The Trouble with Tribes

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

Sermon Shabbat Vayechi 5782

Sophie and I visited my daughter Cipora in Portland, Oregon this week, a quick trip of three days to the Pacific Northwest.  I hadn’t been in Portland in many years, since I was a boy traveling with my parents.  Unlike the stereotypes of the weather up there, when we were leaving the airport in our rental car there was blinding sun shining at just eye level, and I needed sunglasses just to navigate the entrance to the highway to the city.  Of course, that was the last time we saw the sun during our three days there. 

There is a reason it’s so green in Portland: people essentially live under water. A friend of my daughter’s recently purchased a good used car and was pleased to report that it was actually growing moss on it in several places.  When I was packing up some boxes inside a car, I came to realize that the items were actually covered in a fine sheen of water—and they had been inside the car the entire time, never exposed to the everpresent mists of Portland atmosphere.  As my Bubbie Irma used to say, growing up in Portland they had a saying that Queen Victoria and Portland’s weather were exactly the same: it rained (reigned) and rained and rained and never gave the sun (son) a chance.  You could say the same about Queen Elizabeth II nowadays, I suppose…

So, as we dry out back in Tucson, and reacquaint ourselves with the yellow orb in the sky here, I must confess that I have no desire to ever live in a climate like that, no matter how lovely everyone says the summers are.

I can also say that the dark and bleak climate seems to have some impact on personalities in Portland.  People were very polite, but not exactly, um, warm.  Sophie and I tried to visit the historic synagogue there, a very impressive structure that has family connections for me.  My grandmother was confirmed at that temple in 1905, and while the building she knew burned down and was replaced in the 1920s with the current massive sanctuary, it would have been nice to see the inside of the shul and tour it a little.  First, we were aggressively turned away from walking around the outside of the building because a class of charter school kids was playing in the area next to it—no signs indicating that by the way—and then, unfortunately, we were turned away by the synagogue itself: no tours during the pandemic, vaccinations and masks or not, come back when this is all over if you like.  Oh, well.

There was another interesting facet of Portland life.  We attended the theater last night, saw a fine and well-produced play, and prior to the show announcements were made about the importance of acknowledging the centrality of Native Americans and the fact that the current theater did not sit on land that ever been expropriated from indigenous peoples.  That was followed by a statement about the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement, and of Black people and other people of color in society.  The play itself wasn’t focused on either indigenous peoples or Black identity.  After the show concluded—it was very good—the standing ovation was followed by a fairly lengthy appeal for donations for the theater and its outreach work.  Everyone politely listened to the, um, commercials before and after the production and apparently expected them.  It was a little different from, say, watching “Hamilton” at Centennial Hall here in Tucson, where the main concerns seemed to be whether the attendees could get their own selfies taken next to the thoughtfully arranged cutouts outside the show.

We live in a large and complicated nation, with a great deal of cultural and social diversity.  Portland and Tucson are a 2½ hour nonstop flight from one another, and both are certainly western United States mid-size cities—Portland is larger, with actual tall buildings in its downtown and much more serious traffic congestion—but still, they have many external similarities. All US cities have commonalities, of course, and western states are more similar to one another than different.  But like any grouping of people, there are going to be differences.  Self-selection—the “kind of people” who choose to live in Tucson, Arizona as opposed to the “kind of people” who choose to live in Portland, Oregon—but also the local and regional differences that shape our lives, geography, industries, local politics, history, demographics, religious history and distribution, pastimes and sports and local culture, and yes, the prevailing weather.

I was thinking about the way these factors impact groups of people who begin in similar places but change over time, becoming, in a way, different tribes.  Even in an era of easy movement within a nation and around the world there are always significant differences between people who are raised and live in different regions.  Of course, there can also be such differences between groups of people in the same city or region.  But the external differences are often more obviously apparent in physically separated places.  Perhaps by their very nature, people in different places tend to form different tribes.

In this week’s Torah portion of Vayechi our great ancestor Jacob, the true father of Israel, gives final blessings to each of his many sons and the tribes they will father.  Most commentators see in Jacob’s predictions for the future of the descendants of each of his quite different children either a prophecy about the character that those separate units, those tribes, will possess later on in Israelite history—or they see these verses in Vayechi as having been written much later, when the tribes who ultimately descend from the children of Israel were well established in different parts of the land of Israel.  In either case, what emerges is a picture of a diverse and often divergent array of what could only be a loose confederation of peoples unified by a common ancestry, by their presence in a shared inherited land, certain holidays and rituals and, sometimes, by the belief in the same God.  But they mostly seem like semi-autonomous tribes with very different identities, professions, and destinies.

Of course, Jacob’s “blessings” for his sons here in our portion are sometimes not blessings at all.  While some sons receive fulsome praise—the top two blessings, of course, are reserved for Joseph and Judah, who will prove to be the ancestors of the most important of all the tribes, Ephraim in the north of Israel and Judah itself in the south of Israel—other sons are not praised at all but harshly criticized.  Reuben comes in for rough treatment because of his own mixed conduct, called out for being “unstable as water” and violating his own stepmother.  Shimon and Levi are harshly attacked verbally for their brutality in the story of Dinah and Shechem, “called brothers in blood,” their violent and hot-tempered natures totally condemned, told they will be “scattered in Israel.”  One brother, Issachar, gets “you are like an ass, a strong donkey carrying loads;” thanks, Dad!  Another, Dan, is called a snake on the road.   

It’s clear that each of these tribes will have a different destiny, that each will meet its own disparate fate.

Ultimately, in the case of the tribes of Israel, that lack of unity will doom most of the tribes to disappear over the course of history.  Israel, the nation, itself will split into two countries after the death of King Solomon.  The two nations, all Israelites, will fight wars against each other, and in the end Assyria will destroy the Northern Kingdom and carry off the 10 lost tribes into the mists of antique history.  Only Judah and Benjamin and some Levites will be left—and they, too, will suffer exile and destruction at the hands of Babylonians.  You see, the tribal identifications, in the end, proved damaging to the unity of the children of Israel, Jacob’s descendants.  Only when we returned from Babylonian Exile as one unified Jewish people, without all those tribal distinctions, were we able to build an enduring religion and peoplehood based on shared values and experiences.  It was only when our ancestors experienced near total destruction that we saw the need to become Am Yisrael, the people of Israel, with the great value that kol Yisrael Areivim Zeh Bazeh, every Israelite is responsible for every other.

So how does all this relate to the kind of tribalism we have been experiencing lately right here in our own nation, America?  It is perhaps notable that whatever cultural differences—and atmospheric ones—we experience in our various regions and, well, tribes, that we have a great deal more in common than we have real differences.  It is my sincere hope and prayer that it need not take the kind of disaster our own Jewish ancestors experienced for our nation to become aware that harping on difference and accentuating the ways we do things that are slightly or even significantly distinct is no service to our nation and our own culture.  We have always been stronger together, better together, and of more value to the world when we see past these tribal divisions and accentuate our common highest goals.

Even when we have very different weather…

On this Shabbat of Vayechi, may we learn that tribalism is a stage of development that we can, and must, overcome.  And may we learn to serve God, and the good, together, so that we can enjoy, as Jacob promises Joseph, “The blessings of the skies above, the blessings of the deep below,” on our own heads, as on Joseph’s.