Introduction for 2015 High Holy Day Sermon Support on Racial Justice

For the Rabbis of the Reform Movement:

We live in a moment when the bloods of our brothers and sisters of color cries out from the ground,

from the streets, prisons, schools and hospitals of America, and we cannot ignore the urgency of their

voices, or our own roles as allies, perpetrators and complicit bystanders in on-going racial injustice in

our country. Many of us are deeply troubled by this and will be speaking on these issues during the

Yamim Noraim.

Our hope is that the material in this source packet will help rabbis amplify the voices crying out for racial

justice at this moment, while you provide context and moral leadership for our communities. Not every

text will speak to you; not every text is comfortable to read or hear; but each of these texts speak a

powerful truth. There is a huge amount of material here, and yet it is not enough. We have tried to

balance the complexities of the issues with the demands of quotations that will actually be useable in

sermons, trying to answer the question, “What would I as a darshan/it find helpful at this moment?”,

and hope it is a useful foundation as you construct your own prophetic message.

It is important to acknowledge from the beginning that when talking to the Jewish community about

race issues, we are not speaking to a monolithic racial group. Though many of us are “White”, the

Jewish community spans the racial rainbow, and you may have congregants far more experienced than

you with the dark side of race in America. Crafting a sermon on these themes is a wonderful

opportunity for direct engagement with them. At the same time, there may be many in your

congregation who have not put much thought into the meaning or cost of their own whiteness, and this

is an opportunity to wake them up with a powerful shofar blast. And of course, race in America is not a

Black-White binary, though this source material is guilty of skewing hard in that direction. We hope that

in your words and your work, you find ways to broaden this essential conversation to speak to the whole

spectrum of racial identity.

We have intentionally co-mingled Jewish and Black voices in this source material. These aren’t always

comfortable juxtapositions, both in tone and in historical context, but we hope you find this friction a

spur to creativity. Judaism has powerful teachings about our personal and communal responsibility to

build a just society, but it isn’t enough to look only at our own tradition. If we are serious about doing

the work of addressing racial injustice in our communities, we have to listen at least as much as we talk.

The categories here, Systemic Racism, Privilege & White Supremacy, Violent Encounters, Individual and

Communal Responsibility, and Rebuilding the Black-Jewish Relationship reflect some possibilities for

rhetorical organization; many of the quotations could be used in a variety of sermons.

The RAC has assembled excellent material on national legislative advocacy opportunities related to

racial justice: voting rights, educational equity, economic justice and racial profiling. Reform CA has

further information for California rabbis about our current racial justice campaign, B’yachad, and AB 953

and 71 (police racial profiling and use of force). These materials can be found at rac.org/journey.

While much of the research for these sources comes from the internet, there is a particular wealth of material from Ta-Nahesi Coates’ book Between the World and Me (2015), Debby Irving’s Waking Up White (2014), Ella Mazel’s anthology And Don’t Call Me a Racist! (1998), and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s To

Heal a Fractured World (2005), while Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010) and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy (2014) were powerful background reading. The PBS documentary “RACE- The Power of an Illusion” provides an incredibly helpful, fact-based breakdown about the construction of race in America, its origins and consequences. Not cited here, but well worth reading are the letter written by Reform Rabbis arrested in St. Augustine in 1964 (http://jwa.org/media/why-we-went-joint-letter-from-rabbis-arrested-in-st-augustine ) and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s 1963 sermon “On Religion and Race” (http://voices-of-democracy.org/heschel-religion-and-race-speech-text/ ). There is a wealth of literature in print and on the internet on related topics. This material deserves to be read in its entirety; please take advantage of it. As always, be sure to cite original authors when appropriate.

We highlight here one Mishna, which contains a dozen sermons. It revolves around the rules of

testimony on capital cases in an earthly court, and so feels especially appropriate for this season when

we anticipate testifying for our own lives before the Heavenly Court. It defied any particular category,

and may be the rabbinic proof-text establishing the principles of racial justice. Its interpretation we

leave to your wisdom, but Just Congregations and the Religious Action Center would love to collect the

fruits of your labors, so please share with us your sermons when completed. You can send them to

Rabbi Jessica Kirschner at jkirschner@urj.org

Mishna Sanhedrin 4:5 How do we examine the witnesses in a capital case? We bring them to the court’s chambers and press them: “Perhaps what you say is but your own assessment, or from rumors, or your witnessing an actual witness testify, or your reporting what a trustworthy source said. Or perhaps you were unaware that by the end we would interrogate you, with examination and inquiry. Know that capital cases are not like monetary ones. In monetary cases, a false witness can return the money and achieve atonement. But in capital cases, the blood of the victim hangs upon you until the end of time. For thus we find in regard to Cain, who killed his brother, “The bloods of your brother scream out!” (Gen. 4:10). The verse does not say blood of your brother, but bloods of your brother, because it was his blood and also the blood of his offspring [another explanation of the verse: for his blood was spattered over the trees and rocks]. It was for this reason that man was first created as one person (Adam), to teach you that anyone who destroys a life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed an entire world. And also to promote peace among creation, that no man would say to his friend, “My ancestors are greater than yours.” And also so that heretics will not say, “There are many rulers up in Heaven.” And also to express the grandeur of The Holy One, for man strikes many coins from the same die, and all the coins are alike. But Adonai, King of Kings, The Holy One, strikes every man from the die of the First Man, and yet no man is quite like his friend. Maybe you will now say, “What do we need this anxiety for? Why be a witness at all?” But Scripture has already spoken, “If he be a witness, having seen or known, and does not express it, he shall bear his sin” (Lev. 5:1). Maybe you will now say, “Why do we need to be responsible for another man’s death?” But Scripture has already spoken, “When the wicked are destroyed there is rejoicing” (Prov. 11:10).

