rabbi ari lev: The Feeling of Human Solidarity
Kol Nidre 5778
September 29, 2017
Laying in bed one night in late August, trying to integrate the images I had seen of the recent events in Charlottesville, I returned to a letter my father had gifted me in April in honor of my installation as the rabbi of Kol Tzedek. The letter was written in June 1944 by my great uncle, Zio Simone Piperno on the day Rome was liberated from Nazi occupation. It was then found 49 years later and photocopied by one of my cousins. And then, by way of miracle, 73 years later, my father gifted it to me.
The letter begins:
Dearest ones far away,
“David was sainted and was rewarded in his children.” So it is written, so it has been, and so, with God’s help, it will be. Our father’s spirit watched over us, has interceded in our favor, and has granted us grace. So we obtained the miracle of having our mother saved from the Nazi barbarity, thanks to the divine inspiration of Mrs. Alfonsina [a gentile neighbor who, during the German raid of October 16, 1943, pulled Nonna Rachele into her own apartment], for we, in our simple minds, could never have conceived the mass deportation of innocent women, children, old people, blind and paralyzed ones, with an evil cruelty which has no excuse because it is useless for purposes other than war.”
The letter goes on in unbelievable detail about the nine months that four of my relatives spent in hiding. Where they hid for each air raid; a four week battle with Typhus fever; the efforts to hide household items and protect vineyard machinery, their fear and the hope. My Zio Simone offers a first hand account of the October 16th raid of the Roman Ghetto, known as the day the Nazi’s deported the Jews from Rome. And the letter ends with the most exuberant reunion between my great grandmother Valentina and one of her sons, Arrigo - which Zio Simone describes as the reward for all their suffering. The letter is full of so much loss and so much gratitude. But what strikes me most is that my great uncle Simone took great pride in recording the names of every gentile neighbor who saved my ancestors -- Mrs. Alfonsina, Alberto Ragionieri, Amedeo and Michelina and the nuns at at a convent. “These are the generous people who deserve our greatest debt of gratitude.”
This letter makes it clear, that for my family, it was our allies, our neighbors, our relationships, that saved us. And while that may seem obvious, that goes against every pedagogical approach I have ever encountered when learning about anti-semitism. For years I have avoided all Holocaust remembrance events and all Jewish conversations about anti-semitism, because I have felt their primary educational model has been survival through re-traumatization; And safety through isolation and nationalism. And I cannot authentically relate to either strategy, nor do I believe they ultimately work to keep us safe and free.
When I was 15 years old I spent a week traveling around Poland visiting the sites of concentration camps with thousands of other young Jews from around the world. We stopped in villages and cities that were once home to large bustling Jewish communities. We prayed in abandoned synagogues and kissed the doorposts were mezuzot once hung. The trip culminated with a day long walk that reconstructed the journey millions of people took from from Auschwitz to Birkenau, from the work camp to the death camp. And for this reason, this educational tour is called The March of the Living.
The March of the Living was a very formative experience for me as a young person. 20 years later, I remember clearly that I did the 2 mile walk barefoot. When I allow myself to pause, I can still feel the the gravel under my toes. I remember the wrought iron sign at the entrance to Auschwitz that reads, Arbeit Macht Frei - Work will make you free. I remember standing inside the showers that once gassed young women who after surviving Auschwitz thought they had arrived at something better. I remember feeling terror. I remember the butterflies and the sounds of birds chirping. Signs of life in a place where millions of people had died. I remember weeping under the hot sun. I remember wanting to pray but not knowing the words and so I would just sway back and forth. I remember wondering how anyone survived. I remember longing for the vibrant city that once was Warsaw. I remember asking Ray, one of the survivors on my bus, what felt different. And he said, there used to be so much laughter in these villages. Now there is only dust and silence.
