Trans Spirituality – Special Edition: Trump Shooting
Many are familiar with the biblical story in Exodus of the Israelites crossing the sea on dry land, and the Egyptians in their heavy chariots following after. Moses causes the waters to crash down over the Egyptians and they drown. The Talmud tells of a Midrash (rabbinic exposition) that when the Egyptians drowned, the Heavenly angels cheered. God then rebuked them, asking, “Why are you cheering – those are My children (lit. the works of my hands) too?”
This Midrash expresses Schadenfreude, a wonderful German word defining the sense of jubilance we experience when we see the downfall of others. I imagine that many in our community experienced this sense of joy on Saturday July 13 on hearing that Donald Trump had been shot at the rally in Butler PA. I expect that quite a number of us probably exclaimed “Damn!” when we heard he survived.
Dear friends, this shooting was almost the worst possible thing that could have happened for our community. The only thing worse would have been if the shooter had been a good shot and succeeded in killing Trump. As it was, he killed a retired Fire Chief, who is being called a hero, and severely wounded two others.
The Talmud also teaches that to take a life is equivalent to destroying the world. So this shooter will be considered by the Heavenly Court for having destroyed the world by killing this heroic firefighter.
But why, you may be asking, was this so bad for us? And why would it have been worse if Trump had been killed?
We have all seen the images of Trump leaving with his fist raised in a sign of rebellion. First off, this is a symbol blatantly couched from the Black community in a gross act of cultural appropriation, but he is completely ignorant of such things, being a died-in-the-wool white supremacist.
This attack on Trump has only energized his base. Shortly after the attack, Elon Musk, head of Tesla, and one of the richest men in the world, made a huge donation to the Trump campaign. This is what the attack has done. It has mobilized the radical right, white supremacist base in their zeal to destroy marginalized people in the US.
Had Trump been killed, he would have been seen as a political martyr. In the military, we had the belief that if you killed a corrupt leader in combat, the replacement you got would be 1,000 times worse. Such would have been the case here if Trump had been killed. The GOP would have replaced Trump with someone much more vile, and their base would have done everything they could do to ensure he was elected.
As it is, this attack will likely guarantee that Trump gets elected in November, particularly with Biden dropping out of the race and the current uncertainty about who will replace him. With less than four months until the election, it will be a daunting task for the Democratic candidate, even if it is Kamala Harris, who has a very slight lead in some polls.
President Biden called this attack evil, and in this he was absolutely correct. Irrespective of your political leanings, this is the United States. We do not practice political assassinations here! Yes, there have been Presidents and other leaders assassinated in the past, but this attack was somehow much more evil than the attack on Reagan by Hinkley, or the attacks on the Kennedys. I hesitate to compare this to the murders of MLK or Malcom X, because of who they were and what they stood for, but this attack was on that level of evil.
We in our community know what it is like to be the targets of hatred, and to be murdered for who we are. As a disabled trans Jew, I have known this my entire life, long before I started living trans. But we are living in a most dangerous time, and we must do everything we can to limit the power that the GOP and the Evangelicals are trying to claim. And friends, murder is not the way to do it.
Remember what the Prophet Isaiah taught, that the vision of peace can only come when weapons are turned into implements of farming.
Peace,
Rona
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Category: Transgender Opinion, Transgender Politics
