Nosō and Accountability / נשא און אחריות

This is a weekly series

of parsha dvarim written by a frum, atheist, transsexual anarchist. It's crucial in these times that we resist the narrative that Zionism owns Judaism. Our texts are rich—sometimes opaque, but absolutely teeming with wisdom and fierce debate. It's the work of each generation to extricate meaning from our cultural and religious inheritance. I aim to offer comment which is true to the source material (i.e. doesn't invert or invent meaning to make us more comfortable) and uses Torah like a light to reflect on our modern times.

An appeal

My friend Kamal needs help to leave Gaza. He is trying to immigrate to Greece to search for his missing son, who in desperation took a small and dangerous lifeboat across the Mediterranean. Please donate what you can.

Content note

Abuse; mentions of rape and suicide

On accountability

This is the single longest parsha by all metrics: it has the largest number of verses, words, and letters. Nasō means "take a census", and we're starting by counting Jewish men: this time the Levite clans Gershōn, Merori, Kehosi, that we know what number will support the Kohanim in tending and transporting the Mishkon. We're instructed to remove anyone from the camp who is defiled through ejaculation or contact with a corpse—once again, sex and death are linked. Kohanim are instructed to bless Israel daily with dukhnen, or the Priestly Blessing. We're given the details of Nazarite vow. Nasō closes with the chieftains from each clan bringing offerings of precious metals, livestock, flour, oil, and incense.

We are also given two processes for accountability: financial restitution, and the ordeal of "bitter waters" to determine if a potentially-unfaithful woman is an adulteress. I believe that these are genuinely useful models of accountability. There is much too much to say about bitter waters for this dvar, so we're focusing on restitution.

"Breaking faith" with Hashem

Wronging each other is a serious offense. If someone behaves badly and realizes their guilt, they must confess and repay the wronged party, plus 20%.

Misha leyening Bmidbar 5:6–7

0:00

/41.273438

1×

There are three steps to accountability offered.

First: realization of guilt. You can't hold someone accountable if they don't understand that they've done something wrong.

Second: acknowledgement of wrongdoing through confession. Tōrah doesn't stipulate who receives the confession but it's unlikely to intend a priest in a box. Ibn Ezra says the confession is for the victim.

Third: restitution of the original amount, plus 20% (or, if there are witnesses and the guilty party is reluctant to repay the damages, then the restitution is increased to 40%).

If the wronged is deceased, the restitution goes to their kin; if they have no kin, it goes to the Kohanim. Punishment, and tshuva ("return"), are not only about repaying what is owed to the victim, but about the guilty giving back to the community even if the victim isn't around. Restitution is a community process. Further, it is important for the guilty person to make things right so that they may forgive themselves.

Crucially, none of the steps in accountability require anything of the victim, other than to hear the confession and receive money.

And yet, is vital that we forgive each other for our mistakes.

When I say "forgive", I do not mean forget (unless, like me, you have a poor memory due to PTSD). I mean that our expectations of each other can only come from what we do moving forward. They fucked up: what now? What can we ever want from each other aside from tshuva?

Of course some harm can never be repaired, and you're not required to forgive or forget when someone's wronged you—it's one of my favorite things about Judaism. The onus is on the guilty person to make things right, and the victim can feel however they want about it. You can choose to cut hurtful people out of your life entirely. But/and once they've made a sincere effort toward restitution, it's not appropriate to go around telling everyone else how bad they are. The only exception is genuine concern for someone's safety.

Imagine the worst thing you've ever done. You've hurt someone. Now imagine the most ungenerous read of what happened. Now, imagine that the only thing people remember about you is this one bad thing about you, misconstrued to be worse than it was, and no one will let you forget it. I've watched leftists treat each other this way. It's not just sad—it's life-altering. What's worse is that most people aren't interested in accountability for actual hurt caused. What they're invested in is demonizing each other.

"He's dangerous." "She's harmful." "They're abusive." These kind of vague accusations are often shrouded in claims that "I'm not at liberty to give details, for the safety of the survivor." I've worked directly in supporting survivors for years, and this is a huge red flag to me: if the survivor's safety isn't compromised by spreading this information about the dangerous person, then you can say what flavor the danger is. Are they a rapist? A bad boss? Someone with lukewarm politics which contribute to a broader culture of oppression? Did they say something shitty once? Did they take your favorite hoodie in the breakup? Did they make you uncomfortable? Are they just annoying?

As leftists we should be troubled by the assertion from rape culture that survivors are liars who inflating claims; and too by the way that leftists genuinely do sometimes inflate claims.

Why do we do that? Because people listen more when we say "it was abusive" than "I'm hurt." We live in a culture that forces us to rationalize and problematize everything—I'm doing it right now!—in order for our feelings to be taken seriously.

Gossip is a cheap way to create intimacy.

Why do other leftists perpetuate accusations without verifying any details? The left traffics credibility on self-righteousness: when I tell you how "dangerous" someone is, I'm telegraphing an inside knowledge of our social group; a vigilance and intolerance for bad behavior, which makes me morally superior to the accused; and a disgust for bad behavior, which insulates me against accusations for the that type of harm. It lets me show that I'm trying to protect you by telling you who to distrust.

This cycle is terrible for many reasons. It makes us suspicious of each other. It makes us afraid to become the next target of cancel culture. It sucks our energy away from fighting our shared enemies. It reproduces carceral logic.

The Vampire Castle

In his essay "Exiting the Vampire Castle", Mark Fisher (z"l) says that cancel culture replicates the puritanism of the church: morality, guilt, condemnation and excommunication, with people divided into essential and immutable categories of “good” and “evil”. (The excommunication also rings true today in Jewish institutions, where countless antizionists have been kicked out.)

We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we must always agree – on the contrary, we must create conditions where disagreement can take place without fear of exclusion and excommunication.

I hated "The Vampire Castle" when it was published in 2013. I was the Vampire Castle! Twenty-four, a recent graduate, one of Fisher’s “neo-anarchists” whose activism was to be hyper-online and pontificate. “Purism shades into fatalism; better not to be in any way tainted by the corruption of the mainstream, better to uselessly ‘resist’ than to risk getting your hands dirty.” Fisher correctly diagnosed the problem that I now jokingly reduce to "Doing things is reactionary." I was depressed and obsessed with identity: that’s where the social capital was. Totally exemplary and very disturbing is: when I heard that Fisher died in 2017, I posted a tweet along the lines of “I didn’t know Mark well but I liked him and his work is important, even if I really disagreed with the Vampire Castle essay”. I couldn’t publicly express grief without caveats for fear that any proximity to a thinker meant total endorsement of everything they’d ever said. I quickly deleted the tweet when I learned that he didn’t just die, he’d killed himself; a moment of actual shock and sadness jolted me into realizing that discoursing—and distancing myself from what I felt was his most problematic take—wasn’t an appropriate eulogy.

I know people who carry around the gossip of the left like secrets in their hair. They hold the dirt on everyone, never forgetting and certainly never forgiving. The cancellations are currency. It looks exhausting.

In cases of financial misconduct, we can restore a victim to wholeness plus damages: it's easy to quantify money. With other types of harm, we can never again be "restored" to a pre-harmed state. But after the process of restitution or accountability, when the wrong has been corrected as much as possible, we can—we must—try to move on. But we cannot move on until the wrong has been corrected.

Make your confessions. Do your best to correct your mistakes. And while you wait for other people to apologize: hold on to your spite, you vengeful bitches. Get that 20% in damages. I love you.