7 months ago on a cold February morning, I arrived at the Mount Carmel Cemetery in North Philadelphia and a piece of me was transported back to The March of the Living. The overgrown headstones, the unnamed graves, the desecrated memories of so many Jews. As I walked up and down the rows of the cemetery, laying hands on the cracked and crumbled headstones, I kept thinking about the slogan of so much of my own Jewish Holocaust education - Never Again. I can still picture the bumper sticker that hung from my pre-teen cork board, yellow background with black bold letters overlayed on top of a Black Jewish Star. Never Again - this was the thrust of what I understood to be a larger statement both about anti-semitism and Jewish victimhood. While I internalized it as a statement about genocide at large, I also understood it to be an expression of Jewish particularism. Never Again for the Jews. This explained why I was taught to refer to the events of World War II as The Holocaust, capital H, and not particularly the Nazi Holocaust. It existed as a sort of mythic wound that, in the Jewish imagination of my childhood,was proportionally unparalleled.
It was this same phrase, Never Again, that went off like a siren, when I saw images of white supremacists with torches occupying the streets of Charlottesville, chanting “Blood and Soil”. Racism unmasked and unrobed. A sea of white faces, motivated by hatred and fear, with the look of death in their eyes. It conjured images of Hitler Youth and Ku Klux Klan rallies all at once.
And then only a month later, St. Louis Police Officer Jason Stockley was acquitted in the 2011 murder of a 24-year-old Black man, Anthony Lamar Smith. As protesters took to the streets affirming the dignity and worth of all Black people, they were met by cops in riot gear and military force. Police escalated violence, using rubber bullets and tear gas to control crowds and more than 100 protesters sought refuge in the only synagogue within the city limits of Saint Louis, Central Reform Congregation, known as CRC. Only moments later, white supremacists unleashed the hashtag #GasTheSynagogue - in theory a reference to the cops’ tear gas. But in truth, the imagery traces it lineage all the way back to my barefeet, standing in those abandoned showers that murdered millions of Jews, millions of people with disabilities, millions of queers, nearly 75 years ago.
The book of exodus is story of oppression and liberation, slavery and freedom. It begins by naming all of the Israelites that journeyed into Egypt, fleeing famine - refugees and immigrants unto their own right. And very quickly, only eight verses into the first chapter, the story turns.
וַיָּ֥קָם מֶֽלֶךְ־חָדָ֖שׁ עַל־מִצְרָ֑יִם
A new king arose over Egypt…
וַיָּ֥קָם מֶֽלֶךְ־חָדָ֖ש
A new king has risen.
And this King said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are much too numerous for us. Let us deal with then shrewdly so that they not increase; otherwise in the event of war they may join with our enemies in fighting against us and they will rise up from the earth.”
This is the voice of a paranoid authoritarian king that has become all too familiar this past year.
The Torah continues, “The more Pharaoh oppressed the Israelites, the more they increased and spread out... the Israelites were a thorn in the face of Egyptian rule.”
So too with us. With every xenophobic and oppressive executive order, masses of people took to the streets, to the airports, to city hall and sanctuaries alike. All together, with leadership from communities of color, we have taken down monuments and defeated bills. Like the Israelites, we have risen up in the face of authoritarian rule.
And it has not been easy. It has been, by every measure, a very painful year. Some of us have been targeted more directly than others. In particular, immigrants, Black people, refugees, Muslims, indigenous communities and trans people. We, the Kol Tzedek community, reflect the very mixed multitude that left Egypt. We are people of color and people with white access. We are immigrants of African, Arab, Latino and European descent. We are Jewish, Christian and Muslim, cis and trans, queer and straight. And many of us have been directly affected in multiple ways. What binds us most profoundly tonight is our presence in a Jewish community committed to justice and liberation for everyone.
One of the most significant changes for us, specifically as a Jewish community, since last Yom Kippur is the rise of visible anti-semitism. In the words of Rabbi Sharon Brous, “America is turning from a place with an undercurrent of antisemitism, to a place in which anti-semitism is condoned by the state.”
