Thirteen years ago this month, I made a decision that would alter the course of my life.
I painted my nails.
Not just any color, you see. But all of the colors. In preparation for my first New York Pride march, I had painted my nails rainbow.
So on that Friday night of Pride weekend in 2011, I turned up to our family’s Shabbat dinner and of course, one of the first things my grandma noticed was my manicure.
“Tamara,” she asked, “why are your nails painted rainbow?”
I panicked and quipped, “I just couldn’t choose a color…”
I wasn’t ready to tell her. I assumed that I knew exactly how she’d react, and I was nervous.
Four months later, when I had finally had the tearful and scary conversation with my grandparents that I had been avoiding for so long, my grandma quipped right back at me:
“We may be elderly, but we are not stupid. We know that someone who paints her nails every color of the rainbow doesn’t do it because she couldn’t decide on the color!”
On that day 13 years ago, I had made an assumption about how others in my family might perceive me, without actually giving them the opportunity to prove those assumptions wrong. And while I did this to protect myself from what I perceived as a threat, I also didn’t allow myself space to consider what would happen if things didn’t turn out so badly after all.
I share this story with you because on this Shabbat during Pride month, I’m reflecting on the assumptions that we make every day – about ourselves, about others, and about what others may think of us – and about how these assumptions can have lasting impacts on our lives and relationships. We see a perfect example of this in today’s Torah portion.
Parashat Shlach Lecha opens with God commanding Moses to send scouts to the land of Canaan to assess the land and to report back about its resources and the people who live there. When they return, the scouts report that the land is filled with milk and honey, but the people who inhabit it are large and numerous — they compared them to giants. Caleb, one of the scouts, assures the people that, despite the difficulties, the Israelites will definitely be able to conquer the land. The other scouts were not so optimistic, telling the Israelites:
We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked like grasshoppers to them [the Anakites].
Hearing fear in the voices of these scouts, the Israelites cry that they wish they had died in Egypt. Upon hearing this, Caleb tears his clothes in a gesture of mourning, and begs the Israelites not to rebel against Moses and God. In response, God threatens to wipe out the Israelites, but later relents. G-d finally decrees that all the adults of this faithless generation will die in the wilderness so that a new generation, one more like Caleb (who was excepted from God’s decree because of his optimism), could enter the Promised Land.
In the book Five Cities of Refuge, Rabbi Lawrence Kushner retells a teaching of the Kotzker Rebbe: It’s alright to say you feel like a grasshopper in your own eyes, he says -– that means you’re alert — but when you start guessing what you look like to someone else, you’ve given them permission to define you, so you’re still a child. For this reason, Caleb, who refuses to let anyone else define him, was one of only two men of the wilderness generation to live to enter the Promised Land.
The other scouts were nervous. They saw themselves as grasshoppers, and assumed that others did too. In making these assumptions, they let others define them; they did not trust their own definitions for themselves to be anything other than weak. Caleb, in contrast, was strong and independent, letting no one else define him or shake his unwavering faith.
Caleb is held up as an example to inspire us all. His optimism, tenacity, and his independence enable him to see what others could not, and to envision a future for the Israelites that his peers were too afraid to consider.
Pride month began as a protest by a group of people so marginalized for being who they were and loving who they loved that they had no choice but to rise up and resist those in power who sought to keep them weak. We Jews know this narrative all too well. We know the story of the slave and the stranger and the orphan and the widow because these vulnerabilities are etched into our histories.
But we have a choice. We can remain weak and afraid, or we can be strong and be brave and be exactly who we are, unapologetically and authentically. This is the message of pride and one of the messages of parashat shlach lecha: that boldness and bravery are blessings.
On the rare occasion when my wife Anna and I are home together on a Friday night, we’ve been trying to keep up the tradition of blessing our son Jonah. Traditionally, on Shabbat evenings parents would bless their children by praying that they grow up to be like Ephraim and Menashe, or like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah.
But whenever we can, we have been blessing baby Jonah with the following words:
Heyeyh asher tihyeh – veheyeyh barukh ba’asher tihyeh.
Be who you are – and may you be blessed in all that you are.
Be who you are.
It’s a simple task, but it’s a tall order in a world that is filled with peer pressures and social media and the assumptions that so often define us.
But it’s what we wish for Jonah: that he goes through life cultivating a strong sense of self and a deep pride in his identity.
And on this Shabbat, I wish the same for all of us: that we know who we are, that we see ourselves as giants rather than as grasshoppers, and that we may be blessed in all that we are.
Shabbat Shalom.