Systemic Racism

“There is none on earth so righteous as to do only good and never sin.”

Ecclesiastes 7:20

“To engage in a serious discussion about race in America, we must begin not with the problems of black people but with the flaws in American society—flaws rooted in historic inequalities and longstanding cultural stereotypes.”

Cornell West, 1993

“A society is always eager to cover misdeeds with a cloak of forgetfulness, but no society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist in the present. America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 1967

“Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people

will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be

imposed upon them.”

Frederick Douglass, 1857

“Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread and deep-seated, that it is invisible because it is so

normal.”

Shirley Chisholm, 1970

“Racism…is not simply about the attitudes, dislikes and motivation of individuals or individual acts of bigotry and discrimination. Instead, racism refers to the way society as a whole is arranges, and how the economic, educational, cultural and social rewards of that society are distributed. It is about collective injustice.

Project Hip-Hop, 1997

“Most talk by whites about equal opportunity seems to be now to be about equal opportunity to try to get into a position of dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist.”

Peggy McIntosh, 1988

“For too long, we’ve been blind to the way past injustices continue to shape the present…Maybe we

now realize the way racial bias can infect us even when we don't realize it, so that we're guarding

against not just racial slurs, but we're also guarding against the subtle impulse to call Johnny back for

a job interview but not Jamal. So that we search our hearts when we consider laws to make it harder

for some of our fellow citizens to vote. By recognizing our common humanity by treating every child

as important, regardless of the color of their skin or the station into which they were born, and to do

what’s necessary to make opportunity real for every American -- by doing that, we express God’s

grace.

Reverend Pinckney once said, “Across the South, we have a deep appreciation of history -- we haven’t

always had a deep appreciation of each other’s history.” What is true in the South is true for

America. Clem understood that justice grows out of recognition of ourselves in each other. That my

liberty depends on you being free, too. That history can’t be a sword to justify injustice, or a shield

against progress, but must be a manual for how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past -- how to

break the cycle. A roadway toward a better world. He knew that the path of grace involves an open

mind -- but, more importantly, an open heart.”

Remarks by President Barak Obama in Eulogy for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney June 26, 2015

“When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Revolution of Values, 1967 “Again we have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that Capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The face is that Capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor—both black and white, both here and abroad.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., The Three Evils of Society, 1967 “Most white people are ignorant of what they have done to the Negro in the economic field…We frankly do not believe that the Negro’s economic status would have been nearly so bad if white people realized how all specific economic discriminations add up, and how effectively they bar the way for the Negro when he attempts to better himself.”

Arnold Rose, 1948 “The end of discrimination on the basis of race necessarily requires more than the end of intentional discrimination....Justice Roberts famously declared that the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race was to stop discriminating on the basis of race….Roberts is wrong—facially race-neutral processes like property taxes and job referral networks reproduce the discrimination of the Jim Crow and slavery eras. Moreover,…persistent racial gaps in education, jobs, housing, and wealth are at present as significant or more significant a problem than intentional discrimination.”

Daria Roithmayr, Reproducing Racism, 2014

“’Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at God’ (Ex. 3:6). Why was he afraid? Because if he

were fully to understand God he would have no choice but to be reconciled to the slavery and

oppression of the world. From the vantage point of eternity, he would see that the bad is a necessary

stage on the journey to the good. He would understand God but he would cease to be Moses, the

fighter against injustice who intervened whenever he saw wrong being done. ‘He was afraid’ that seeing

heaven would desensitize him to earth, that coming close to infinity would mean losing his humanity.

That is why God chose Moses, and why he taught Abraham to pray.”

Rabbi Nachum Rabinovitch, as retold by R. Jonathan Sacks in To Heal A Fractured World p. 23

“Racism is alive and well in America, shaping our suburban geography and weaving through our private conversations…While residential segregation decreases for most racial and ethnic groups with additional education, this does not hold true for African Americans.”

Charles R. Lawrence III & Mari J. Matsuda, 1997

“The difference between de jure and de facto segregation is the difference between open, forthright bigotry and the shamefaced kind what works through unwritten agreements between real estate dealers, school officials, and local politicians.”

Shirley Chisholm, 1970

“To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the direct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body. But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker. However you call it, the result was our infirmity before the criminal forces of the world. It does not matter if the agent of those forces is white or black—what matters is our condition, what matters is the system that makes your body breakable.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, 2015, p 17-18 “I came to see the streets and the schools as arms of the same beast. One enjoyed the official power of the state while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry of both. Fail in the streets and the crews would catch you slipping and take your body. Fail in the schools and you would be suspended and sent back to those same streets, where they would take your body. And I began to see these two arms in relation—those who failed in the schools justified their destruction in the streets. The society could say, ‘He should have stayed in school,’ and then wash its hands of him. It does not matter that the ‘intentions’ of individual educators are noble. Forget about intentions. What any institution, or its agents, ‘intend’ for you is secondary. Our world is physical. Learn to play defense—ignore the head and keep your eyes on the body. Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream. No one directly proclaimed that schools were designed to sanctify failure and destruction. But a great number of educators spoke of ‘personal responsibility’ in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility. The point of this language of ‘intention’ and ‘personal responsibility’ is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. ‘Good intentions’ is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, 2015, p. 33