But it is very difficult to talk about anti-semitism. And even more difficult to know how to talk about it in public. It is difficult because it is very painful for me personally. And it is difficult because the term anti-semitism is a snare. It has been exploited, used as a tool for censorship and political manipulation. So much so, that it is extremely challenging for Jews and our allies to know how to define, name and relate to anti-semitism. It is also difficult because many of us struggle to discern what feelings about anti-semitism are grounded in what is happening in current time and what is based on historical trauma. I never imagined giving a sermon on the topic in my second year at Kol Tzedek. But the events of the past month have led me to hear the call of Hillel, our Elder: If not now, When?
If not when there are cemeteries being desecrated, when? If not when there are Nazi’s marching with torches screaming “Jews will not replace us”, When? If not when the President of the United States appoints nazis to his cabinet and refuses to unequivocally denounce white supremacy, when? If not when there is a viral hashtag, #GasTheSynagogue, then truly, when?
And even with all of this, I am still unsure how to gauge an appropriate response to the rise in anti-semitism this year.
On the one hand, there are flyers with swastikas created in real time, circulating about events whose primary thrust is anti-semitic white nationalism. White angry men with torches marched in public chanting: “Blood and Soil.” Anti-semitism is also alive and gaining mainstream visibility.
For those of us who were raised Jewish, for those of us with European ancestry, which I know is not all of us, this is the core fear many of us have been indoctrinated against. This is the moment we have been in training for.
On the other hand, we are immersed in a thriving, dynamic, creative Jewish community. I feel safe wearing a kippa in public. Judaism feels totally alive and well, and I feel sheltered from any real hatred that others hold for us.
Why then focus on antisemitism?
In the words of Eric Ward, a long time African American civil rights organizer who has spent the last 30 years studying white nationalism:
“And indeed—why? Why, when the president of the United States appears bent on removing as many dark-skinned immigrants from the U.S. as he can, and when men who look like me are shot in the street or tortured to death in prison with impunity?”
He offers this answer:
“...Antisemitism is the lynchpin of the White nationalist belief system. That within this ideological matrix, Jews—despite and indeed because of the fact that they often read as White—are a different, unassimilable, enemy race that must be exposed, defeated, and ultimately eliminated. Antisemitism... is a particular and potent form of racism so central to White supremacy that Black people would not win our freedom without tearing it down…”
Ward continues, “Antisemitism fuels White nationalism, a genocidal movement now enthroned in the highest seats of American power, and fighting antisemitism cuts off that fuel for the sake of all marginalized communities under siege from the Trump regime and the social movement that helped raise it up…”[1]
Jews are not being targeted in isolation. Antisemitism is virulent and violent. And it exists within a larger context of racism and white supremacy.
Eric Ward developed an analysis of anti-semitism because he wanted to smash White supremacy; because he wanted to be free.
So, if we want to be free, which I believe we do, then we too must come to understand how anti-semitism works, how it is central to white supremacy, how it lives in our bodies, how it divides our communities and undermines our social movements. If Eric Ward is right, and I believe he is, we need to lead the way so that we can uproot anti-semitism within ourselves,our communities and our world.
While I have spent a lot of time this year reading and feeling and talking to academics and rabbinic colleagues, these are not things that I fully yet understand. I am inviting you to learn about them with me.
There is one thing that I know, and that brings me back to the Mount Carmel Cemetery.
In truth, looking back I was not afraid in that cemetery. I had arrived on the scene of a hate crime in which no one was hurt. It was violating but not violent. I was there with rabbis whom I trusted and sympathetic media.
