Individual and collective trauma, just like patterns of behaviors that we picked up from parents or peers, can and sometimes must be addressed, healed, and corrected.
Some of the values we internalized, despite our ancestors’ best intentions, no longer serve our moral responsibilities towards a equity and justice. While some of us try to face, challenge, and reverse many of the supremacist and fear-based tenets of our shared past - how do we as a whole take responsibility for our inherited norms of harm? What can we each do to stop cycles of violence, interrupt age-old narratives and start again? Must we keep on paying the price for the sins of the past?
These questions are on the minds and hearts of many of us today - while the war between Israel and Gaza rages on and as people in the United States prepare for yet another Thanksgiving feast with all rich mix of gratitudes and complexities.
For Ezekiel, facing the inevitable description of Jerusalem in the 6th Century BCE, the theological question is immense: Are the people suffering because of their own behavior or is this tragedy the consequences of previous generations that have caused this mess? At least on some level the popular belief was that troubles are the direct result of previous generational problems.
The common proverb, quoted by Ezekiel and previously by Jeremiah, echoed elsewhere in the Bible, is that ‘parents eat sour grapes and the children’s teeth hurt’, or in other words -- we pay the price for our parents’ bad behavior.
Ezekiel, aware of the people’s despair as the destruction looms closer, wants to save them from this theological dead-end that feels fatalistic.
He offers the people a radical rethinking of what they had previously known, in the form of a redemptive new idea - giving them agency and responsibility for how they choose to behave. Regardless of how badly their ancestors behaved - from now on each person must be resopnsible for their own decisions and actions.
What’s radical about Ezekiel’s words here is that he offers us a new religious paradigm - one that actually revokes age-old tradition that goes back to Moses -and to YHWH. This bold approach is one of the ways we can face the tough truth of previous collective assumptions and generations-old truths - to heal old traumas and begin again.
The Talmud already gives voices to this bold shift. In Tractate Makkot of the Babylonian Talmud, today’s chapter is listed among the four times in which a prophet invalidates the previous decrees created by Moses in the Torah. These timely adjustments reflect the understanding that even our deepest truths must evolve with time:
“Rabbi Yossi bar Chanina said: “Moses made four decrees upon the people of Israel which four prophets came and canceled… Moses said (Exod 34:7): ‘He visits the iniquity of the fathers on the children.’ Ezekiel came and canceled this (Ezek 18:4): ‘The one who sins will die.’”
Prof. James Diamond helps to further unpack some aspects of this radical innovation:
“What this prophetic iconoclasm reflects is a strong current in rabbinic thought that obliges critical thinking to determine the propriety of any rule or a law over blind submission to authority. If Moses and Ezekiel could challenge no less a supreme authority than God then surely the ethical quality of any earthly authority’s governance must be subject to the same careful scrutiny.
This revolutionary break with long accepted theologies thought to be sanctioned by God also offers a precedent for how religion should respond to historical events against which those theologies prove to be tired and worn.”
Ezekiel ends the chapter with a plea for new possibilities, for each person in each new generation to take ownership of reality, and to open to new paths and patterns of being, not tethered to the traumas of the past:
How do we take upon ourselves a new heart and a new spirit - when so much of what we know is grounded in what came before us? That’s a question that is still on us to ponder and to seriously address.
“I have learned that we can recognize, choose, and redefine our own destinies, even in the aftermath of ruinous events. Humans are created with the capacity to heal from wreckage, transform fear into compassion, and turn tragedy into strength.”
I hope that each of us and all of us together can get beyond the blames of the past to benefit a brave new reality of healing and hope.
Gratitude today for what we inherited and for new narratives towards more peaceful and just days for all.
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