D'var Torah for Yom Kippur

10 Tishri 5769
October 9, 2008

by Margie Paris

Our readings this morning present a challenge to the unsophisticated interpreter such as myself.

First of all, they contradict each another. Our Torah portion contains a meticulously detailed set of instructions about priestly rituals, which are to be carried out with extreme precision. Here we learn of the scapegoat practice and other acts which must be performed by the priest wearing certain items of linen clothing and engaging in much sprinkling of blood in just the right spots, followed by bathing. The consequence of failing to follow the prescribed rituals exactly appears to be death, just as Aaron’s sons were stricken when they approached the holy one in a manner that was unacceptable. The entirety of the Torah portion is “do this, do that, and don’t vary from the instructions, or else!” According to this portion, the demands of our creator center around the form of our observance.

Meanwhile, from the Haftarah, Isaiah raises his voice in anger to contradict the Torah’s emphasis on formal practices. Isaiah rages against those who fast merely to deprive their bodies while at the same time oppressing others. “You call that a fast?” he asks. What G-d really desires, says our prophet, is that we attend to injustices – unlock the chains of wickedness, free the oppressed – “only then shall your righteousness travel before you,” he says.

Each of these positions makes sense on their own, but the juxtaposition is daunting. What could the ancient rabbis have intended with this pairing?

To add more difficulty, the texts are abstract and difficult to connect with emotionally. They deprive us of a compelling human narrative of the sort that kept us riveted during the two days of Rosh Hashanah, when we read about the binding of Isaac and about Hannah, who so desired to bear a child. Although, as Rabbi Maurice explained last night, we will get to recount the story of Jonah and the whale later this afternoon, we’re confounded in this part of the service by Torah and Haftarah portions that we have to work awfully hard at in order to derive meaning.

I suppose the discomfort I feel after examining these texts is precisely the point – on this day, the rabbis mean to challenge us to the utmost. Not only are we expected to obey commandments, to observe ritual requirements carefully, but also we must continually go beyond ritual to confront the injustices for which we are responsible. Just a month ago, in Parashat Shoftim, we were instructed, “Justice, Justice, shalt thou pursue.” Today, our readings confirm that pursuing justice is a commandment no less important than the commandment that we fast on Yom Kippur. There is no relaxing for us, no kicking back after today’s fast. We’ve got to thirst for justice every day just as we thirst for water on this one day.

It’s also possible that, by depriving us of a good story in the texts, the rabbis wanted to push us into a more active role in the Torah service. Like modern-day kids who are used to being entertained by TV, we can get lulled into passivity by the wonderful Torah narratives. On Yom Kippur, we are responsible for finding a story on our own that will illuminate the readings.

I’d like to tell you one that I think fits well the theme of justice that leaps from Isaiah’s lips in today’s Haftarah portion. Bits and pieces have been in the news recently, and today’s Register-Guard has a wonderful editorial about it. It is a tale of injustice that resonates with our own story as a wandering people. By telling it and remembering it, perhaps we can keep in our minds the commandment that we must pursue Justice.

Our tale begins in far-western China, in the province known by the Chinese as Xinjiang, and by its nine million ethnic Uighur residents as East Turkestan. Uighurs are a Turkic Muslim people, and their relationship with China has long been tense, with occasional spurts of violence. Chinese authorities claim that the Uighurs foment ethnic separatism and terrorism; while the Uighurs and international human rights groups accuse the Chinese government of having long oppressed this minority group. Our own State Department concurs that the Chinese government has engaged in ethnic discrimination against the Uighur people, as well as suppression of Muslim religious freedom, and executions of suspected separatists. As one Uighur-American has said, “The northwestern part of China has been occupied by communist China for 50 years. We've suffered just like the Tibetans, but nobody knows about us because we don't have a Dalai Lama.” Because of this situation, Uighur peoples have been trickling out of East Turkestan for years in order to relocate in Turkey, the United States, and elsewhere.