“’Make the race proud,’ the elders used to say. But by then I knew that I wasn’t so much bound to a biological ‘race’ as to a group of people, and these people were not black because of any uniform color or any uniform physical feature. They were bound because they suffered under the weight of the Dream, and they were bound by all the beautiful things, all the language and mannerisms, all the food and music, all the literature and philosophy, all the common language that they fashioned like diamonds under the weight of the Dream…In other words, I was part of a world. And looking out, I had friends

who too were part of other worlds—the world of Jews or New Yorkers, the world of Southerners or gay men, of immigrants of Californians, of Native Americans, or a combination of any of these, worlds stitched into worlds like tapestry. And though I could never, myself, be a native of any of these worlds, I knew that nothing so essentialist as race stood between us. I had read too much by then. And my eyes-- my beautiful precious eyes—were growing stronger each day. And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do. In America, the injury is not in being born with darker skin, with fuller lips, with a broader nose, but in everything that happens after.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, 2015, p. 119-120 “Black life is cheap, but in America, black bodies are a resource of incomparable value.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, 2015, p. 132

Postmodern societies are marked by their lack of moral consensus. They contain people of radically

different faiths. Secular culture, meanwhile, has largely abandoned the project of morality as a society-

wide enterprise. It has become instead the exercise of autonomy: morality as private and personal

choice (the Bible sees this as anarchy: ‘In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit’

[Judges 21:25]). It is hard to see how a society can survive in the long term under such conditions.

Morality is the history of humanity’s attempts to construct a common life on the basis of shared codes,

conventions and convictions. Without shared moral discourse, the public square is reduced to a quasi-

economic exchange: the provision of services in exchange for taxes. That is too fragile a basis on which

to build a viable nation, let alone a gracious world. It leaves it entirely open to question, for example,

why people who feel they are not getting a fair deal should abide by the political process at all. Why not

simply reject society if you that it is rejecting you? That would plunge us back into the ‘state of

nature’—the war of all against all, civil unrest—that provoked the crisis of modernity in the first place.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World, p. 124

“African Americans had answered the country’s every call from its infancy…Yet, the fame and fortune that were their just due never came. For their blood spent, lives lost, and battles won, they received nothing. They went back to slavery, real or economic, consigned there by hate, prejudice, bigotry, and intolerance.”

General Colin Powell, 1995

“Between 1934 and 1962, the Federal government underwrote $120 billion in new housing, less than 2% of which went to people of color. America’s single largest investment in its people, through an intertwined structure of housing and banking systems, gave whites a lifestyle and financial boost that would accrue in decades to come while driving blacks and other minority populations into a downward spiral. Discriminatory practices among colleges, universities, banks, and realtors created an impenetrable barrier to the GI Bill’s promise, turning America’s golden opportunity to right its racially unbalanced ship into an acceleration of its listing. From the perspective of American’s excluded from this massive leg-up policy, the GI Bill is one of the best examples of affirmative action for white people.”

Debby Irving, Waking Up White, p. 35

“Millions on millions of white Americans are unable to understand that slums, family disorganization and illiteracy are not the causes of the racial problem, but the end product of that problem.”

Lerone Bennett, Jr. 1965

“As my understanding of America’s history broadened, isolated bits of disconnected data found their

place in a tapestry carefully woven over time. The dilapidated and isolated inner-city neighborhood, the

phone call that landed me my first job, the diversity initiatives that fell short, the way my white students

consistently rose to the top, my mixed feelings about affirmative action, friendships with people of color

that felt stilted—suddenly the all became united in a single narrative. It was as if I had been examining

the world through a telephoto lens, zooming in on events, communities, and individuals without putting

each in context or connecting one to another. As my lens retracted, more of the tapestry came into

view, revealing the interplay between various scenes. Racism wasn’t about this person or that, this

upset or that, this community or that; racism is, and always has been, the way America sorted and

ranked its people in a bitterly divisive, humanity-robbing system.

Debby Irving, Waking Up White, p. 31

Privilege & White Supremacy

“When I was young, I wanted to change the world. I tried, but the world did not change. Then I tried to

change my town, but the town did not change. Then I tried to change my family, but my family did not

change. Then I knew: first, I must change myself.”

Rabbi Israel Salanter

“We cannot choose the color of our skin, but we can choose the nature of our beliefs.”

Clyde W. Ford, 1994

“Prejudice is a burden which confuses the past, threatens the future, and renders the present inaccessible.”

Maya Angelou, 1986

“If we tell ourselves that the only problem is hate, we avoid facing the reality that it is mostly nice, non-hating people who perpetuate racial inequality.”

Ellis Cose, 1997

“God has told you, O man, what is good, and what the Lord requires of you: Only to do justice, to love

goodness, and to walk humbly with your God.”

Micah 6:8

“We can at least try to understand our own motives, passions and prejudices, so as to be conscious of what we are doing when we appeal to those of others. This is very difficult, because our own prejudice and emotional bias always seem so rational.

T.S. Eliot, 1950

“Racism is a sensitive word. Americans often avoid mentioning it, even when it is relevant…It is a sensitive word because it exposes so much, institutionally and personally. It is a Rorschach word, a linguistic inkblot test. How you define it reveals something important about you, how you see the world and your place in it.”

Clarence Page, 1996

“The story of Adam and Eve is not primitive science. It is an elegant statement of the first principle of

ethics, which is that freedom generates a new kind of law. Scientific laws describe, moral laws

prescribe. Scientific laws predict what will happen, moral laws tell us what ought to happen. Only a free

agent can understand a moral law, and only a free agent can break one. This, the Bible intimates, is

never without consequences—for which we are responsible. That is the knowledge conveyed by the

fruit of the tree. To break a law is to taste forbidden fruit and know that one has strayed into the

territory called ‘evil’, however harmless the first steps are.

