Who or What is Your Scapegoat? A Drash for 1 May 2015

We hear the term ‘scapegoat’ often.  In common use, as a verb, it means to blame one’s troubles on someone or something outside oneself.  As a noun, it usually means the object of one’s tendency to blame.  The Nazi Holocaust is often laid at the feet of ‘scape-goating’ of the Jews.  That is to say, blaming the Jews for all of Germany’s troubles in the period of economic depression between the wars.  There’s truth in this, but it’s a gross over-simplification.  The Nazi phenomenon was far more complex than an attempt to find someone to blame for Germany’s military and economic failures.  And Germans’ attitudes toward the Jews were far more complex and deep-seated than a simple need to blame someone, so why not they Jews.

            But the tendency to ‘scape-goat’ is very real and near-universal.  So many of us go through life, disappointed in the way things turn out for us.  And feeling a need to lay these disappointments at the feet of someone or something outside ourselves.  And doing so.  It is much easier, than looking for the cause of the disappointment within ourselves.  But if we’re honest, when disappointments come we will look within ourselves.  And there, we will find the major cause for our disappointments.

          Look at what’s happening in the USA this week, in the city of Baltimore.  It’s a wonderful, vibrant place with a great populace possessing a ‘can do’ attitude.  In the late 1970’s this city found creative ways to combat, and reverse the cancer of urban blight.  And it did so with aplomb!  In American urban studies, Baltimore is often studied as a success story.

          But this week, Baltimore – at least in certain neighbourhoods – looks like a war zone.  What happened?  What changed, if anything?  What was the cause of the malaise that led some of the city’s residents to destroy cars, businesses and other institutions in their own neighbourhood?  Scapegoating, that’s what.

          It’s been pointed out that, in the year 2015, there is still income disparity.  There are the poor, and the rich.  And the majority, who are somewhere in between.  Some declare that, with the passage of time, it only gets worse.

          Really??!  Still income disparity?  Please…say it ain’t so!

Okay, income disparity is no surprise.  But it’s also nothing to decry.  Some people, through a combination of skills and smarts, willingness to take risks and even luck, do better than others.  So what?  Is that an indictment of the world around us?  It should not be taken so.  The ‘utopia’ where everybody has the same amount of wealth does not exist, and never has existed.

The immediate cause of the recent violence in Baltimore is given as the death of a man in police custody.  As soon as that news came out, and the fact that the dead man was black, it became a cause for agitators in the community to explode in an outburst of violence.  Against businesses.  Against institutions.  Against the police.  Without waiting for an investigation into exactly what happened to Freddy Gray, some blacks in Baltimore reacted by extending their hands in anger.  Destroying.  And blaming.  Blaming anybody, blaming everybody.  And many well-meaning people, have responded thusly:  It’s not really about Freddy Gray.  It’s about a deep-seated resentment over a world where black people suffer from poverty.  It’s about tax codes that favour the rich.  It’s about an inadequate minimum wage.  It’s about poor people scrambling for their next meal.

In other words, it really doesn’t matter what actually happened to Freddy Gray, and who caused it.  More than that:  Freddy Gray is completely irrelevant!  What matters is that there’s an underclass of black people, for whom the ‘American Dream’ becomes ever more elusive.  Who, 150 years after the abolition of slavery, find themselves ever more in slavery to poverty.

Forgive me it this sounds insensitive or unsympathetic.  But scapegoating helps no-one.  It has never lifted anybody from the depths of the poverty of their disappointment.  It only masks the real causes of the disappointment.  Lashing out at others only puts off one’s ability to change things for the better.

My purpose here is not to single out Baltimore, or a group of its black citizens, as a particular offender in the tendency to scape-goat others rather than face one’s condition and apply oneself to improving it.  Each and every one of us has a little of the Baltimore agitators in us.  I see in myself, in the people around me…a reluctance at best to accept responsibility for our failures.  So we blame someone or something outside ourselves.  We look for a scapegoat.  And if we look for one, we will surely find it.

The very term ‘scapegoat’ comes from this week’s Torah portion:  Aharei Mot.  Most of us know the essence of the story.  It’s read every year on Yom Kippur.  The High Priest declares that all the nation’s sins are upon a goat.  And then the goat is led into the wilderness to carry away the people’s sins.  In other words, the Torah seems to be modelling the practice we’ve come to call ‘scape-goating’..and to justify it.  Or perhaps, there’s a different lesson to be drawn.

Immediately after the goat is sent to the wilderness, we find the instructions for the fast of Yom Kippur.  The people are to ‘afflict themselves’ to atone for their sins.  But if all their sins have just been carried away on the back of a goat, why would such affliction be necessary?

I think the real lesson of the story, is that one cannot dispatch one’s sins on the backs of others.  The ancient Israelites had to afflict themselves for their sins after supposedly dispatching them on the back of a goat.  After the ritual was over, then the real work began.  Perhaps this teaches that scape-goating never works.  After we have unfairly lashed out at someone or something else in hopes of overcoming our shortcomings, they remain.  And then, hopefully, we can begin the real work toward overcoming them.  Plus the additional damage caused by the scapegoating.

The Baltimore agitators and their apologists blame, among other things, decades of divestment by business for the economic malaise of the city’s poor.  So how do the agitators address their malaise?  By looting and destroying business that have chosen to remain in the city and provide employment, vital products and services.  So…get set for more divestment from the city of businesses.  Oy!

The inclusion of the account of the ‘scape-goat’ in this week’s Torah narrative, immediately before the instructions for the fast of Yom Kippur, provides an important lesson.  For the ancient Israelites.  For the disgruntled citizens of Baltimore.  For all of us today.  We can blame others for our problems.  We can lash out at them.  And then, when the dust has settled, we can get on with the hard work of moving forward.  One would think that, by this point in history, we would have learnt the lesson in all this.  Skip the first two steps.  Let your disgruntlement with your condition, lead directly and immediately to the step of getting on with the hard work of moving forward.  Maybe now, after watching with horror as actions and their consequences unfold in Baltimore, we can learn this.  Shabbat shalom.