“One who destroys a life, Jewish tradition tells us, is considered to have destroyed the entire world; one who saves a life has saved the entire world. A person is not a statistic, or a unit of GDP, but a boundlessly precious being who has an entire universe of potential. This may seem obvious, but how many of us have walked right by a homeless person on the street who asked for our help? If that person had been a celebrity, would we have stopped? If we had seen a laptop lying on the street, would we have stopped?”
–8 NIGHTS, 8 JEWISH VALUES: REFLECTIONS FOR CHANUKAH ON THE JEWISH OBLIGATION TO BUILD A BETTER WORLD, Sarah Hurwitz
This principle–that of the absolute and nonnegotiable worth of absolutely every human life–must be seared upon our hearts.
We are terrible at accounting, aren’t we?
When we assess worth, much like yesterday’s reflection where we assessed worthiness, often we start from what we feel is a neutral place, and then ascribe debits and credits and come up with a number. Is she a teacher? 3 points. Are they addicted to a substance or engaged in a behavior we don’t like? Negative 6 points. Are their teeth even? Plus 1. Do they smell? Minus 10. What’s their zip code? Do they own or rent? What was their class ranking? And on and on and on.
This needs to be confronted, dismantled, and thrown in the waste bin. Our worth, your worth, my worth, the worth of the Other, starts at Infinite, and never wavers.
We say we know this. It’s embedded in documents that founded this country. It rolls so glibly off of the lips; and is mindlessly belched out without our fully grasping and internalizing the enormity of what it is we are affirming.
Because this is not how the world has taught us to live. We mouth it, but we don’t believe it ourselves–we don’t believe it, even about ourselves. Which is why we so often lead with the attributes we feel will buttress our own ledgers: our education; our achievements; our clothing; our cars. We know we are being sized up, however unfairly, and feel that we come up wanting.
We live in constant anxiety about what is written in those ledgers by the hundreds of people we encounter in the course of a day. And in spite of, or even because we know the game is toxic and rigged, still we impose the will and the weight of those judgments upon ourselves, and our intolerable shame moves to a faux grandiosity, and we do the same to others.
We know we will end up in the red–the system guarantees it. We feel powerless to change what feels like indelible red ink staining our very souls, and so the best we can come up with is that even as we live in deficit, our small measure of comfort is that there are others whose books look worse than ours. We make damn sure of it.
And so it continues.
When I hear Hurwitz speak to the infinite worth of every human, I must start with myself. I must declare myself enough–not perfect, not unteachable, not grandiose, not static and fixed.
I know there is more on the daily that I must do to become just a bit closer to the person I say that I want to be. I know there is more to learn and unlearn, more to examine, more to practice. But I strive to do it not from a place of lack, but from a place of abundance. I need to get to a place where I can affirm my messy humanity as I look at my crooked teeth, and my legion of moles, and my round belly, and my educational gaps, and my relational challenges, and my failures, all of which make me who I am, and all of which must be accepted and integrated as I prepare to truly meet the Other.
The Other, in their messy imperfect, absolutely perfect humanity.
I challenge myself to look past societal markers; the designer shades, the German horsepower parked in the valet stand that so many of us see as a proxy for value and worth. My smile must be no more bright for those with the keys to the Audi Quattro as for our homeless fellow on Broadway in Lemon Grove.
As we pivot to race we can and do confront other markers that society ascribes warped values and inflated and deflated scores. Pedigree, heritage, clubs, associations, rap sheets, credit scores. All affected by a system of supremacy that puts a fetid thumb on a scale created for the benefit of only a few, to the detriment of so many more. People on the wrong side of that particular slash start with a deficit that no point system can ever make even–the societal forces guarantee that too.
We will never get it right if we use the world’s accounting system.
So it is our task to burn the ledgers–no more credits. No more debits. No more extra credit or asterisks or caveats.
Start with infinity, and stay there. See the worth that can never be diminished. Find what has always been there, in yourselves, and then assist and witness the infinity of the Other. Make it your life’s work.
And the moon rises on the Third Night.
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