Most Jewish communities recite a selection of verses beginning with the words vehayah im shamo’a tishme’u (“if you will truly listen…”)—from this week’s parshah–as the second of the Shema’s three passages. The text’s takeaway isn’t complicated: if we listen to God, we’ll get good rainfall, bountiful crops, and beneficial blessings, but, if we don’t listen, bad things will happen. The message is not only straightforward, but it is actually so simple that it must be either unfair or plain-out wrong. This is to say, if some “people of the Book” are obedient and some not, how do the scales balance? After all, the Israelites who heed God’s word most certainly lived right next to those who did not earn their worth in rain-drops.
To answer this question, Nachmanides (Spain and Palestine, 1194-1270) qualifies that God will pay close attention to how “the majority of the nation” acts when God determines whether to judge the people favorably (see RaMBaN on Deuteronomy 11:13). The itinerant Rabbi Mosheh Alshikh (Ottoman Empire and Palestine, c. 1507-1600) partially proposes the same sort of answer but highlights what he sees as the preposterousness of one Israelite’s field growing beautifully while the neighbor’s field lies parched (ad locum). As far as Nachmanides and Alshikh could see, in a nation where the majority of people are sinful, a righteous minority of people would be doomed to suffer, finding themselves subject to a system of divinely-decreed devastation greater than they alone could possibly reverse.
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In my home state of Pennsylvania, our schools and neighborhoods are experiencing the nourishing rains of education in precisely the absurd pattern Alshikh envisions. Between 2012 and 2013, Philadelphia closed 30 public schools; in so doing, the City of Brotherly Love saved the city plenty of money by shutting down over a tenth of the city’s general public school buildings. Students from these closed schools were sent to other, wealthier schools which, dealing with this influx, have reported a dip in the academic achievements of the students whose classes became more crowded with new (displaced) students. Meanwhile, research shows that the displaced students’ attendance decreased, suspension days increased, and academic performance remained the same as it had been before being removed from underserved schools (see Matthew P. Steinberg and John M. MacDonald, “The effects of closing urban schools on students’ academic and behavioral outcomes: Evidence from Philadelphia,” in Economics of Education Review 69 [April 2019], pp. 25-60). To top it off, new legislation enacted in July 2019 bars the state from considering the standardized test scores of students missing 20% or more of school days before the “end of the state testing window.” While attending classes regularly is important, for youth who face multiple, significant obstacles (systemic racism, systemic poverty, domestic instability, and the like), just showing up to school can be an overwhelming challenge. Philly’s school closures and mergers have, in short, benefitted nobody.
So what becomes of these children whose lives are a constant uphill struggle? They strike me as eerily, sadly reminiscent of the Babylonian Talmud’s category of tinok shennishbah (“a [Jewish] child who was taken into captivity [by those unfamiliar with or hostile towards Judaism]”) (as appearing in Shabbat 68a-b, Shevu’ot 5a, and Kereytot 3b). The Babylonian Talmud effectively legislates that Jews must not discount the ‘ignorance’ of the tinok shennishbah and therefore cannot hold them accountable for laws to which they were never exposed. Rather, Jews must be compassionate towards the tinok shennishbah, for they never could have learned the basics of Judaism as would have been common knowledge among anyone who grew up with any kind of real (albeit Jewish) education (Shevu’ot 5a). Bearing the weight of their tragic identity, the tinok shennishbah is passively carried into adulthood by time alone; their maturity does not come from gaining necessary “adulting” skills. Those early fledgling years in the lives of the tinok shennishbah are, after all, so acutely definitional to who they are as underprivileged individuals that these grown-ups are still called by a name that emphasizes their juvenility; their experience has led them to believe that they possess no agency in this world–as if they are merely “children” at all ages.
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Despite this, I like to believe in a God who is capable of living up to the Psalmist’s description of mattir asurim (“One who frees the bound,” as in Psalm 146:7). But, with the unjust systems I see in the world, I often wonder if God alone is capable of granting the tinok shennishbah what is needed in order to escape this captivity.
It is upon us to forge Divine partnerships, to understand better what kinds of setbacks–legal, domestic, economic, psychological, and otherwise–have inhibited so many young people from progressing forward. Each of these forms of brokenness have built a broken system requiring the sort of repair only possible when we can carefully find the stumbling blocks lying along the path. Though our rabbis were stymied in how to respond to a divinely ordered collective punishment, we–like Rabbi Alshikh–must continue to protest when one neighborhood is nourished by a shower of fecundity while the kids next door suffer devastation.
Rabbi Jonah Rank is the Director of the Shul School at Kehilat HaNahar in New Hope, PA. Rabbi Jonah was listed on The Forward’s Soundtrack of Our Spirit of 2015 for his music composition, and he enjoys writing and editing for new liturgical and Jewish educational projects.