Just moments after arriving, a man I did not know got out of a lyft with suitcase in hand. I know at least some of you have heard me tell this story. Tarek El-Messidi is a local philadelphia Muslim leader and runs an organization called Celebrate Mercy. He was one of the people who had organized the Muslim community to help fund the repair of the cemetery in St. Louis. And he had been on his way to the airport to visit his sick nephew, when he heard about the Mount Carmel cemetery vandalism. He skipped his flight and came straight to the cemetery. Tarek stayed all the through the day and into the night. He walked the rows and helped to lift up the toppled gravestones. He joined us in song and stood with us as we recited Kaddish. Tarek’s presence at the cemetery undermined everything I had been taught about Never Again. His presence embodied my own theology of safety and echoed the words of my great uncle Simone Piperno’s letter. It is our relationships and our interdependence that will save us.
In the words of Hillel, the elder: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, who am I?”
Former executive director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Dove Kent wrote just yesterday: “This moment requires acting in solidarity — having other people’s backs and enabling people to have ours. As Jews, we need practice in both.” [2]
And at Kol Tzedek we are already practicing. . The week after the violent protests in Charlottesville, I reached out to Rev. Eric Goode from the People’s Baptist Church, who will be speaking here tomorrow during the afternoon service. It was clear that what we all needed was connection and community. We contact several other churches and faith leaders in the neighborhood. And what transpired was so simple, so obvious and so subversive all at once. A multi-racial, multi-faith affirmation of our shared humanity and our commitments to each other. Those who were present will certainly remember the Reverend Isaiah Bank’s sermon on our need for vision; the candles we lit and the choir leading us in song. Amidst so many new faces, there was a palpable sense of connection in the room. That evening is what I know of solidarity and safety.
And it echoes the words of my Uncle Simone’s letter:
“And so it is that at last we are safe and free among free people, protected by the feeling of strength and justice which springs from the flags of the United Nations, as we were protected until yesterday by the feeling of human solidarity which sprang from the souls of the largest majority of the Italian people, from the Holy Father, down to the last commoner, with so many manifestations of brotherhood and selflessness that gave us strength to resist the ordeals we went through.”
Together as a community, if we are brave enough to talk about anti-semitism and to feel the pain, loss and fear it inspires, we have the potential to create new ways of responding, rooted in the feeling of human solidarity.
וַיָּ֥קָם מֶֽלֶךְ־חָדָ֖ש
A new king has risen.
And so have we.
חזק חזק ונתחזק
Courage, courage, Grant us Courage!
[1] http://www.politicalresearch.org/2017/06/29/skin-in-the-game-how-antisemitism-animates-white-nationalism/#sthash.HriabPuh.dpbs
[2] https://jewschool.com/2017/09/80330/yom-kippur-torahfortheresistance-jewish-allyship/
September 29, 2017
Laying in bed one night in late August, trying to integrate the images I had seen of the recent events in Charlottesville, I returned to a letter my father had gifted me in April in honor of my installation as the rabbi of Kol Tzedek. The letter was written in June 1944 by my great uncle, Zio Simone Piperno on the day Rome was liberated from Nazi occupation. It was then found 49 years later and photocopied by one of my cousins. And then, by way of miracle, 73 years later, my father gifted it to me.
The letter begins:
Dearest ones far away,
“David was sainted and was rewarded in his children.” So it is written, so it has been, and so, with God’s help, it will be. Our father’s spirit watched over us, has interceded in our favor, and has granted us grace. So we obtained the miracle of having our mother saved from the Nazi barbarity, thanks to the divine inspiration of Mrs. Alfonsina [a gentile neighbor who, during the German raid of October 16, 1943, pulled Nonna Rachele into her own apartment], for we, in our simple minds, could never have conceived the mass deportation of innocent women, children, old people, blind and paralyzed ones, with an evil cruelty which has no excuse because it is useless for purposes other than war.”