Between 1999 and early 2001, some three dozen or so young Uighur men, some of them in their teens, wound up in Afghanistan. There is some dispute as to why they were there. According to some of the Uighurs, they had been on their way to Turkey, needed a spot to rest and recuperate, and had heard about Uighurs in a particular Afghani village who would provide them with food and shelter. According to others, it was not the promise of creature comforts but rather the availability of training in weaponry that drew them to Afghanistan. In either event, they wound up in a primitive village near Tora Bora.

Within months they found themselves at the center of a firestorm, for in October of 2001, the Tora Bora area became the center of U.S. efforts to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden, who was reputed to be hiding there. Fleeing heavy bombing, the Uighur men hid in the mountains for several weeks, starving. Finally, they followed a group of Arabs to the Pakistani border. There, they fell into a trap, as monetary rewards – apparently backed by the United States government – were then being offered for the turnover of “Arabs.”

Said one of the Uighur men, "We crossed into Pakistan and there were tribal people there, and they took us to their houses and they killed a sheep and cooked the meat and we ate." That night, they were taken to a mosque, where about 100 Arabs also sheltered. After being fed bread and tea, they were taken to a truck, and driven to a Pakistani prison. From there, 22 of them were handed over to the U.S. military.

At first, the men were relieved to have gotten into American hands. As one of them said, “After we were handed over to American authorities, we thought it was good, because Americans uphold people’s rights and protect them.” But then they were taken to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base – a place soon to be notorious for U.S.-military-inflicted torture, isolation, sleep deprivation, humiliation, conditions of extreme heat and cold, hopelessness, despair, and insanity, to which prisoners have responded with hunger strikes and attempted suicides. There at Guantanamo, along with 750 other detainees, the 22 Uighurs were accused of being enemy combatants and were subjected to, in addition to the common conditions I listed above, interrogation by a team of Chinese security officials, who were imported to Guantanamo for that purpose.

The interrogation efforts bore no fruit, and ultimately, U.S. officials concluded that the Uighurs, rather than being terrorists, posed no threat. They were, in fact, “cleared for release.” But there was an obstacle to their freedom: there was nowhere for them to go. The State Department concluded that they could not be sent back to China because Chinese authorities considered them terrorists and would deal with them harshly. And the U.S. Department of Homeland Security refused to permit them entry into the United States because they had been linked with enemy combatants, despite the fact that those links had proven groundless.

Caught between a rock and a hard place, the State Department canvassed governments all over the world, seeking homes for these 22 men. From Europe, to Africa, to Australia, it sought placements and offered compensation. Despite pleading with over 100 countries, it found no takers -- perhaps because, in the words of one administration official, “The Chinese keep coming in behind us and scaring different countries with whom they have financial or trade relationships,”

Finally, two years ago, Albania – of all places – offered to take in five of the Uighurs, and they were transported there, while the other seventeen remained in Guantanamo. In Albania, the five new residents now live in what the New York Times calls a “squalid” refugee camp, subsisting on free meals heavy with macaroni and rice, and monthly stipends of about $67. The Times reports that some of the men have been in telephone contact with their families in China but have lost hope of ever seeing their wives and children again.

Said one, “We suffered very much at Guantanamo, but we continue to suffer here. The other prisoners had their countries, but we are like orphans: we have no place to go.”

As for the other seventeen remaining in Guantanamo – there was a glimmer of hope this week. The potential turn of events began this past June, when the United States Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo detainees have the right to a writ of habeas corpus – that is, the right to demand their production before a judge in order to challenge their detention. The ruling was a rebuke to the U.S. government, which had sought vigorously since 2001 to deny the protections of the Great Writ to Guantanamo detainees.

Pursuant to that case and a petition for writ of habeas corpus filed on the detained Uighurs’ behalf, this week federal judge Ricardo Urbina ordered the government to produce the men in his courtroom – in Washington, D.C. The judge said, “I want to see the individuals.”

Pursuant to that ruling, today, seven years after their capture by United States forces, they were to have been transported from Guantanamo to Washington, D.C., and tomorrow, the men were to have appeared in front of a court of law in the United States. After that, it was expected that the judge would release them into the care of seventeen volunteer Uighur-American families in the Washington, DC area who have stepped up to house them temporarily.