This is what Adam and Eve simultaneously experience and deny. The first beings to discover freedom,

they are also the first to feel what Erich Fromm called ‘the fear of freedom’. Freedom is fearful,

precisely because it involves responsibility. It is comforting and comfortable to live under someone

else’s tutelage and power; to be able to say, ‘It wasn’t my fault’; to look elsewhere for deliverance. The

knowledge that there are laws you can break, and for whose breach you bear the guilt, is the exile from

Eden, the loss of childhood and innocence. Hence the depth and originality of the story is not that Adam

and Eve sinned (sin is rarely original) but its insight into the psychodynamics of self-deception. Their

first instinct is to deny that they were acting freely at all. They deny personal responsibility.”

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World, p. 137

“As a white person, I realized that I had been taught about racism as something which puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.

Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the United States think that racism doesn’t affect them because they are not people of color; they do not see ‘whiteness’ as a racial identity.

In my class and place, I did not recognize myself as a racist because I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth.”

Peggy McIntosh, 1988

“The following story, in its insistence that God punishes even adult children for their parents’ sins, is

troublesome, but also reflects the belief of at least one prominent medieval sage (the thirteenth-century

Rabbi Judah the Chasid) that cheating a non-Jew is among the worst sins a Jew can commit:

‘Once there was a Jewish man whose children died shortly after they were married [but before they had

children]. He sought the advice of a Torah sage, to whom he explained: ‘I had a non-Jewish neighbor

who died. Soon after, my children died, and the money I had given them was inherited by their wives

and husbands. If Heaven judged that I was unworthy of having descendants, why didn’t my children die

before marriage, so that at least my wealth would not have to go to strangers?’ He concluded: ‘As long

as the non-Jew was alive, everything was fine.’

“The Sage said: ‘Perhaps your wealth was acquired dishonestly.’

“The man replied: ‘I never wronged anyone—except that non-Jew, whom I used to deceive in

business.’

“The Sage explained: ‘When he died, his angel told him the truth, and the man cried out in

anguish. The Holy One, Blessed be He, takes up the cause of the oppressed, whether they are Jews or

non-Jews’” (Sefer Chasidim, paragraph 661).

There are several ways to understand the punishing of the man’s children. Perhaps Rabbi Judah

believed that God punishes children for the sins of their parents. Alternatively, the children, who were

now adults, might not have been completely innocent. Perhaps they knew of their father’s wrongdoing,

and shared in the money he acquired dishonestly. If such reasoning seems unfair to the children,

consider how most Jews feel about children of Germans and Poles who lived on property stolen by their

parents from Jews during World War II, and who knowingly accepted such property when bequeathed

to them by their parents.”

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, A Code of Jewish Ethics: Love Your Neighbor As Yourself p. 269

“This is a racist nation. I am a racist and you are a racist because we’ve had the advantage from the day we were born. We may not be bigots…but I’m still a racist because my tribe still has the power and seems determined to hang on to it.”

Will D. Campbell, 1992 “Why is equality so assiduously avoided? Why does white America delude itself, and how does it rationalize the evil it retains?

The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Where Do We Go From Here? 1967

“Instead of…nasty people intent on using our color against us, we are surrounded by perfectly nice people who embrace the color-blind ideal with a vengeance.”

Harlon L. Dalton, 1995

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s greatest stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is…the white moderate…who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.

For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never”. It has been a tranquilizing thalidomide, relieving the emotional stress for a moment, only to give birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963

“Most of us came here in chains and most of you came here to escape your chains. Your freedom was our slavery, and therein lies the bitter difference in the way we look at life.”

John Oliver Killens, 1964

“Somebody asked us if we remembered seeing the Statue of Liberty as we pulled into the harbor. Tell you the truth, we didn’t care too much about it. The Statue of Liberty was important to white European immigrants. It was a symbol to them. We knew it wasn’t meant for us.”

Sadie and Bessie Delany, 1993

“It’s well worth remembering that Jim Crow flourished during the very time that millions of Europeans entered the United States. A deeply racialized U.S. society transformed ignorant and impoverished immigrants…into white people. And as whites, European newcomers enjoyed access to the American transition belt of upward economic mobility.”

Nell Irvin Painter, 1998

“It does not matter that contemporary Black folk were not personally enslaved so long as we carry the stigmata of those who were—dark skin. Similarly, it does not matter whether our White counterparts actually descended from slave-masters so long as they inherited from our culture the mind-set that made it possible for liberty-loving, God-fearing people to subordinate their fellow human beings.”

Harlon L. Dalton, 1995

“While slavery and Jim Crow laws provided white people with tangible evidence of racism and clear cut

demands for its undoing, today’s racism lives hidden beneath the surface, in individual hearts and

minds. Today’s work to dismantle racism begins in the personal realm. Until I begin to examine how

racism has shaped me, I had little to contribute to the movement of righting racial wrongs. My cultural

markings, invisible to me, screamed “Caution!” to those outside my culture. It explains why, for so many

years, my best efforts stagnated or backfired. Until I examined how racism shaped me, I had little hope

that any person of color would want to engage with me around a problem I saw as theirs. Only when I

began to explore and share my personal struggle to understand my racialized belief system did people

of color start opening up to me, engaging with me in our common struggle.”

Debby Irving, Waking Up White, p. 192

“Tolerance is among the most difficult of virtues. The Hebrew word for it, sovlanut, derives from sevel,

to suffer. In other words, we have to endure a certain amount of discomfort and sometimes even

suffering, to tolerate views with which we disagree.”

