Toya Graham, the Baltimore woman who became a media sensation when videoed beating her son about the head in the streets of Baltimore when she caught him about to throw a rock at the police while rioting with his peers, has been termed the “mother of the year” in certain circles [mostly conservative] and the paradigm of why American society is irredeemably white supremacist in other circles [mostly…other than conservative]. While very few people actually think that what she did at the moment was inappropriate, is it really the model of motherhood to exemplify?
In this week’s parsha, the megadef [blasphemer] has his
maternal lineage delineated by the Torah [partly because his biological father
was the ish mitzri Moshe killed—see below].
Shlomit [his mother] said “shalom” to everyone; Divri [his grandmother]
was—for lack of a better term—ostensibly the quintessential Biblical yenta.
So they talked to everyone.
Was this a lesson in “tznius”?
Ostensibly, but not necessarily. It’s more a lesson in being
nondiscriminating. Shlomit slept with
the mitzri assuming it was her husband.
And the way the medrash and Rashi spells it out—he didn’t have to rape
her [which was likely de rigeur in a slave society]. Aside from her apparently happy-go-lucky
attitude displayed by the midrash, the way the narrative lays out about the
mitzri beating the ish yisrael indicates that in most other cases the beating
would have been unnecessary; a slave never has anything. This was different. He objected to the fact that his wife was
willing if duped, and the power dynamic had to be reinforced. So you have a clearer indicator of the wife’s
inability to discriminate.
Being nondiscriminating in relationships—even without
intent—was more than just sloppiness. It
might even be inferred that both Shlmoit and Divri might have pursued
relationships with the masters of the time, or were willing to sleep with the
enemy, and not necessarily because they felt forced. While an enslaved population is definitely targeted
to have their women exploited until they can’t figure out how to control their
own lives, some women actually might go willingly to the enemy. It therefore might be possible that this ben
Dan was discriminated against because everyone knew what his mother and
grandmother were about. [The question
remains why no one stepped in to try and help in out, but there doesn’t seem to
have been too much time between the lawsuit and the blasphemy, so it became a
moot point.]
Toya Graham—a single mother of six—clearly knew her son did
not belong on the streets at that moment last week in Baltimore and, while society
clearly frowns upon corporal punishment as a disciplinary method [as, for the
record, does this author], at that specific moment it was not an issue of a
teachable moment or even a disciplinary action.
It might very well have been a matter of life or death for him as she
saw it: doing what she did to get him out of there.
Which means it’s the exception that proves the rule: the use
of force as interventionary versus as disciplinary. The real “teachable moment” is that not
every disciplinary situation requires an intervention. S’mmol docheh, yemin mekareves.
In the case of the megadef, we can see that there was a
possibility that he had neither.
Obviously his mother was busy with other things. His biological father was dead before he was
born, although it was unlikely he would have acknowledged him or had anything
to do with him. And the text and
midrashim seem to be silent about what happens to his mother’s husband after
Moshe kills his oppressor, but we might gather that he didn’t want to have anything
to with the future megadef either.
So here we have the ultimate unwanted child. Furthermore, we see the nature of the
discrimination against him. And yet when
he commits what might be considered one of the most serious Torah offenses,
there is no hesitation about the punishment, although all manner of Torah due
process is afforded [and may even be taught from the passage dealing with the
incident.] But he is dispatched with
nary a word said about mitigating circumstances.
We see that there are times where no matter the ostensibly
proximate causes—and no matter how pervasive—an egregious act can be taken
completely out of any other context and treated as the offense that it is. I would posit that principle applies in the
case of rioting, which is ipso facto a metatstatic threat to public order and
in Baltimore’s case is exacerbated by the plethora of sympathy from some
quarters for that kind of reaction to perceived injustice.
Toya Graham was having none of it. At that moment she staged an intervention.
Now it’s plausible the media plaudits that ensued were
because people appreciated an apparent display of “tough love” in a zeitgeist
where progressive educational theory that disdains anything “tough” holds sway,
or as an antidote to the aforementioned riotsplaining. But I think what we can take away from this
incident without overplaying the socio-political implications are two things:
one, she is obviously not an absent parent; two, there are times where an
intervention is not only legitimate, but mandated.
And: we can do that without lionizing the action as a
disciplinary tactic because we don’t know that it was, nor does it say anything
about whether her parenting skills up to this point are or aren’t admirable or
whether lack of general discipline led to this point [like the possible
complete lack of structure in the case of the megadef], when that moment
arrived—in the case of the megadef, the court case, in this case, the riot—the
mother was there in this case to make sure the authorities didn’t get
involved. The megadef wasn’t as
fortunate to have that kind of mother.
As an aside and coda, there is a Biblical model for a WORSE
mother that Shlomit bas Divri: the mother of Sisera, the Canaanite general and
her koffeeklatch of female friends. The
Song of Devorah details how while she wailed about her missing son’s fate, her
friends assured her that he was not only winning the battle but procuring his
share of the requisite spoils, including the kind of extracurricular activity
with captive females that was almost a job requirement of soldiery at the
time. It’s almost as if Toya Graham
would have instead been encouraging her son’s riotous tendencies on the
barricades; that’s the kind of mother Em Sisera was. And yet—ironically—it’s em Sisera’s wailings
from which we learn how to blow shevarim on Rosh Hashanah. There might be the last difference between
even the megadef’s mother and em Sisera: even if she obviously raised him wrong,
em Sisera raised him. The megadef’s
mother seems to have not bothered.
No comments:
Post a Comment