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D'Var Torah
Yom Kippur 5770

Jessie Gerson-Nieder

I'm going to be speaking today about the ritual of the scapegoat from today's parshah Acharei Mot. For a portion of the text which has given rise to a rich body of commentary and debate, the actual references are relatively brief. Aaron is instructed to select two goats. One for the lord and one for Azazel. After sacrificing the goat for the Lord, and completing the rituals of purification, he is to lay hands upon the goat, and confess the sins and transgressions of the people of Israel. Then the goat is sent off into the wilderness.

Commentators have raised a number of questions about this passage: What exactly happens to the goat? How does collective expiation of sins mesh with the need for individual repentance and atonement and who, where or what exactly is Azazel? Some of the most interesting debate is the contrasting interpretations of the nature of the ritual offered by Ibn Ezra and Maimonides. Ibn Ezra suggested that the ritual was connected to pagan sacrifice or demon appeasement whereas Maimonides rejects this interpretation arguing in A Guide to the Perplexed that the ritual is "an active allegory meant to impress upon the mind of the sinner that his sins must lead into a wasteland."

The idea of the scapegoating ritual as an allegory is an interesting one in part because of the continued modern resonance of scapegoating (the word scapegoat was, in fact, coined by William Tindale the first translator of the English bible) Also interesting, is the degree to which the current meaning of scapegoating has shifted from the original intent of the biblical ritual. In the Torah, scapegoating served as a public acknowledgement of collective responsibility for a community's mistakes and transgressions. In the words of Rabbi Peter S. Knobel, "the goal is not to evade responsibility but to dramatize it." Modern day scapegoating however, turns this ritual on its head. To create a scapegoat is to turn a blind eye to that same responsibility to shift it to the shoulders of another. We pass the buck and blame the goat. If the ancient practice of scapegoating was an opportunity for acknowledging the shortcomings and mistakes of the past year at the collective and communal level, the modern tradition of scapegoating takes a far more dangerous turn in that we evade rather than accept responsibility and lay the blame upon another.

I have spent the last four years working in low income, urban schools. In that time, I have seen and experienced enough ingenuity, humor, and kindness to make me feel privileged to have chosen this line of work. I have seen parents who work double shifts to provide for their families, students who persevere in the face crushing challenges, and communities that rally around their schools and their children. But in many ways, the stories of success that occasionally feature on the news or in inspirational movies are the exception that proves the rule. Urban children living in poverty, who are disproportionately children of color, have become this country's scapegoats in both the biblical and the modern sense. In looking at the bleak statistics we see the failings, mistakes, the sins, of our nation. For example, we see our failure to provide equitable and excellent education to all children. Students in high poverty, high minority schools have a disproportionate number of unqualified and inexperienced teachers. African American students are three times more likely than white students to be placed in special education classrooms and half as likely to be placed in gifted ones. By the end of eighth grade, poor students are three years behind children growing up in affluent homes in reading and math, by twelfth grade they are four years behind. And we don't just fail children when it comes to education; we fail them by not providing adequate health care, housing, or safety in their communities. Franklin Roosevelt wrote in his second inaugural address "We are determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country's interest and concern; and we will never regard any faithful law-abiding group within our borders as superfluous. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." As a nation we have failed to lived up to these ideal and poor children and communities have been cast aside and deemed superfluous. They have become the biblical scapegoat upon whom our national failing are made manifest. And, in the unfortunate modern tradition of scapegoating, we see the blame for these same failures being laid at the feet of these children, their families, and their communities as politicians and popular wisdom speak of broken homes, bad choices, and bootstraps.

In the face of all of this what can we do? In fact, there is a large body of research that shows that three consecutive years of uninterrupted, highly effective teaching is capable of closing the achievement gap between poor children and their more affluent peers. Programs like the Harlem Children's Zone which provide comprehensive services and excellent schooling have proven that it is possible to break the cycle of generational poverty. We do not lack the knowledge to at least begin fixing what is broken but we seem to lack the will. We know what it takes for children to succeed. Allowing them to fail is sending them off into the wilderness.

Maimonides in his commentary on scapegoating makes clear that the ritual deals with sins and mistakes at the collective level-the sins of a people, a community, or a nation. How do we start, right now, at the individual level to make right what happens at a systemic level? I would argue that as citizens, voters, and tax payers we have more power than we think. But equally importantly, we can be brave enough to look unflinchingly and with honesty at suffering and injustice within our country and acknowledge when our collective choices have contributed to it-we can act in the spirit of the biblical ritual by taking responsibility and admitting culpability. By acknowledging what is happening in our country and by imagining and working towards a future of possibility, safety, meaning, and opportunity for all children we reclaim the intent and power of the original ritual.

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