Anger Breeds Chaos and Chaos Breeds Anger

Thoughts on Parasha Behaalotecha

Menachem Mirski

POLSKĄ WERSJĘ Van Nuys, one of the northern neighborhoods of Los Angeles, Monday around 5 pm. A journalist from a TV station is talking with several people gathered in front of a grocery store. All of them are African-Americans, two of the men are holding shotguns. Just like many others in the neighborhood, they are protecting their businesses from raids of thieves and looters which accompany the demonstrations organized in reaction to the killing of George Floyd committed by a policeman in Minneapolis a week earlier. While she is talking to one of these men’s wife, a car drives up and several individuals – both white and black – get out of it. Local business-owners know who they are; they know they’re not from here and they’ve come to rob a local jewelry store. The looters are trying to “negotiate” about something, but they are afraid of the armed residents of the neighborhood and they don’t really know what to do; they seem baffled. After a couple of minutes the police arrive and the looters start to run away on foot. The policemen who have just gotten out of their police cars set out to chase them, but two of them approach the armed residents, they decide to detain them and handcuff them. The TV reporter screams: “It’s not them! These are good people, owners of their stores, they’re defending their property!” After a few-minutes-long conversation the policemen set them free.

This is just one vignette portraying the reality in many cities in the United States in the last several days. Just in Los Angeles, besides desecrated synagogues, many Jewish stores and other businesses have been looted.

After a Night Of Looting, L.A. Store Owners Ask, ‘Where is the Justice For All The Business Owners They Robbed?’

Besides the looting of stores and local businesses the widespread protests were also accompanied by acts of pure, mindless, barbaric destruction, such as setting on fire and desecrating churches and synagogues (cut up Torah scrolls and talits in toilets), devastation of monuments, burning down the bookstore Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgar’s in Minneapolis or acts of killing, such as the killing of Dave Dorn – an African-American retired 77-year old policeman from St. Louis, who served in the police force for 38 years and came to the city to protect one of the jewelry stores. By Tuesday, June 2nd at least 11 people were killed in connection to the protests.

I’m not going to discuss to what extent those protests are peaceful and to what extent they are not. I will just point out that some of the protesters themselves have expressed the opinion that sometimes a peaceful protest is not enough, and I learned about this from the press which supports the protests ideologically. Some say that the underlying reason is the widespread injustice present within the society. I would not objectivize this, since there are many different concepts of justice and we won’t easily find a common denominator here. But certainly the source of that anger and of the ensuing events was a sense of injustice among certain groups within the society.

I’m also not going to discuss in detail the issue of the so called racial inequality in the USA. I will just say that this issue is too complex for it to be reduced to a simple (neo)Marxists concept of the oppressors and the oppressed. To be honest, I believe that this concept should be discarded once and for all, since such binary sociological concepts from the 19th century have no cognitive value whatsoever. In general, human lives are too complicated to reduce social reality into two simple categories. The same goes for concepts which portray the society as nothing else but a bunch of different identity and interest groups competing with each other which are constantly at each other’s throats. In fact such theories don’t really explain anything, they present an extremely simplified view of reality and in the longer run they are very harmful. We know these kinds of concepts from our own history, which is in part a history of anti-Semitism. Dividing people into groups according to criteria we’ve come up with and then defining such groups as possessing certain inherent traits de facto amounts to creating new stereotypes and prejudice. In order to fix anything within a society we need an accurate, specific and in-depth diagnosis of the problems existing in it based on empirical data, and not on ideological premises and pseudo-empirical generalizations. Human societies are at least as complicated as an airplane or a helicopter. They cannot be repaired by means of slogans and emotions. These can only act as the driving force for such a repair, if that’s what they’re focused on – rather than on destructing the existing reality.

Such simple, binary concepts describing social reality give those who believe in them the illusion that they have understood everything. I am not one of those people and it’s not even my aim here to present a comprehensive picture of the situation; I’m only going to focus on two related aspects: on anger and chaos. Anger breeds chaos and chaos breeds anger. In this case chaos is an objective representation of the inherently subjective anger. I believe that the anger caused by the events in Minneapolis and by the reaction of the law enforcement system was understandable. But a brutal, public expression of any kind of anger is unacceptable. If I am upset and frustrated and I throw a paving stone at someone because of it, I should be punished for it. If my wife or my girlfriend has cheated on me, I have the right to be angry. But I don’t have the right to beat her up because of it. Period.

Anger is something we’ve always been dealing with as humans. Lack of control over anger is one of the primary sources of evil in the world and it leads to chaos. It leads to situations which we’d like to “take back” afterwards. It was the lack of control over internal anger stirred up by a sense of injustice that led Cain to kill his brother Abel. It is the lack of control over our social reality – a leniency towards forces of chaos – that leads to various Divine punishments such as the plague, war (Leviticus 26:17;23-26) or wild beasts [that] shall bereave you of your children and wipe out your cattle. They shall decimate you, and your roads shall be deserted (Leviticus 26:22), something I wrote about in my drasha three weeks ago. In fact I’ve already written about anger, chaos and order many times. Without the ability to control anger and to stop the forces of chaos there is no chance for any justice nor for any ideal of societal life. And it’s not true that some stages of chaos are necessary in order to establish some kind of a new order. This is only a bitter-sweet rationalization created post factum, after we’ve managed to bring under control the forces of chaos and people have started to believe that the newly-established order is better than the previous one.

In this week’s Torah portion we have two instances of human outbursts of anger and dissatisfaction caused by these people’s current situation; The Israelites complaining about the harsh living conditions on the desert, such as the lack of any food other than manna (Numbers 11:4-23) and Miriam’s and Aaron’s evil speech towards Moses because he had married a Cushite woman. Both situations bring Divine anger on the people involved in them. In the first case He is (temporarily) stopped by Moses and in the second one Miriam is inflicted with leprosy. There is one common theme in both of these situations – the theme of purification, of sanctifying oneself. The Israelites receive their much-desired meat from God precisely under this condition – that they sanctify themselves and purify themselves from anger and negativity (Numbers 11:18). Miriam has to undergo a 7-day quarantine to achieve the same aim.

Anger and chaos cannot form the basis of any kind of order, nor can they be the source of any principles or any form of order or justice. In principle anger and chaos self-escalate and lead to more and more destruction, as was witnessed by residents of many American cities in the past several days. People who tolerate such developments are also accepting all the tragedies and dramas which ensue from them. The condition necessary for the existence of any kind of order is to bring these phenomena under control and to sanctify ourselves by separating from anger and chaos. Only then can we start rebuilding that which has been destroyed, only then can we speak rationally and build a better future. A future in which our children will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.*

Shabbat Shalom,
Menachem Mirski

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]* “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”. Martin Luther King[/perfectpullquote]

Translated from Polish by: Marzena Szymańska-Błotnicka