R. Joseph Telushkin, A Code for Jewish Ethics, p. 433

If there’s a place for tolerance in racial healing, perhaps it has to do with tolerating my own feelings of

discomfort that arise when a person, of any color, expresses emotion not welcome in the culture of

niceness. It also has to do with tolerating my own feelings of shame, humiliation, regret, anger, and fear

so I can engage, not run. For me, tolerance is not about others, it’s about accepting my own

uncomfortable emotions as I adjust to a changing view of myself as imperfect and vulnerable. As

human.”

Debby Irving, Waking Up White: And Finding Myself in the Story of Race

“I know that in trying to shut the Negro race away from us, we have shut ourselves away from so many good, creative, honest, deeply human things in life…that the warped, distorted frame we have put around every Negro child from birth is around every white child also…that what cruelly shapes and cripples the personality of one is as cruelly shaping and crippling the personality of the other.”

Lillian Smith, 1949 “I really don’t think of you as Black.”…The erasure of my Blackness is meant to be a compliment, but I am not flattered. For when I am e-raced, I am denied an identity that is meaningful to me and am separated from people who are my flesh and blood.”

Harlon L. Dalton, 1995 “Americans believe in the reality of “race” as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism—the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them—inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men. But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hair and hue is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that

these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, 2015, p. 7

“A judge should not defend his opinion if he is not confident he is correct, merely out of the desire to

avoid the embarrassment of retracting it.”

Talmud Bavli, Shavout 30b

“…Why exactly was I sad? I came out of the studio and walked for a while. It was a calm December day. Families, believing themselves white, where out on the streets. Infants, raised to be white, were bundled into strollers. And I was sad for these people, much as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there watching and reveling in a specious hope. I realized then why I was sad. When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice laws. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is treehouses and Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. And knowing this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those families, I was sad for my country, but above all, in that moment, I was sad for you [my son].”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, 2015, p. 11 “At first Moses stated that you are to keep God’s statues and His testimonies which He commanded

you. Now he goes on to add that even where he has not commanded you, be careful to do what is good

and right in His eyes, for He loves the good and the right. This is a great principle, for it is impossible to

mention in the Torah all aspects of a person’s conduct with neighbors and friends, all his various

transactions, and the ordinances of all societies and countries. But since He mentioned many of them—

Do not go up and down as a talebearer Do not take vengeance or bear a grudge, Do not stand idly by the

blood of your neighbor, Do not curse the deaf, Rise up before the hoary head, and the like—he reiterated

in a general way that, in all matters, one should do what is good and right, including compromise [not

insisting on your rights] and going beyond the strict letter of the law.

Nachmanides, commentary on Deut. 6:18

“In 1957, the white residents of Levittown, Pennsylvania, argues for their right to keep their town segregated. ‘As moral, religious, and law-abiding citizens,’ the group wrote, ‘we feel that we are unprejudiced and undiscriminating in our wish to keep our community a closed community.’ This was the attempt to commit a shameful act while escaping all sanction, and I raise it to show you that there was no golden era when evildoers did their business and loudly proclaimed it as such.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, 2015, p. 98 “I am sorry that I cannot make it ok. I am sorry that I cannot save you—but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when

nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be. And I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, 2015, p. 107 “As I’ve swapped childhood stories with people of color, I’ve learned the ways in which many parents of color prepare their children for a hostile world. Trying to protect children with a worry-free childhood is a privilege of the dominant class—a white privilege. Many parents of color teach their children to keep their hands in plain sight if a police officer is near and to avoid white neighborhoods in order to avoid being questioned for simply being there. In the same way I was trained to make myself visible and seek opportunity, many children of color are trained to stay under the radar.”

Debby Irving, Waking Up White, p. 19

“Individuals who do not have power may hold racist views, but they seldom cause much harm…The significance of racism lies in the way it consigns certain human beings to the margins of society, if not painful lives and early deaths…No white person can claim to have suffered in such ways because of ideas that may be held about them by some black citizens.”

Andrew Hacker, 1992 “A white man I met at a conference shared a story about his 1970’s adolescence in poverty. His father had lost everything as a result of a double addiction to alcohol and gambling. Desperate to get a college education, the son shop-lifted to pay his way. In all his years of sneaking electronic equipment out of stores, he got nabbed only once. For that, he was told to hand over what he had stolen and never come back to the store. A young black man trying the same tuition-funding strategy very likely would have been followed around the store by a suspicious employee and arrested if caught. On the other side of the equation is a story told by John Hope Franklin, an African American man revered for his contributions as a US historian, educator, and author. In 1995, President Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In celebration of the honor, Mr. Franklin hosted a small dinner at Washington D.C.’s exclusive Cosmos Club. That evening, a white member of the club handed Mr. Franklin—who was dressed in a tuxedo—a coat check tag and asked him to fetch her coat. Nothing like this has ever happened to me or any white people I know. Unlike poverty, skin color is visible and fixed, forever and always. In both stories I see skin color translating into expectations on the part of onlookers. White skin can erroneously bring high expectations and the message ‘you belong’; dark skin can erroneously bring low expectations and the message ‘you don’t belong’.”

Debby Irving, Waking Up White, p. 14

Violent Encounters: Riots and Police Violence

“Rabbi Chanina taught: Pray for the welfare of the government, for without fear of governmental

authorities, people would swallow each other alive.”

Pirke Avot 3:2

“The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be denounced.”

Frederick Douglass, 1852

“Why in the verse, ‘Justice, justice you shall pursue’ is the word ‘justice’ repeated?” The rebbe answered

that the repetition is meant to convey that not only must be ends we pursue be just, but so too must the

means we employ to achieve those ends.

