Rosh haShanah Sermon 5786: The Little Guys

(Spoken sermon transcribed and adapted for print)

My name is Qian Julie Wang, and I’m just a little guy. I know I look tall—but trust me, I’m a little guy. I didn’t always think of myself this way, but in 2009, I was lucky to be accepted into a fancy law school—the kind of place where a tiny group of extremely privileged young people train for three years to become even more privileged young people.

As soon as I started at the school, I noticed that everyone in my new world had a specific language, a way of introducing themselves. Everyone would, upon meeting someone, slip in the fact that even though they didn’t look it, they were a little guy. Translation: I know I seem privileged, but I’m actually not. I’ve suffered. This seemed to be the operating language of my new world, one that many picked up quickly, including one fellow student whom you may have heard of—he must have looked up one day and thought, “If I tell the whole country I’m just a little guy—a hillbilly with an elegy—I can ride this thing all the way to D.C.”

This game might have been new to me, but I was not to be outdone. Not only was I going to fit in; I was going to dominate. You see, no one is more dangerous than someone who used to be underprivileged, but comes to acquire a great deal of privilege. And that was me. I had a past I did not want to own or heal—I had lived as an undocumented child; I had known the taste of poverty—and while I didn’t want to deal with that, I learned that this past gave me power in my new world. All I had to do was allude vaguely to its contours and my unhealed past became a weapon I could use to bludgeon and dominate the competition in my new world.

I wielded it for a long time. I became a commercial litigator, and I’m sorry to report that even between people litigating multimillion- and billion-dollar cases, there is still a fight, in rarified boardrooms and the highest courtrooms, to claim to be the little guy in the fight. The thing is that when I was actually hungry, I never thought of myself as anything; most people who are struggling simply don’t have energy for that. And if anything, back then, I assumed everyone dealt with the same problems, because I did not know what privilege looked like. But the thing is, if you say something enough, you begin to believe it yourself. And so it was that I never felt more disenfranchised and underprivileged than when I was receiving a healthy corporate paycheck in designer suits.

This is not unusual. America has never been a meritocracy, but it has become a victimocracy. We have to prove that we earned all privilege with suffering and pain—we have no entitlement to good things until we’ve endured bad things. But this paradigm keeps us tethered to a worldview where everyone must suffer, where victimhood is a competition. It also keeps us focused on our unhealed parts, the scared children inside us who had no agency or control. But when we live from that place, we do not seek justice or equality; we seek vengeance and supremacy. Pain begets more pain. There is no better way to keep us cogs in the capitalist, imperialist, war machine.

This American paradigm centers our victimhood, regardless of how far we’ve come since those trauma. And unfortunately American Judaism is infected by this plague: so many of our religious leaders would have us define ourselves, our Jewishness, by our victimhood. But is that really necessary? Might there be another way to approach our faith, our community?

The Rosh Hashanah reading is the binding of Isaac, and the traditional reading would seem to map onto this idea of victimhood: Isaac is a child who has no choice but to submit to his father Abraham, who in turn has no choice but to sacrifice his son under the order of Hashem. But consider that some rabbis have read Issac to be some 30 years old, a grown man who arrives at the altar of his own free will, instructing his father to tie the bindings tight so he will not resist. In the traditional reding, Isaac is a true victim. In the second, he is an empowered adult who exercises agency to do what is need. Similarly, Abraham may appear to be the victim in his relationship to Hashem—he has no choice but to submit—but when viewed in relationship to Isaac, Abraham is the empowered father who exercises agency, and chooses to forge his parental duty to his son in favor of a greater good.

If we are to read this parashah as being aligned with Isaac and Abraham, and if we understand that all humans are created in the image of Hashem, which reading would we prefer? At what point do we choose to let go of the victim narrative, and choose a more empowered path forward?

These days, I no longer think of myself as a little guy. You might ask how that happened. In the words of Hemingway, “gradually, then suddenly.” Gradually in the sense that, like a good Jew, I’ve spent over a decade in therapy. That definitely helped. And suddenly in the sense that it all clicked into place in one watershed moment: seconds after I gave birth, my doctor put my daughter on my chest. I don’t know if each of you have seen a newborn up close, but it’s quite miraculous. You see, baby giraffes and zebras can walk minutes after they’re born. But baby humans? Completely and utterly helpless. They can barely see and they can’t move their heads or bodies. And new parents are supposed to just take these things home and keep them alive without even an instruction manual. In the moment I met my daughter, it hit me, how ludicrous it all was. I was supposed to introduce myself to this helpless blob by saying, “Hey, I know it doesn’t look like it, but I’m actually the little guy here”?

That was the day I ceased forever to be a little guy. It’s impossible to parent from a place of victimhood. Don’t get me wrong—you can definitely have a kid from that place, and unfortunately many people do, but you cannot truly parent—that is, empower and equip another human being for the world, when you refuse to step into your own sense of agency and responsibility. This is true for parents, but it is also true for our governmental and elected leaders. So what does it say when so many in our country insist on having us define ourselves by our victimhood?

Don’t get me wrong: of course people suffer. Of course we all deal with structural oppression. Antisemitism exists. But none of that has ever been in tension with the fact that a genocide is being perpetuated in our name, that Gaza deserves to live and Palestine must be free. Far from being in tension with each other, these truths are intertwined. So what does it say about our society’s most powerful—the ones most able to end these hand-in-hand blights—when they do not explore what the world could be but instead direct us to center our identities on victimhood, and approach the world with the view that suffering is inevitable? Who has the duty to end bloodshed when everyone claims to be David and no one will cop to being Goliath?

Through the parashah, Abraham shows us that we are all each David and Goliath, oppressor and oppressed, and we are both at the same time. It just depends on our vantage point. So why not choose the perspective that give us more agency? How expansive would our worldview grow?

To quote a little guy who stepped into his power, Spiderman: “with great power comes great responsibility.” This is a quote that’s easy to apply to others, but not so easy to apply to ourselves. But the truth is that each of us comes to the world with our own unique set of privileges and power. It’s easy to read the news and feel powerless, like we are victim to America and its constant erosions in justice and democracy. But might there be another reading here, as the binding of Isaac teaches? What if we look up from the news and remind ourselves, as often as we need to, that we are choosing to remain American, to endure the pain of loving America, because we believe in something greater: that we have a duty and responsibility—to our children, our neighbors, our world—to hold America accountable, to call her to rise to what she holds herself out as, to what she very well could be? What if we lived each day not from victimhood but from that place of power and care?

This season of teshuvah, I submit to you that power and privilege have taken on bad connotations because we’ve let the powerful and the privileged shirk their responsibilities for far too long. But that includes all of us, too. What if we reclaimed these words, imbue them with goodness, have them come to represent the love and care that we owe to each other, here, in this sanctuary, but also out there, in the great wide world? What if, instead of handing our agency to our leaders, we reclaimed our power to lead? What if we could begin to imagine a world where every one of us has the duty to treat each other with care, where there need not be suffering, where there is no little guy? And what if we, each of us in our mundane moments, have the power to begin that communal transformation in this year 5786?