in Judaism. When I go to services, I go to the Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation, which is where my family started attending services when we moved to Indianapolis in 1977. The IHC is still my favorite Jewish place of worship in Indianapolis. It’s a Reform congregation, not nearly as strict in its observance as the Orthodox are. My observance of Jewish rituals as of late had been anything but strict, but IHC isn’t the kind of congregation that ever made me feel out of place because of that.
Rabbi Brett Krichiver, guitar in hand, began the services with words of welcome for the gathered congregants.
“You’re welcome to join us as we bless this moment and we know the warmth and the spirit that fills this room as we light Shabbat candles,” Krichiver said.
Strumming his guitar, he and Cantor Aviva Marer then led the congregants—40 people give or take—through prayers and songs plucked from the prayerbook. It was a book, the rabbi remarked sardonically, that had been written “by committee.” The service was in a mix of English and Hebrew. Hebrew is a close cousin to Arabic, and the languages are read right-to-left as opposed to left-to-right. (The Jews and Arabs are close cousins too, but that’s another topic, for another time.) Having studied Modern Hebrew for two years, I found myself nevertheless struggling with the prayerbook, even where the Hebrew was transliterated with Roman letters.
In particular, I had to struggle when reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish, which is the prayer traditionally recited in memory of the dead. The Kaddish is not in Hebrew—although the text of the prayer is in Hebrew letters—but in Aramaic, which is the language Jesus is said to have spoken in Palestine. Through the utterance of a prayer recited generation after generation, the Kaddish unites the living and the dead.
During the service, the rabbi recounted the story of Jacob who, while spending the night on a riverbank, encounters an angel and wrestles with him until dawn. After which he (Jacob) is given the name Israel, but the angel refuses to give his own name.
“So what does it mean exactly to wrestle with God?” Krichiver asked the congregation. “And why does the text add that Jacob has seemingly wrestled with human beings as well? We know Jacob's path is anything but easy. Having deceived his brother and his father for his birthright, and then having been deceived by his father in law in exchange for the woman that he loves, and three other women as well. He does seem to struggle. From his earliest days fighting with his brother, striving to find his place in the world. So in a contemporary interpretation, we might argue that Jacob’s struggle is one of understanding. We are, after all, the children of Israel.”
Krichiver went on to say that we all struggle, each of us, with understanding news of disasters around the world, near and far. The struggle to understand it all is complicated by the fact that all of us, as human beings, are of infinite value. In this context, he remarked on Ye (né Kanye West) and his praise of Hitler on Alex Jones’ show.
“West has been creating chaos and controversy for much longer than the past week,” Krichiver said. “His talks and his interviews—the normalization of the hatred that he spews—it can't be taken lightly, with millions of social media followers. What Kanye or Ye now says, it just matters, as ill-informed and as nonsensical as it might be. And I'm left wondering how we got here. How is it that we are spending such tremendous resources, combating blatant and demonstrably dangerous gibberish?”
Just as the hate-spewing Ye is a person of infinite value, he went on to say, so is WNBA star Brittney Gardner, released in early December from a Russian gulag.
“Perhaps we have witnessed this week a right-sizing of the infinite value of human life,” Krichiver continued. “Yes, we will rescue Brittney Griner from an unjust and inhumane prison term even if it means sparing a basic life sentence for a dangerous arms merchant. We will not tolerate ignorant and vile polemics from a character we know has nothing of substance to say. Our lives are too valuable to waste our time. We will defend ourselves. Make no mistake, but we will not give Ye any more attention than that. Let us celebrate instead the release of Brittney Griner to her wife and family the knowledge that our country at least in this moment has lived up to its promise to respect the dignity of every person …”
After the Shabbat service, Ken Falk, the legal director of the ACLU of Indiana, led a discussion regarding the organization’s challenge to the state of Indiana’s abortion law alongside Rabbi Krichiver. This law, Krichiver said, violates the religious rights of Jews. That is, an 11-week-old fetus is a living being, according to Jewish law—but that fetus is not the same as the 25-year-old woman who might die because she is forced to carry it to term. Rabbi Krichiver has spoken out publicly multiple times against this law which passed easily through the Indiana General Assembly to Governor Holcomb’s desk. The governor signed the ban, which contains a few narrow exceptions, in early August. But thanks to the ACLU, the law is currently blocked pending Indiana Supreme Court review in early 2023.
In Indiana, Jews have to live with the decisions of the (gerrymandered) majority. At the same time, being Jewish in (Greater) Indy can feel like being in a distinct minority. According to the 2017 Greater Indianapolis Jewish Population Study, there are 17,900 Jews in the region, comprising 1.7 percent of the population. This is not an overwhelming slice of the population. But we, in fact, exist. We are not only lawyers and bankers, but also doctors, Uber drivers, electricians, English professors, accountants, restaurant managers, farmers, shopkeepers, and astrophysicists. You’ll find a wide diversity of employment among us, just like in any other ethnic group. If some Jews are a little better off than the population at large, well, that’s not a crime.
I don’t often go to Shabbat services. That I’ve written like I have on this subject may be a shock to some people. That is, I’ve been more than willing to consider perspectives that are far outside the Jewish mainstream in the past. Like that time I attended a “non-Zionist” Passover service and wrote about it. But I’ve had some disheartening discussions on social media as of late regarding Ye in particular and Jews in general. This happened mostly in early November, when “#the Jews” were trending on Elon Musk’s Twitter for all the wrong reasons. It made me consider, and perhaps reconsider, a few things. I mean, what would you do if Ye said he wanted to go “DEFCON 3” on you?