R. Yaakov Yitzchak of Pzhysha (Hassidic, 1766-1814), in Martin Buber’s Ten Rungs: Hasidic Sayings p. 7

“Slavery continues to shape our lives more than a century after abolition because the link it forged between Blackness and inferiority, Blackness and subservience, Blackness and danger, has survived to this day.”

Harlon L. Dalton, 1995

“Because of delays in pronouncing judgement, perverting judgement, corrupting judgement [through

carelessness]…war and plundering and plague and famine come.

Talmud Bavli, Shabbat 33a

“I think that rage is an understandable and appropriate response to an absurd situation, namely, black people finding themselves in a situation of white supremacist power.”

Cornel West, 1997

“The anger of the oppressed man is a sign of health, not pathology. It says: ‘I am condemning you for doing wrong to me.’”

Alexander Thomas, M.D., 1972

“My son was turning three years old…Somewhere along the way he is going to turn almost overnight from someone who is perceived as cute and innocent into someone who is perceived as a menace, the most feared creature on America’s urban streets today, a young black male.”

Clarence Page, 1996

“Do not stand idly by while your neighbor’s blood is shed.”

Leviticus 19:16

“I was eight years old when I saw a photo of Emmett Till’s body…The murder shocked me; I began thinking of myself as a black person for the first time, not just a person. And I grew more distrustful and wary…I could be hurt or killed just for being black.”

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, 1996

“When seeing a large crowd, we are commanded to recite a blessing, ‘Blessed is the Wise One who

knows secrets’ (that is, everyone’s innermost thoughts).”

Talmud Bavli, Berachot 58a

“But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally

irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable

conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that

they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say

tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed

to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed

to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large

segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice

and humanity.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., The Other America, 1968

“There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, 2015, p. 10

“The right to kill in self-defense applies only to the person or people threatening your life. You are not

permitted to kill an innocent party even if doing so will remove a mortal threat. In a seminal, oft-cited

ruling, the Talmud recounts the case of a man who came to the fourth century scholar Rava and told

him that the governor of his town had ordered him to kill an innocent man; otherwise he himself would

be executed. What should he do? he asked. Rava told the man that it was forbidden for him to kill an

innocent victim: “What reason do you see for assuming that your blood is redder [than that of your

would-be] victim? Perhaps his blood is redder [than yours]?” (see Sanhedrin 74a, Pesachim 25b, and

Yoma 82b)

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, A Code for Jewish Ethics, p. 352

“At this moment the phrase ‘police reform’ has come into vogue, and the actions of our publically appointed guardians have attracted attention presidential and pedestrian. You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. The truth is that the police reflect America in all its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies—the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects—

are the product of democratic will. And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self-generated fears that compelled the people who think they are white to flee the cities and into the Dream. The problem with the police is that that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, 2015, p.78-9

“If it is possible to save the pursued by damaging of of the limbs of the pursuer (rodef), one should do

so. Thus, if one can strike him with an arrow, a stone, or a sword, and cut off his hand or break his leg

[or find another way to prevent him from achieving his objective] one should do so. If there is no way to

be precise [in one’s aim], and save the person being pursued without killing the pursuer, one should kill

him, even though he has not yet killed his victim.”

Maimonides, “Laws of Murder and Preservation of Life” 1:7

There exists a solidarity among men as human beings that makes each co-responsible for every wrong

and every injustice in the world, especially for crimes committed in his presence or with his knowledge.

If I fail to do whatever I can to prevent them, I too am guilty. If I was present at the murder of others

without risking by life to prevent it, I feel guilty in a way not adequately conceivable either legally,

politically or morally. That I live after such a thing has happened weighs upon me as indelible guilt.

Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt p. 36

“Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets America made. That is a philosophy for the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket. It was only after you that I understood this love, that I understood the grip of my mother’s hand. She knew that the galaxy itself could kill me, that all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy spilled upon the curb like bum wine. And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of ‘race,’ imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgement of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world’s physical laws.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, 2015, p. 82-3 Hasidim tell the story of the second Lubavitcher Rebbe (the “Mitteler” Rebbe) who was once so intent

on his studies that he failed to hear the cry of his baby son. His father (R. Shneur Zalman of Ladi) heard,

and went down and took the baby in his arms until he went to sleep again. Then he went into his son,

still intent on his books, and said, “My son, I do not know what you are studying, but it is not the study

of Torah is it makes you deaf to the cry of a child.”

“I've also represented people who have committed terrible crimes but nonetheless struggle to recover

and to find redemption. I have discovered, deep in the hearts of many condemned and incarcerated

people, the scattered traces of hope and humanity - seeds of restoration that come to astonishing life

when nurtured by very simple interventions.

Proximity has taught me some basic and humbling truths, including this vital lesson: Each of us is more

than the worst thing we've ever done. My work with the poor and incarcerated has persuaded me that

the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice. Finally, I've come to believe that

the true measure of our commitment to justice, the character of our society, our commitment to the

rule of law, fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, the powerful, the

privileged, and the respected among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor,

the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.

We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can

corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and

abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as

much as we victimize others. The closer we get to mass incarceration and extreme levels of punishment,

the more I believe it's never to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and - perhaps - we

all need some measure of unmerited grace.”

Bryan Stevenson, founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative

Individual and Communal Responsibility Towards Racial Justice

“It is impossible to be moved by the prophets and not have a social conscience. Their message,

delivered in the name of God, is: accept responsibility. The world will not get better of its own accord.

