Category: Racial Justice

After a weekend of protests over the murder of George Floyd

In the protests over the state-mandated lockdowns a week earlier, the protesters were shouting, “My rights! My rights!” Pretending they were innocent victims, they were asking us to consider, “What are my rights?”

The correct response at the time was, “If you want rights enforced, then what are your responsibilities in return.” President Kennedy had something to say on the subject.

Then came the murder of George Floyd. All the arguments over rights and responsibilities were put under a glaring focus that played across our screens. In this light, the arguments over rights are selfish and shallow, coming from a place of no fear while parading around government buildings fully armed. Few if any were arrested.

“Where are my rights?” The African American community is asking a more fundamental question. It is the same question they have asked since they arrived here on slave ships: “Where are my rights?”

Where are they, indeed. As the protests across the nation demonstrate, the rights of Black men and Black women are lacking in most every metropolitan city from coast to coast, and in the rural outposts in between. I am surprised that I have not seen a protest sign saying, “Do I even have rights?”

“Do citizens have rights in the United States of America?” On paper, you do; however, in the streets, it may depend on the color of your skin.

A Day after Pittsburgh Synagogue Massacre

Our tradition offers words of consolation, but we may not hear them until we can explain our pain. The wounds are raw and the deaths are fresh. At this time of aninut, the period before burial, we feel nothing and yet, we feel everything.

  • Jews have enjoyed three hundred years fear from fear of communal violence in a blessed land until yesterday.
  • We are proud to be Jews, but we thought we were seen as Americans first in this century.
  • And like all people of good will in the United States, we believed that reason and optimism would overcome hatred and paranoid delusion.

We were not wrong.

The murderer may be a random actor, but I cannot see this senseless massacre as an isolated moment. The Sikhs were gunned down in Wisconsin. The black church members were slaughtered in the basement of their church in Charleston, SC. All of them and all of us were easy targets for hatred. We were people who believed in the possibilities of humanity and in the hope that prayer, good deeds, and acts of compassion could heal a divided world. We met the world with open arms instead of loaded guns.

The murderers were wrong though. The Sikh Gurdwara re-opened as did the AME Church. People came from all walks of life to sit with the survivors and to stand with the mourners. You must understand – a gun can kill a human, but it cannot extinguish humanity.

Historians have proven in European history that when Jews were persecuted, the country was already in or headed into great turmoil. The community of Jews was like a canary in a coal mine, a harbinger of great suffering to come. However, the persecutions in Europe were all, either state sponsored or church sponsored. History has no example of the great patchwork of ethnic and religious communities that make up the United States. Are the Sikhs, the African-American Christians, or the Jews the canary or all of us canaries? No, they are not and no, we are not. Our murdered brothers and sisters are victims and, as our tradition states, they are martyrs for their beliefs. We mourn with their families, friends, and congregation.

The massacre in Pittsburgh was directed at all American Jews. I hear that message, acknowledge it and hold my loved ones ever closer. The pain is personal, tapping into a history of martyrdom that I know far too well. I have known Jew-hatred, intimately. I have witnessed the hatred of the other through my eyes and my ears. Some people fear the world, and no law or principle will sway them from their hatred.

Please remember the great deeds our country has accomplished though. This nation has allowed the Jews to flourish as no other country in history has. The United States has offered the same opportunity to many, many other communities, which has made us as Jews doubly proud. We must pledge not be silenced by the hatred and the violence until it has been diminished and dismissed from the public ways and public discourses of this great nation.

In the coming days we will comfort our people and we will pray. Even more, we encourage our resolve to continue the fight for dignity and respect for all peoples who live within these borders. We must not respond to this tragedy with silence.

To our friends and well-wishers, please join with us as we pray, sit with us as we mourn, and when these first days have passed, join with us and let us together return grace to this nation. Nothing could give us greater solace.