TO ENTER la fortaleza where Jhonny Rivas was being held prisoner, I had to hand over my passport and undergo a thorough search, which included squatting naked on top of a mirror laid on the floor. I wanted to turn around indignantly and go home. Instead I faced the two female guards, girls really, one with braces, the other with the acne of a teenager. Por favor, I appealed. They exchanged an unsure glance, no doubt worried about el capitán strutting outside, then gestured for me to put my clothes back on. At the door, I embraced them.
Blessed are those who don’t follow unrighteous rules, for they shall be hugged.
I confess that I often practice my own beatitudes lite. It’s where I often want to stop, at the easier, feel-good variety of activism. But the beatitudes are as morally rigorous as those daunting Ten Commandments, albeit working through positive reinforcement—blessings rather than “thou shalt nots.” If you truly embrace them, they keep pulling you further and further out of the comfort zone of the self that always wants to stop at having done its part.
Which is why I had come reluctantly to visit a Haitian prisoner, whom I had never met. Why at every inconvenient step, I wanted to turn back.
After all, I had been on my way home, having just finished taking part in Border of Lights, our annual gathering at the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Every October, a group of us from the Dominican diaspora, along with supporters, gather to commemorate the 1937 massacre of 20,000 Haitians by the dictator Trujillo’s military. This massacre, never properly addressed or redressed by the Dominican government, is unfortunately not an atrocity relegated to the past. The “massacre mentality” persists in the egregious violation of the rights of Haitians within the country. In fact, just weeks before our 2013 gathering, the highest court in the land passed a law denationalizing Dominicans of Haitian descent by stripping them of their birthright citizenship unless they could prove the legal status of their ancestors retroactive to 1929.
Haitians had been brutally cut down by machetes in 1937; now Dominicans of Haitian descent were being eliminated cleanly with laws.
Our group had worked hard for nine months, planning those three days on the ground. We had successfully completed several collaborative projects between the two countries, including discussion panels, a town meeting, a vigil, a park clean-up, and visits to schools and to an orphanage. We had hungered and thirsted for righteousness, and the gathering had been another moving and powerful manifestation by many good-hearted people that we were committed to that fourth beatitude.
At our final celebratory dinner, I happened to sit next to a local collaborator. He told me the story of Jhonny Rivas, a Haitian activist who had been organizing his fellow workers for their rights. In retaliation, he had been seized on trumped-up charges of having murdered a witch. He had already been held several months without bail. At every hearing, some legal loophole or lost document or missing witness forced another delay.
Clearly the aim was to break the man, let him rot away, forgotten ... unless “somebody” stepped in to help.
Here was this beatitude up close and uncomfortable, the way they always insist themselves upon us, demanding a deeper level of commitment than we want to give them.
For that is the danger embedded in this beatitude—as there are dangers particular to each beatitude. Preceded by “self,” righteousness becomes an appropriation of social justice to the small, gated community of our single self or our particular group or point of view.
But the righteousness being singled out in this beatitude is not the lite, self-referential variety at all. It’s also not the in-your-face violated righteousness of the eighth beatitude, where persecution makes it obvious that you have to step in or there will be bloody consequences. This is a more-chronic need that can so easily become “invisible” because it is ongoing—the poor who are always with us—until it suddenly flares up in a particular case and we are reminded that it’s always too early to go home if we are indeed committed to a righteous cause.
It might be that there’s never any other place to be than where we are needed. According to scripture scholars, the preamble in all the beatitudes of “Blessed” is more accurately translated as “You’re in the right place.” You’re in the right place if you’re with those who hunger and thirst for righteousness—there is no other place to be but where they are. They are already blessed in their needy state of being, and, by extension, so are we by being with them there, not later, after their trials are over.
AND SO BEGAN a long process of working to get Jhonny Rivas freed: weekly calls to him on his contraband cell phone; letters to newspapers, Amnesty International, and other human rights organizations; donations to his bereft family; visits to la fortaleza every time we were in the country. Finally, after one year, seven months, and two days, Jhonny was released.
Ultimately, all the beatitudes pose us with this same challenge: How are the promised vindications to be effected?
A favorite story answers this question: Some followers go to the rabbi and ask him, “What is heaven like?”
“In heaven,” answers the rabbi, “they sit at a table with delicacies and sumptuous treats of every kind. The only problem is their arms do not bend.”
“And what is hell like?”
“In hell they sit at a table with all sorts of treats and sumptuous delicacies. The only problem is their arms do not bend.”
“Then, Rebbe, what is the difference between heaven and hell?”
“Ah, my children,” said the rabbi, “in heaven they feed each other.”
The blessings of the beatitudes happen when we feed that deeper level of thirst and hunger for righteousness in someone else. That’s how the blessings descend on their heads, as well as on ours.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!