Hukat 5777 / Pride Shabbat / 23 June 2018

This week it feels especially impossible to stand up here and talk to you about something other than the terrors of this world—massive deportations, children forcibly separated from their parents and held in internment camps, and so much more. The state of the world is terrifying. But that’s not what I’m going to talk about today. Today, I’m going to talk about Pride, and being bold enough to imagine a future. 

In today’s parsha, Hukat, the Israelites continue to be frustrated, hot, and angry on their long trek through the wilderness. Out of that frustration, discomfort, and anger, last week Korach lead to a popular revolt against Moses and Aaron, calling for democratization and transparency. Korach and his people got swallowed up, God angry that Korach refused to have faith in God and Moses. The rebellion was quelled, and in the end everything had come back to the baseline: they were wandering, making their way slowly to the Jordan, under the vision and leadership of Moses and Aaron and God. But the people kept on being frustrated, hot, tired, angry. 

Finally, out of water, they had another outburst: If only we had died with everyone before us who has died, we would be better off. There are no figs, vines, or pomegranates here, they said, not even water to drink. Why did you make us leave Egypt. We were better off there (Numbers 20:5). Moses and Aaron could not take it any longer, and they went to God to figure out what to do. God instructed them to take a staff and strike a rock with it, and water would come forth. This miracle, hopefully, would restore their faith. But when Moses took the staff to the rock, he did not hit it once as instructed, nor did he affirm God. Instead, Moses said: Listen up, you rebels, shall we get water from this rock? And then he hit the rock twice, hard, and water came out. The people had what they needed. But for this, Moses does not get to cross over into the Jordan. We hear a few verses later that God’s reason is that Moses did not trust God enough to affirm God’s holiness to the people in that moment. 

There is a midrash that teaches that Moses, when he became angry, became forgetful, and made mistakes. One of those mistakes is this one, striking the rock twice and showing off. Moses became angry at the people Israel, and forgot who he was speaking for and to.  (Sifrei Bamidbar 157:9). Anger becomes forgetfulness

The Israelites had been wandering for longer than anyone knew, generations dying and being born, those who had left out of Egypt were now ancestors. They were scared, frustrated, underfed, dehydrated. They were angry. They had been walking all this time in pursuit of someone else’s dream, someone else’s imagined future. They’d been told: you can have a future, in which you are free. You can have a future, in which life is not so hard. You can have a have a future, where you are not oppressed. In the immediate explosiveness of liberation, perhaps some of them were bold enough to imagine that land of milk and honey, but we know their kvetching started quickly. They were not chasing after a future they imagined for themselves. They thought maybe they made a mistake by leaving.

Imagining a future, when you have been conditioned to believe that you and your people do not have futures, are not worth futures, are disposable, is one of the most difficult things we can do. To do it, you have to believe you will live, that you are worth living. You have to believe you will survive, that you are worth surviving. It means imagining that everyone you love will continue to live, continue to survive. That the world will conspire for you to succeed in this. 

When the world is full of danger and violence, it is reasonable to be angry. When our ancestors escaped tyranny to wander for generations without adequate food or water. When queer and trans people have fought for generations for a real and lasting liberation and still live in daily fear of attack, violence, and oppression. When trans women have a life expectancy into the mid 30s. When teenagers can’t imagine making it out of high school. When queer adults can’t imagine any one of their nascent dreams actually happening. When this is the baseline, when so many of us live our lives believing our dreams could not possibly fulfilled, it is very reasonable to be angry.

Moses was punished for his anger because he failed to remember the future he had imagined. He lifted himself up, he acted rashly, narcissistically. He wanted the Israelites to shut up, but he was not acting to transform the world. Our queer and trans anger, it rails against the world, not for the purpose of shutting it down, but to make this world anew. This is the anger people talk about when we say Stonewall was a riot. It was specifically a riot against police violence, to be sure. But it was a riot, too, against the hijaking of our futures, the theft of our dreams. 

Anger turns to forgetfulness. In the face of this anger, we forget. We forget that we are worth futures. We forget that we are worth imagining. We go so long without being told we are worth fighting for—we go so long being treated as though we are not worth fighting for—that we forget the truth. That we are precious, that we are beloved, that the world was, indeed, created for us. We are overpracticed in believing that we are but dust and ashes. 

We need our anger to not go the way of Moses here, in striking the rock twice and elevating himself. We need our anger to fuel our fight against the forgetfulness we live in. We need our anger to wake us up again, to not lead to forgetfulness but instead to lead to passionate dreaming about futures brighter than we knew. It was anger, too, that lead Moses and the Israelites up and out of Egypt in the first place. The world was created for us. What would it mean to imagine bright and full futures? Where we we can, in the words of the poet Suheir Hammad, walk ever loved and in love. Where we can fight with our neighbors against the fascism of this land, to protect and nurture the futures of people of color, of immigrants, and know our futures as queer and trans people will be fought for and preserved, too?  What would it be like to imagine that we become old, that there will continue to be a world for us to fight for, that we will continue to live in that world? 

The possibility of it all is too difficult for me to imagine most days, but not during Pride. Not when my people are shouting, raving, loving, playing, jubilantly in the streets. This is one of the few times of the year that I can look out into the world and see myself reflected, and think: there is a place for me here. Pride is one of the few times I feel with certainty that the whole world was created for me.

Do not give in to forgetfulness. Do not let your anger turn you inward. Let it transform you, let it transform your dreams. Let it make you bold, courageous, playful, chutzpadik enough to imagine that you, and everyone you love, might grow old together, in a world that is strong and loving and brilliant enough to hold us all. It’s the only way through. It’s the only way to get through this desert alive.