by Rabbi Ron Stern
I recently came across the following quote introducing an exhibit at one of the world’s great art museums: “A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.” (Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses)
Rushdie’s assertion conveys a powerful challenge to those who would embrace the somnolence and complacency of turning our backs on the fissures that are rife in our world, of throwing up our hands in submission or feigned ignorance to the forces that seek to undermine our hard-fought freedoms and democratic rights.
In what might be the most disturbing demonstration in our lifetimes, lives were lost in Charlottesville, Virginia as this latest generation of America’s homegrown fascists displayed their colors. Predictably, anti-Jewish epithets were shouted, perhaps directed at the town’s Jewish mayor, perhaps because through neo-facist conspiratorialist eyes the Jews are at the root of all their paranoid, convoluted misconceptions. We’ve heard this before and unchecked, we know where it leads.
Are we sleeping? Are our leaders sleeping? It is during times like these, when the poisonous snakes rear their heads that true guardians of democracy stuff them back in their borrows and speak out even louder to preserve the essential principles of plurality, religious freedom, civil rights, and tolerance that drew all of our ancestors to these American shores. Let’s be clear, equivocation and moral equivalency have no place in the face of a resurgent American facism.
We can have our differences. We can differ over political parties and platforms. However, we cannot allow even a crack of light to shine through the bricks of the wall we build within our society to contain fascism, anti-Semitism, and racism. And when we see that there might be cracks in that hard fought for wall then we need to all become poets, to name the unnameable and stop our world from going to sleep.