Last week, my Torah class studied Genesis 28, the story of Jacob’s dream.  Jacob’s encounter with the Divine in the heart of the forest is a tale of disorientation and embodied discovery. Jacob comes to a place with one understanding and only through lived experience wakes in the morning with new revelation. Jacob had scanned the world around him, had come to a particular understanding of his world and only through dramatic and singular experience is he able to come to a new understanding of truth. Jacob has no precedence for his experience, has no framework into which he will integrate his nighttime vision and, as such, the vision is left free to transform him, and through him, us.

On the night before Jacob dreamed his dream, he falls asleep in a world where angels come from heaven and where journeys have a beginning and end. Where prayers happen in the light of day and sleeping is the time when awareness is sealed from insight. Jacob’s world looks a lot like the world in which we live now: a world of shorthand, of scanning, of ascribing meaning to whole pages through quick scans of the letters on the page, without ever interrogating the spaces between the letters for the depth of their inarticulatable truth. We are horizontal scanners, we are shorthand seekers; our efficiency makes us blind.

We live in a society that has shorthand justice. Where minimum sentencing requirements reduce individual incidents to their component pieces, create direct and inescapable correlations between factors in incidents and the way those actions are punished. Where whole communities are read to be potentially criminal, latently dangerous; where swaths of populations are patrolled and incarcerated, due to the way in which we are tracked, due to society’s shorthand.

The story of Jacob’s dream in Genesis 28 is a story of collisions and contractions, where the signs and signifiers of reality up until that point fall away and truth is revealed in its complexity and resonance.  The rabbis understand Jacob’s encounter with the “certain place,” the locus of his dream-to-come, as an experience of collision. Aviva Zornberg writes that the word va-yifga, the verb that describes Jacob’s encounter with that place, suggests a dynamic encounter with an object that is traveling toward oneself.

This collision, this vertical protrusion in the midst of a horizontal journeying, causes the collapse of Jacob’s semiotic universe, allowing for all of Truth’s potentialities to stream in.

All of this allows for the discovery of truth over and above abiding by structure and order. Jacob punctuates his night’s encounter by a declaration of truth: “G-d was in this place, and I didn’t even know it,” articulating in simple words the collapse of possibilities, the resonance of his night of dreaming, the smashing of his calcified universe and his emergence into a new perspective.  Jacob is able to recognize that which he couldn’t recognize the day before and this change allows him to speak from a new paradigm.

The story of Jacob and the dream is a story of encounter with truth.  Jacob is, in a sense, pulled out of the customary understanding of his life and, through his dream encounter, comes to encounter new truths.  The experience of being human is to be reminded time and time again of the power of discovery, of encounter, over and above the ways in which we become ensconced in our realities.

There are moments when we, too, become like Jacob.  Where we collide with a reality so painful in its brazen unfamiliarity that, like Jacob, we release into the unknown and are transformed. It can come in the form of a divine vision or an all-too-human altercation where we are challenged to lift out of our horizontal scurrying into new paradigms.

CeCe’s Story

A person walked down the street. A black person walked down the street. A black transgender person walked down the street. A black transgender woman walked down the street at night.  A black transgender woman walked down the street at night with a group of her friends and passed a bar. A black transgendered woman, named CeCe McDonald, walked down the street. Someone standing out front of the bar shouted abuse. Someone standing out front of the bar yelled out racist and transphobic remarks. Dean Schmitz was standing out front of the bar and yelled out racist and transphobic remarks. There was an altercation. A bottle was smashed and used as a weapon. A bottle was smashed against CeCe’s face. CeCe crossed the street, was followed by Dean Schmitz. CeCe pulled out scissors. In the ensuing struggling, Dean Schmitz ended up with scissors in his chest, ended up in the hospital, died.*

In the court of law, the critical piece of this story is about establishing how the scissors ended up lodged in the chest of Dean Schmitz. Was it intentional? Was it intentional and in self-defense? Was it unintentional? Each of these degrees of intention was associated with a different punishment, a different legal construct.  The fact that there are so many critical pieces of the story, that with each detail that is added to the story, new possibilities and truths are revealed, is left functionally ignored in a traditional court of law.

In the eyes of the law, CeCe’s story must adhere to the structures upon which it has been founded, but in the adhering to these structures, so much of this story are made invisible.  CeCe has been incarcerated since June 2011 and is currently awaiting sentencing because of this system, because we in this system are compelled to harmonize the messiness of violent actions with our legal structures, seeking those responsible, seeking to exact retribution.

Jacob’s dream, where truth is valued over coherent systems of meaning, challenges us to imagine a system of justice that privileges truth telling and the making visible the context of violence.  A system of justice that privileges healing over punishment, transformation over blame, and takes into account the legacy of violence against people of color, women, queerness — the legitimization of violence against all those socially construed as non-normative.  The quest for justice would be woven through with the willingness to collide with the truth of violence the way Jacob collided with that certain place.

This collision might make many things possible.  In the welcoming in the complexities of situations, of the collision with the truth that our actions are bound up with inherited trauma, internalized oppression and the impact of social structures, our understandings of seeking justice would be transformed.

CeCe’s story is a particular story, a story of one woman living in a society with a long legacy of violence against women, violence against people of color, violence against queers, who fought back when confronted with hate speech.  CeCe has, in a sense, been punished for surviving that night in Minneapolis.  Jailing CeCe does not create justice, as we cannot build a prison for the hate, ignorance and violence that makes a night like the one that CeCe survived last June possible

CeCe’s story is a vertical protrusion, a protrusion of resistance and grief and injustice, emerging out of the horizontal smoothness of our society’s narrative. What if we, individuals who buy-in every day to the legal narrative of this nation, who integrate ourselves into the social and legal fabric of our communities, were to collide with CeCe’s story?  What possibilities and new paradigms of justice would we discover by the next morning’s light?

To find out more and to support CeCe, please visit CeCe’s solidarity website.