Just hours ago, however, a federal appeals court blocked Judge Urbino’s ruling, pursuant to a government request. For now, the seventeen men will remain in Guantanamo. There will be a hearing again in two weeks, and at this point, no one knows the ultimate fate of the Uighurs in Guantanamo – or, for that matter, the 5 who remain in a refugee camp in Albania.

The story of these 22 men illustrates the complexity and seemingly insurmountable obstacles to justice that we face in our time. In this tale, two powerful governments, fueled by the fears of their citizens, have managed to keep hundreds of lawyers, judges, and activists at bay. How can we make a difference in the face of such forces?

Consider the work of the lawyers who have volunteered thousands of hours in order to try to help detainees at Guantanamo. The work has been grueling, and progress slow and in some cases non-existent. How is it that they keep up their strength and hopes in order to pursue their passion for justice? Last year, for example, Chicago lawyer Candace Gorman related this about her experience in representing a Guantanamo detainee: “Eight months after filing the habeas petition, I was finally allowed to go to Guantánamo and meet with my client, a sick and visibly jaundiced man who pined for his wife and young daughter. My ultimate aim is to release my client and reunite him with his family. However, my immediate goal is to keep him alive. The medical staff at Guantánamo have diagnosed my client with tuberculosis and hepatitis B but failed to inform or treat him for either condition. There is no rhyme or reason to the world of Guantánamo—only a cruel inhumanity.”

Despite the despair, lawyers have come from a variety of backgrounds to represent Guantanamo detainees. Said one of these lawyers, "Some of us are experienced, some work in very big firms, some are law professors. But we have the same goal: to try to make sure our country represents the bases on which it was built."

Some are military lawyers who are appointed to represent detainees. "I couldn't be on the side of the prosecution," said Commander Suzanne Lachelier, a US Navy lawyer who defended one of five men accused of participating in the September 11 attacks. She said, "It is such fundamental work. The damages to our Constitution are wounds that will have to be dealt with for decades to come."

Some lawyers and law firms who have given so much time to this cause have been demonized by their own government for their efforts. Last year, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs said it was “shocking” that prestigious law firms in the United States were helping to represent Guantanamo detainees. On a radio show, this government official, who once said that the detainees could be held in Guantanamo for the rest of their lives, read out loud a list of law firms representing them and then warned that “those firms would suffer financially once that representation became known to the firms’ corporate clients.” Another unnamed official claimed that the lawyers’ volunteer efforts were being done “to tilt the playing field in favor of Al Qaeda.”

These events have given me a feeling of hopelessness, and I’ve hidden behind that feeling too frequently – doing nothing beyond lamenting this sorry state of affairs. Thinking about today’s readings, however, has strengthened my spine. Neither G-d nor the rabbis demand that we achieve Justice. Rather, our obligation is to pursue it. “Justice, justice shalt thou pursue.” To use the fact that Justice is unachievable as an excuse to give up the pursuit is the very thing that Isaiah criticizes.

So, for me, the lesson of our readings is that we prepare ourselves today to rejoin our pursuit of Justice, just as the priests in the Torah portion were instructed to prepare themselves to pursue their ritual obligations. We must keep our desire for Justice in our sights always, thirst for it, drive ourselves forward on its behalf, refusing to let fear and hopelessness get in our way. This is my new year’s resolution, and I ask you to join me.

There are organizations in which we can participate by volunteering our time or our money: for issues relating to detainees, the ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild are both active. For other causes, organizations such as the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law are instrumental in pursuing Justice in our country. For those of us who are citizens age 18 or over, we can exercise our franchise and elect those politicians whom we believe are most committed to Justice. We can speak out; we can write. Out of the river of our individual efforts can form an up swelling – an ocean – of change. But, regardless of the results or lack thereof, the key thing is that we keep ever in pursuit.

G’mar chatimah tovah – may you be sealed in the book of life. And may strength and health be with you in all of your pursuits.