Well, the statistics are in, and the news isn’t good. Hate crimes, it seems, are more popular than ever. Perhaps it’s because the economy isn’t as robust as we would like it to be; perhaps it’s because we live in an age of rapid social change and there are people who resent the changes and feel powerless because of them. Or perhaps the rising violence is because there are simply people willing to do evil and lacking the self-restraint (or the communal restraint) to stop them.
In any case, this has been a tough year for many. Beatings, bombings, hate mail and intimidation are frequent - if not accepted - behaviors in America today. We live, it seems, in a climate of militants, in an age in which people act viciously in public and think their zeal justifies their barbarity.
Our Torah portion has something useful to say about the zeal of the bigot and the nature of bigotry. In speaking of the Conquest of the land by the newly-liberated Israelites, the Jews are told "Don’t be afraid of the people already in the land, because God will send ha-tzirah," which is generally translated as "a hornet." This peculiar Hebrew word was apparently one that previous generations also had a hard time understanding, so Rashi, the great medieval Rabbi and commentator quotes from the Talmud (Massekhet Sotah) to explain that the tzirah "is a type of flying insect that discharges poison into them and renders them sterile and blind."
Both Rashi and the Talmud weigh their words with great care, using precision to transmit a deeper meaning. I believe that here they are unearthing a hidden perspective from the Torah about the price that bigotry exacts.
The Canaanite culture, don’t forget, was one of rigid social hierarchy, in which the rich dominated and the poor suffered. Living in fortress cities, the wealthy exacted their luxury from the sweat of the poor, an imposition that the Hebrew mind condemned as unjust and intolerable. The Israelites were a free people, living by the rule of a profound legal system that bound all its members, rich and poor alike. Serving only God, the Israelites were explicitly told to fear no mere mortal, to treat all with the same standard of justice. Such an open and progressive society must have seemed extremely threatening to the despots and beneficiaries of Canaanite power.
We can well imagine how those satraps justified their persecution of the poor, and their hatred of the Israelites, by repeating the same bigoted stereotypes by which the wealthy often justify the poverty of the poor, by which one group writes off all the members of another group - they’re lazy, they’re not willing to work hard, they’re not honest, they smell funny, they’re not like us.
Then as now, the mindset of bigotry is tempting and deadening.
Bigotry is tempting in that it allows a person to not have to confront the humanity of a fellow human being, not have to empathize with suffering and pain, not have to get involved in alleviating misery or fighting evil.
But bigotry is also deadening: The inability to see a fellow human being is a terrible blindness indeed. A refusal to learn from the great majority of human beings and human cultures is a sterility that can preclude all real creativity and growth.
Perhaps that is why the poison of the tzirah is one that blinds and causes sterility among the bigots it attacks.
Canaanite culture was blind to the changing realities around it, unwilling to see the Israelites as anything other than a military threat and a peasant people. By responding with hostility and violence, the Canaanites doomed themselves to destruction and stagnation.
Imagine if they responded to this group of people moving in by welcoming them instead. Imagine if the Canaanites had recognized the industry and responsibility that the Israelites had demonstrated by risking so much for freedom in a better land. What might have happened if the Canaanites were willing to learn from the Israelites, and were willing to teach them as well.
Instead of hundreds of years of conflict and hostility, with mutual stereotyping and violence on each side, both peoples could have become vital partners to each other, with the Canaanites teaching the Israelites their arts and industries and the Israelites sharing their lofty vision of God, justice, and law.
Bigotry doesn’t go away, and there are closet Canaanites in every group. How we respond to the newcomers our midst may well reveal the Canaanite within each of us. "You shall have one law for yourself and the stranger that is in your midst, for you were strangers in the land of Mitzrayim."
True Israelites welcome the stranger.