Nor will we make it a more human place by leaving it to others—politicians, columnists, protestors,

campaigners—making them our agents to bring redemption on our behalf. The Hebrew Bible begins not

with man’s cry to God, but with God’s cry to us, each of us, here where we are. ‘If you are silent at this

time’, says Mordechai to Esther, ‘relief and deliverance will come from elsewhere…but who knows

whether it was not for such a time as this that you have attained royalty?’ (Esther 4:14). That is the

question God poses to us. Yes, if we do not do it, someone else may. But we will then have failed to

understand why we are here and what we are summoned to do. The Bible is God’s call to human

responsibility.”

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, To Heal A Fractured World p. 28

“All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

Edmund Burke

“Seek the welfare of the city to which I [God] have exiled you and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its

welfare you shall find your own.”

Jeremiah 29:7

“The most important part of the Little Rock story was…the magnificent courage and dignity these young people…their action did more to win the sympathy and support of democratic-minded white people than all the speeches about “tolerance” that have ever been made…As they walk through Jim Crow barriers to attend school…the world rocks beneath their tread.

Dear children of Little Rock—you and your parents and the Negro people of your community have lifted our hearts and renewed our resolve that full freedom shall now be ours. You are the pride and the glory of our people, and my heart sings warm and tender with love for you.”

Paul Robeson, 1958

“The integration [of Little Rock Central High School] had stolen my sixteenth birthday. Later that night before I sobbed into my pillow, I wrote: Please, God, let me learn how to stop being a warrior. Sometimes I just need to be a girl.”

Melba Patillo Beals, one of the Little Rock Nine

“The choice was not alone between fairness and unfairness to an oppressed people, but also between wholeness and division in the family of man. It was between integration and disintegration in our very hearts, between love and hate—between the highest and lowest values I knew.”

Sarah Patton Boyle, 1962

“A young child…asks his mother why the man in the grocery store is so dark. Instead of answering, his mother tells him to be quiet, which tells the child it’s not ok to discuss differences.”

Beverly Daniel Tatum, 1998

“Whoever can influence the members of his household to stop sinning, but does not, is punished for the

sins of the members of his household. If he can influence the people of his city to stop sinning, but does

not, he is punished for the sins of the people of his city. If he can stop the whole world from sinning,

and does not, he is punished for the sins of the whole world.”

Talmud Bavli, Shabbat 54b

“By doing our homework we can transform a pretend conversation that seeks to simplify the impact of race in American into a full-scale dialogue that reveals the utter complexity, variability, and adaptability of racism. Once the fig leaf has fallen, we might as well look at what it has been hiding. For it is by exploring the things we dare not say to each other that we can best get to know one another.

Unlike those who counsel smoothing over our differences and pushing our fears to the side, I am convinced that the only way to truly heal the past and prepare for a more just future is to (as we used to say) let it all hang out.

The very process of racial engagement puts us all on the same plane. When we are open and honest with each other; when we abandon our hiding places, take risks, and own up to our own self interest, when we place on the table our assumptions, fears, trepidations, and secret desires, by that very act we are connecting with one another as equals.”

Harlon L. Dalton, 1995

“Noah’s failure is that, righteous in himself, he has no impact on his contemporaries. He does not

engage with them, rebuke them or urge them to mend their ways. Nor does he pray for them,

questioning the justice of the Flood, as Abraham would later do for the people of the cities of the plain.

Jewish tradition judged him unfavorably. Noah, the sages said, walked with God, whereas Abraham

walked ahead of God. (‘Walk ahead of Me’, says God to Abraham, ‘and be wholehearted’. In Jewish

folklore, Noah became a tzadik im peltz, ‘a righteous man in a fur coat’. There are two ways of keeping

warm on a cold night: buying a fur coat or lighting a fire. Buy a coat and you keep yourself warm. Light

a fire and you keep others warm also. Noah, the righteous man, fails to exercise collective

responsibility.”

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World p. 141

“There are many persons ready to do what is right because in their hearts they know it is right. But they hesitate, waiting for the other fellow to make the first move—and he, in turn, waits for you. The minute a person whose word means a great deal dares to take the openhearted and courageous way, many others follow.”

Marian Anderson, 1956

“The tolerance and understanding necessary to heal must come from each and every one of us, arising out of our everyday conduct, until decency reaches a flood tide.”

Muhammad Ali, 1996

“The love for people must be alive in the heart and soul, a love for all people and a love for all nations,

expressing itself in a desire for their spiritual and material advancement…One cannot reach the exalted

position of being able to recite the verse from the morning prayer, ‘Praise the Lord, invoke His name,

declare His works among the nations’ (1 Chronicles 16:8), without experiencing the deep, inner love

stirring one to a solicitousness for all nations, to improve their material state and to promote their

happiness.”

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook

“A society, almost necessarily, begins every success story with the chapter that most advantages itself, and in America, these precipitating chapters are almost always rendered as the singular action of exceptional individuals. ‘It only takes one person to make a change,’ you are often told. This is also a myth. Perhaps one person can make a change, but not the kind of change that would raise your body to equality with your countrymen.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, 2015, p. 96

“When God is conceived of both beyond the natural universe and endowing humanity with his most

distinctive attribute, creativity, a momentous human freedom is born. For the first time, religion

becomes a world-transforming rather than world accepting force.

With freedom is born responsibility. If we are not free—if what we do is the result of natural laws,

inexorable forces beyond our control—then we are not responsible. I may be unfortunate, but I am not

guilty, for things I could not help doing. Freedom, choice, moral agency, accountability, merit, guilt,

retributive justice, atonement and forgiveness are interlocking concepts that were born together, and

have their genesis in the Hebrew Bible.”

