Realizing Potential

Twelve spies are sent out by Moshe to reconnoiter the promised land of Canaan. They return, and ten of them report: The land is fertile. But the people there are so formidable, so big….We couldn’t possibly defeat them.

How big were they? Said the spies: “We were in our own eyes like grasshoppers, and so were we in their eyes.” The spies did not consider that the Nefilim, the Anakim — those outsize Canaanites — might have viewed the Israelites not as insignificant grasshoppers, but as a fearsome vanguard of Israelite hornets or, that local — Jersey shore — summer scourge, greenheads!

The ten spies projected their insecurities and retreated behind them: “We’re too small to stand up to people so large and powerful!” The Israelites responded with cries of fear.

Adonai is understandably frustrated with the Israelites’ whining, with their lack of faith in Adonai, and, perhaps even more, their lack of faith in themselves! That generation of Israelites is to die off without realizing their potential in the promised land.

June is designated “Pride Month,” a time to recall and appreciate the trials, travails and triumphs — the real pain and the perseverance — of our children, of our peers, our older relatives and friends who were denied basic rights and consideration because they didn’t fit a standard mold, because they didn’t conform to an expected trajectory. Because they loved differently.

The generations who were made to see themselves as less-than, as small in the eyes of others. The brave souls who wouldn’t hide, and who sought not acceptance or tolerance but simple humanity.

And those who embraced, supported and helped embolden the few, then the many, who demanded the freedom to live as any citizen. Free to engage in the pursuit of happiness as they wished, without religious or legislative condemnation.

That there are parents who feel unable to accept their children as fully-formed persons in their own right is saddening. That governments willfully deprive citizens of equal treatment because of sexual orientation — or disorientation — is maddening.

For a time to commemorate in the synagogue context the possibilities of human expression, I have been torn between the secular June and the annual Torah cycle’s first reading, Bereishit/Genesis, in early autumn. June because in New York City, on June 28, 1969, the Stonewall Uprising began, the first public protests against oppression and persecution of gays.

Bereishit/Genesis? In the biblical creation story, Adonai endows each human with male and female properties — zachar u’nekayva bara otam — i.e., with a range of binary and non-binary potentialities.

June or Bereishit? Why choose: There is enough history of repression and persecution, of struggle and success, for both!

To Sophie — to all our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren: The hapless spies doomed themselves and their generation because of debilitating self-perception. May you, may all of us, be free to develop as suits our nature and our desire. And may we always recognize our inherent worth so that we will thrive in the place of promise to which each of us aspires.