This drash was delivered as part of a Shabbat service marking Juneteenth. It followed a powerful new poem by Sally Churgel, the link to which will go right here once it is posted.
I am grateful to Sally for starting us off tonight. For so beautifully, so poetically, doing the heavy lifting, for bringing into our consciousness the weight of our grief at the death of George Floyd and the senseless loss of so many other black lives; for bringing us close to our sadness, touching our outrage, noticing our complicity, and for helping us hear the call.
Today, Juneteenth, should be cause for unalloyed celebration. But it is not, because despite Emancipation, the legacy of slavery – the systemic suppression, policing and incarceration of Black people – contiinues in this country.
In 1968 Dr. Martin Luther King assured black people – assured all of us – that we would one day reach the Promised Land. He had already been to the Mountaintop and he had looked across.
But it is harder to leave the Wilderness than it looks. The Promised Land looks beautiful, but beauty can be frightening too.
Our Torah portion this week is Shlach-Lecha. It is the moment where, camped on the Jordan River, on the border of the Promised Land, Moshe sends out scouts. They tour the land. They come back with clusters of grapes, boughs of delicious fruit. They say the land is flowing with milk and honey.
Among the twelve scouts are some visionaries: Joshua and Caleb, who already can see the people living in sweetness and abundance. They say, "We can do this; we've seen it; let's go; let's go."
But the ten other scouts who also saw the promise in the Promised Land say, "The people who live there are giants; and we were like grasshoppers in our own eyes and surely in theirs." The Children of Israel hear this, and the fear is infectious. Soon the whole nation of Israelites is quaking in their sandals, saying, "Hell no, we won't go. Take us back to Egypt."
God, angry at the refusal of the gift of a Paradise, offers instead the gift of a Wilderness. Forty years of it until the People have outgrown their fear of the new.
We also are peeking across a border into a Paradise right now. A world where everything can flourish: the fruit trees and the grapevines, the painters and the poets, people of all ages; people of all races. We could do the work of crossing over; on the other side we would be bigger than we are now; our spirits enormous as giants. That's who we could be. And that scares us. It is easier to stay grasshoppers, shrunken, constricted, hard-shelled, afraid of being trampled. It is easier to stay grasshoppers than discover all the dimensions into which we could grow. Easier to stay in the Wilderness we know than the Promised Land that we can only see incompletely, and in which things will be beautiful but different.
Our ancestors spent 40 years in their Wilderness. Forty years from slavery to freedom. How long have we been in our Wilderness? It's 52 years since Dr. King visited the mountain top. It's 155 years since Emancipation. It's 401 years since the first slave ship rubbed up against these shores.
Dayenu. It's enough. It's so much more than enough. Any bit of it would have been more than enough.
This is not the time to be afraid of an uncertain future. Every future is uncertain. But look! Just look! Right across the Jordan! There it is! Pomegranates and figs. Milk and honey and wine. Look! There we are, bigger, fuller, expanded far beyond the shrunken spirit our our racist culture, beyond the hard shell of injustice. Can't you see? No more constriction. Welcome breath! Look! We have broken through! There we are – giants of love, all of us, full of laughter and song, loving the Earth, trusting each other, grasshoppers no more. Look! It's so close. We are so close!
Our leaders and prophets stand at the shore ready to give the order to march. Will we follow? There they are. And Moses is black and Miriam Latinx. And Nachshon ben Aminadav who is just now lifting a toe to test the water, Nachshon looks just like you. They are calling, "Lets go." Shall we?
Remember, people, we are not on the shores of the Red Sea. We don't need a miracle. This is the Jordan River. We can wade. So let's go. Let's go already. Let's go.