An Empathetic Indictment

Just about every summer of my childhood my parents, my three bothers and I would pack food and clothing, pile into our Volvo station wagon, and drive the thirteen hours from Atlanta, Georgia to my dad's hometown of Broken Bow, Oklahoma, heart of the Choctaw Nation.  The uninitiated might imagine Broken Bow as a brownish yellow dust bowl, complete with tumbleweeds and dust tornadoes, fitting it neatly into every picture that one would have seen of Oklahoma.  Such an image, though, would do one no good. While acres are still the preferred measuring unit and it's often miles until the next property, Broken Bow is located on the edges of a majestic man-made lake and at the foot of the Ozark mountain chain.  It is green and lush in timber. Its white rivers, bedded with quartz, tumble down the hills and irrigate the soybean fields.
We would pull up to my dad's little sister's house near the tracks that run through the small town.  My grandfather had moved his family back to Broken Bow, his birthplace, after his wife had passed away unexpectedly, leaving seven children with him, an American Indian living in Morocco.  Most of my family would be there and I always looked forward to seeing them, after all Owa Chitah, the seasonal festival of the forest, was a time for family first and foremost.    

Family, now that is an interesting concept.  For many it connotes a certain degree of homogeneity.  Sure, there might be some crazy uncle who is an Obama supporter and that cousin who married a goy, but more or less everyone shares similar values.  That has never been the case for me.  Occupying a space that straddles numerous worlds, be it the Choctaw Nation, the Yeshiva University community, or my mother’s parents’ hard line haskalah, my idea of family is one that transcends borders, languages, and blood.

In a sense, it reminds me of the Mishkan.  The Torah states that Moshe wrapped the Mishkan in the skin of an animal known as the tachash.  Many speculate that the tachash is a dugong, some sort of sea cow, or perhaps even a giraffe.  The one thing we know for certain is that the tachash’s skin had a singularly important quality: it was multicolored.  The Malbim runs with this fact, explaining that when G-d looks at the Jewish people He wants, He commands that they be multicolored, open to difference - open, as Emmanuel Levinas put it, to the Other.  Judaism is not inherently an inclusive, ethnocentric religion. 

Interestingly, if you look at one of the reasons supposedly behind the destruction of the Beit HaMikdash, as well as, perhaps, the reason for our continuing Diaspora, is this same refusal to incorporate the Other into the unified service of G-d, or sinat chinam, baseless hatred.  Unfortunately, though, its contemporary American incarnation, born in the urban and suburban ghettos of the tri-state area and incubated by long school days and cloistered curriculums, is a central ethnic identity, complete with the particular accoutrements of summer camps in the Catskills and Pesach trips to Florida.  Within any walled community such as this, a fear of and insecurity with the Other is often a paramount feature.    
I was attracted to YU for its unique solution to this issue: Torah u'Madda, the dialectic entanglement of two worlds in a binary paradigm that begs for its own deconstruction.  As one of the very few Moroccan, Native American Jews in this world, I wanted a place of dialogue, of fluid borders, and above all, engagement, respect for, and tolerance of the Other.  I came here only to find that the dialogue with the Other, the interaction between the Yeshiva and the University, is buried beneath stilled waters.   Yeshiva College's curriculum maintains the fiction of these two discrete categories to assuage the timeless fear of confronting the Other.  Unsurprisingly, it reflects the ethno-centricity of the community itself. 

And this cloistered atmosphere is counter-productive in so many ways.   For example, a number of semesters ago I was on a campaign to start an Honors Code at Yeshiva College to control the outright theft of others’ work more commonly known by the more innocuous academic moniker – plagiarism.  The administration would have none of it, though.  They believed that such a program would never work in a cloistered community.  If only Bernie Madoff had made my point then. 

The Tolerance Club itself was founded in part because of a student’s careless disregard for the larger Washington Heights community.  At a town hall meeting a student, without thinking, blamed our “neighbors” for breaking into his car.  President Joel astutely pointed out that it could have been one of us too. 

Finally, the most common reaction I get when someone finds out I am “Indian” is the Family Guy-esque ritual of pointing to the head with a single finger, connoting the dot some of those from the Sub-continent wear, and then popping the open hand against the mouth, asking which “Indian” I mean.  Taken separately, each of these are fairly harmless.  Yet, together they unfortunately represent a larger trend, fostered by both the cloistered lifestyle as well as the static curriculum.   
As I prepare to spend my last year here I can’t help but reflect on the missed opportunity that this school seems to have become.  Rabbi Dr. Bernard Revel originally founded the school with two key words in mind: harmony and blend.  These words present an oxymoron of sorts; how can something being blended, a tumultuous and violent action, be harmonious?

The answer, I believe, perhaps might lie in the greatest interaction that the Yeshiva contains, the chavrusah. In the air between two people stir dynamic ideas, fraught with significant complications.  These two argue, heated words boiling in the space between.  Yet, in that tension is a harmony, you might even say a love; a love that you might even identify as familial in a strange new, yet wholly beautiful understanding of the word.  Family not defined by borders, language, or blood, but by a unified respect for the tension inherent in that singular relationship, a relationship built on the tolerance of the Other