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World, p. 134

Re-Establishing the Relationship between Black and Jewish Communities

“’To me, O Israelites, you are just like the Ethiopians,’ declares Adonai.”

Amos 9:7

“You shall not wrong the stranger (ger) or oppress him, for you yourselves were strangers in the land of

Egypt.”

Exodus 22:20

“The stranger was to be protected, although he was not a member of one’s family, clan, religion,

community or people, simply because he was a human being. In the stranger, therefore, man

discovered the idea of humanity."

Hermann Cohen (German-Jewish philosopher, 1842-1918)

“There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.”

James Baldwin, 1961

“Whether we do much or we do little, what matters is that our heart is turned to heaven.

Talmud Bavli, Menahot 110a

“We come from a legacy of people who, when they were told they were nothing and everything around them, every single experience in their life, said, ‘You are nobody. You are nothing’…somewhere inside themselves, said, ‘I believe I’m better.’”

Oprah Winfrey, 1998

“Ben Zoma used to say: ‘Who is wise? One who learns from every person’.”

Pirke Avot 4:1

“We talk a lot and we talk pretty well about race, but we don’t listen enough. And I’m hoping that if we listen to each other, we can begin to…make this society of ours into less and less of a country of strangers.”

David Shipler, 1997

You don’t be afraid. I said it was intended that you should perish, in the ghetto, perish by never being

allowed to go beyond and behind the white man’s definition, by never being allowed to spell your

proper name. You have, and many of us have, defeated this intention and by a terrible law, a terrible

paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of

reality. But these men are your brothers, your lost younger brothers, and if the word “integration”

means anything, this is what it means, that we with love shall force our brothers to see themselves as

they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it, for this is your home, my friend. Do not be

driven from it. Great men have done great things here and will again and we can make America what

America must become.

It will be hard James, but you come from sturdy peasant stock, men who picked cotton, dammed rivers,

built railroads, and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental

dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of

them said, “The very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook and my chains fell off.”

From “A Letter to My Nephew” by James Baldwin, first published in The Progressive, Dec. 1962

1. How does Baldwin’s evocation of legacy reflect our own story as Jews?

2. What do you think are appropriate roles for Jews and the Jewish community in the ongoing

struggle for racial justice?

In the unceasing ebb and flow of justice and oppression we must all dig channels as best we may, that at the propitious moment somewhat of the swelling tide may be conducted to the barren places of life.

Jane Addams (U.S. social worker, 1860-1935)

“There is a strange and lovely detail in the construction of the sanctuary. The holiest item of its

furniture was the ark. It contained the holiest of objects, the tablets on which were written God’s word,

both the second set that remained whole and the first that were shattered into fragments. Above the

ark were two figures, cherubim. The Torah says that ‘their faces were turned to one another’ (Ex.

25:20). Ostensibly this was a great risk. The Israelites had been told not to make any likenesses that

might be worshipped as a god, an idol. The sanctuary itself was constructed in the aftermath of such an

episode, the making of the Golden Calf. Why then were figures introduced into the Holy of Holies?

The sages say that they were like children (Talmud Bavli, Hagigah 13b), or, in another interpretation,

that they were intertwined like lovers (Talmud Bavli, Yoma 54a). It was between the two cherubs that

God spoke to Moses. The message of this symbol was so significant that it was deemed by God himself

to be sufficient to outweigh the risk of misunderstanding. God speaks were two persons turn their face

to one another in love, embrace, generosity and care.”

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, To Heal A Fractured World p. 54

“In these downbeat times, we need as much hope and courage as we do vision and analysis; we must

accent the best of each other even as we point out the vicious effects of our racial divide and pernicious

consequences of our maldistribution of wealth and power. We simply cannot enter the twenty-first

century at each other's throats, even as we acknowledge the weighty forces of racism, patriarchy,

economic inequality, homophobia, and ecological abuse on our necks. We are at a crucial crossroad in

the history of this nation--and we either hang together by combating these forces that divide and

degrade us or we hang separately. Do we have the intelligence, humor, imagination, courage, tolerance,

love, respect, and will to meet the challenge? Time will tell. None of us alone can save the nation or

world. But each of us can make a positive difference if we commit ourselves to do so.”

Cornel West, Race Matters, 1994

“America may not be the best nation on earth, but it has conceived loftier ideals and dreamed higher dreams than any other nation. America is a heterogeneous nation of many different people of different

races, religions, and creeds. Should this experiment go forth and prosper, we will have offered humans a new way to look at life; should we fail, we will simply go the way of all failed civilizations.”

Nikki Giovanni, 1993

“All of this [the opening stories of Genesis) is prelude to the appearance of Abraham, who does not

emerge in a vacuum. His life is a culmination of all that has gone before. The first words of God—‘Leave

your land, your birthplace and your father’s house’—are a call to personal responsibility. Abraham is

commanded to relinquish everything that leads human beings to see their acts as not their own. The

call to Abraham is a counter-commentary to the three great determinisms of the modern world. Karl

Marx held that behavior is determined by structures of power in society, among them the ownership of

land. Therefore God said to Abraham, ‘Leave your land.’ Spinoza believed that human conduct is given

by the instincts we acquire at birth (genetic determinism). Therefore God said, ‘Leave your place of

birth’. Freud held that we are shaped by early experiences in childhood. Therefore God said, ‘Leave

your father’s house.’ Abraham is the refutation of determinism. There are structures of power, but we

can stand outside them. There are genetic influences on our behavior, but we can master them. We are

shaped by our parents, but we can go beyond them. Abraham’s journey is as much psychological as

geographical. Like the Israelites is Moses’ day, he is travelling to freedom.”

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World, p. 145