Words of the Spirit
March!
It’s been a season and summer of crazy. Issues of parades and flags and race intersecting, and none too comfortably. And then … Charlottesville.
Next week is Pride Week in Ottawa, and I’m sitting with lots of questions: How do we name the crossroads where we meet each other next week? How and why are parades and flags, walls and race intersecting at this moment in our peoples’ story? Where do we stand and how do we march forth, literally as well as metaphorically? Is what happens at a Dyke March in Chicago, Illinois or a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a matter of concern for a Reconstructionist congregation in Ottawa, Ontario?
A personal story. Setting: Camp Bnai Brith, Petit Lac Long, Quebec, circa 1966:
We’re hanging out near the camp gates, and I want to get to know a girl whom I’ll call Cheryl Robinson. Somehow I know – or maybe I found out later – that she lives in my neck of the woods in Chomedey, north of Boulevard St. Martin. She’s black, and I want her to know that I’ll be her friend. We exchange names, and are joking around and chatting, and then I say something like, well at least you won’t get sunburned, and then she punches me, and I’m confused. No one tells me why I shouldn’t have said that, and she is not reprimanded for the punch, which hurt. I eventually work it out, on my own, much later. Much later and very much on my own, because I also realize that no one at camp, no one in my shul, no one at Talmud Torah, and certainly no one in my extended family – which liberally uses the Yiddish equivalent of the “n” word – has signaled any awareness or willingness to become aware of race in the Jewish community, or to address the implicit as well as explicit racism in our midst.
Where do I find the places in me to figure all this out?
Back to this moment: Why are my colleagues Rabbis Mordechai Liebling and Malkah Klein not afraid to go to Charlottesville, or, if they were afraid, what did they do with their fear? They report on their experiences here and here.
What I learn from their reporting, their witnessing, is that looking inward and knowing who we are and where we are from and what we have been through is essential to our capacity to confront the forces that hate Jews, blacks, queer people. White supremacists also carry fears. In order to challenge theirs, we must face our own fears, our own ignorance, the intersections of our own identities and the ways in which we can – and must – carry our flags and march.
- Rabbi Liz
