True, the violence is unfortunate

In these hard times, perhaps it is time to speak frankly about race.

"While violence against these people and their so-called religious leaders is unfortunate, it is impossible for them to be good. Their depravity is enormous and it increases every day. Even granting civil rights to them was an injustice perpetrated by the government against the good people who founded this country and defended and preserved it with their wealth, blood and lives. Now, however, these degenerate people, whom we shelter and who benefit from the state, but never have done any good for the state, are treated in exactly the same manner that we are."

So said Hartwig Von Hundt Radowsky about the Jews of Germany in 1821.

The same and more has been written with words about American Blacks, and it has surely been written with the blood of Black people again and again, most recently at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

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At one level, our history as Jews demands that we remember the widow, the orphan and the stranger for we were once strangers.

We Jews inherit a history of violence perpetrated against our bodies with swords and guns and gas chambers and of violence perpetrated against our souls with fear and degradation and segregation. We know what it is to have a society - both its people and its government - seek to murder us for simply existing.

The Jews of Europe lived and thrived and suffered and died on the wrong side of a divide between Christians and non-Christians. We were the despised underclass whose very name - Jew - became an insult. We came to America to find that here, we were more or less on the right side of a divide between Blacks and Whites and someone else was the subcaste, despised for existing.

Suffering on the wrong side of that divide is part of the living memory of our community. Our memories - and lest we be naive about the dynamics of hatred, our self-interest - demands that we act in solidarity with Black Americans.

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It's not simply history, however, that links us, the perennial underclass of Christian Europe, with Blacks, the perennial underclass of White America.

In 1963, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel sent President John Kennedy a telegram in advance of a meeting on race relations. He wrote, "We forfeit the right to worship God as long as we continue to humiliate Negroes... The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity."

Today, after the real, if incomplete, victories of the civil rights movement, we might hear less overt racism than in years past. Yet there is no merit in standing by and counting our blessings while others are oppressed and humiliated.

We forfeit the right to worship God, we forfeit the right to invite the Holy One to dwell in our hearts, when we think that God is like us and only like us.

For many of us, the idea of "worshiping God" has a musty smell to it, like a cloak of our great grandparents which we take out of the attic every year or so, primarily to show the kids on Yom Kippor.

But the humility conditioned by worship enables us to have relationships with people who don't reflect our own glory back to us. By and large, we worship ourselves, or the little versions of ourselves known as our children. We have little practice recognizing our own smallness in the face of grandeur. 

But worship is the regular, consistent acknowledgement of something bigger than ourselves. Worship means acknowledging that we - whoever we might be - are not the be-all and end-all of creation. Few of us acknowledge that if eternity has a face, it doesn't look like ours alone. As my friend and teacher R. Shai Held pointed out, Genesis records the creation of many types of birds and animals, but only one type of person. We are idolaters when consciously or unconsciously, we assume that one person looks like us. 

The unaddressed injustice of our society makes a mockery of our spiritual efforts.

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So what now? There are no easy answers.

The Jewish tradition teaches that "we are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it," and nowhere is that more true than in addressing our country's long history of racial violence.

The Kabbalistic tradition imagines that the world exists, in part, because of the creative tension between two forces - hesed (loving kindness) and gevurah (discipline).

The dynamic of hesed, of loving kindness, demands that we build bridges across the functional, if not legal, segregation of our society. Across race, yes - and class and culture and world view as well.

Last year, the clergy of BHA, Tabernacle of Christ, New Vision Church of Deliverance and First Presbyterian co-taught an eight week class on Exodus in part to learn that incredible story of liberation and in part to learn with and from others who read that book with different traditions, different accents, different languages. Those gatherings were among the most diverse I have seen in this town.

Next year, we'll be reading Psalms and I hope yet more people will take part, both because of the depth of the learning and the breadth of the connections.

The dynamic of gevurah, of judgment and discipline, demands that when needed, we mobilize and organize strength to effect the change we seek. Gevurah is doing the hard work of effecting change - going to meetings that run too long, planning strategies that might not work, volunteering our time when we rather be doing something else. Gevurah is a grind.

BHA, together with local churches and I Am Beacon, is working to improve police/community relations in Beacon. It's a slow process that takes hundreds of hours of meetings and planning and volunteering. Our efforts might not work, but if they do, they will effect real change in our community. We've had tremendous community support, and I hope that yet more people - from our community and others - will have the vision and the strength to spend beautiful summer nights working on projects that will take months, if not more, to succeed.

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Nine people were murdered in their house of worship last week and they weren't us.

We can choose the luxury of lamenting the tragedy and being glad that this time, it wasn't us Jews.

Or we can be Jews in more than name only and know that we are commanded to act - commanded by our history, commanded by our souls commanded by the Creator of us all.