The letter goes on in unbelievable detail about the nine months that four of my relatives spent in hiding. Where they hid for each air raid; a four week battle with Typhus fever; the efforts to hide household items and protect vineyard machinery, their fear and the hope. My Zio Simone offers a first hand account of the October 16th raid of the Roman Ghetto, known as the day the Nazi’s deported the Jews from Rome. And the letter ends with the most exuberant reunion between my great grandmother Valentina and one of her sons, Arrigo - which Zio Simone describes as the reward for all their suffering. The letter is full of so much loss and so much gratitude. But what strikes me most is that my great uncle Simone took great pride in recording the names of every gentile neighbor who saved my ancestors -- Mrs. Alfonsina, Alberto Ragionieri, Amedeo and Michelina and the nuns at at a convent. “These are the generous people who deserve our greatest debt of gratitude.”
This letter makes it clear, that for my family, it was our allies, our neighbors, our relationships, that saved us. And while that may seem obvious, that goes against every pedagogical approach I have ever encountered when learning about anti-semitism. For years I have avoided all Holocaust remembrance events and all Jewish conversations about anti-semitism, because I have felt their primary educational model has been survival through re-traumatization; And safety through isolation and nationalism. And I cannot authentically relate to either strategy, nor do I believe they ultimately work to keep us safe and free.
When I was 15 years old I spent a week traveling around Poland visiting the sites of concentration camps with thousands of other young Jews from around the world. We stopped in villages and cities that were once home to large bustling Jewish communities. We prayed in abandoned synagogues and kissed the doorposts were mezuzot once hung. The trip culminated with a day long walk that reconstructed the journey millions of people took from from Auschwitz to Birkenau, from the work camp to the death camp. And for this reason, this educational tour is called The March of the Living.
The March of the Living was a very formative experience for me as a young person. 20 years later, I remember clearly that I did the 2 mile walk barefoot. When I allow myself to pause, I can still feel the the gravel under my toes. I remember the wrought iron sign at the entrance to Auschwitz that reads, Arbeit Macht Frei - Work will make you free. I remember standing inside the showers that once gassed young women who after surviving Auschwitz thought they had arrived at something better. I remember feeling terror. I remember the butterflies and the sounds of birds chirping. Signs of life in a place where millions of people had died. I remember weeping under the hot sun. I remember wanting to pray but not knowing the words and so I would just sway back and forth. I remember wondering how anyone survived. I remember longing for the vibrant city that once was Warsaw. I remember asking Ray, one of the survivors on my bus, what felt different. And he said, there used to be so much laughter in these villages. Now there is only dust and silence.
7 months ago on a cold February morning, I arrived at the Mount Carmel Cemetery in North Philadelphia and a piece of me was transported back to The March of the Living. The overgrown headstones, the unnamed graves, the desecrated memories of so many Jews. As I walked up and down the rows of the cemetery, laying hands on the cracked and crumbled headstones, I kept thinking about the slogan of so much of my own Jewish Holocaust education - Never Again. I can still picture the bumper sticker that hung from my pre-teen cork board, yellow background with black bold letters overlayed on top of a Black Jewish Star. Never Again - this was the thrust of what I understood to be a larger statement both about anti-semitism and Jewish victimhood. While I internalized it as a statement about genocide at large, I also understood it to be an expression of Jewish particularism. Never Again for the Jews. This explained why I was taught to refer to the events of World War II as The Holocaust, capital H, and not particularly the Nazi Holocaust. It existed as a sort of mythic wound that, in the Jewish imagination of my childhood,was proportionally unparalleled.
It was this same phrase, Never Again, that went off like a siren, when I saw images of white supremacists with torches occupying the streets of Charlottesville, chanting “Blood and Soil”. Racism unmasked and unrobed. A sea of white faces, motivated by hatred and fear, with the look of death in their eyes. It conjured images of Hitler Youth and Ku Klux Klan rallies all at once.
And then only a month later, St. Louis Police Officer Jason Stockley was acquitted in the 2011 murder of a 24-year-old Black man, Anthony Lamar Smith. As protesters took to the streets affirming the dignity and worth of all Black people, they were met by cops in riot gear and military force. Police escalated violence, using rubber bullets and tear gas to control crowds and more than 100 protesters sought refuge in the only synagogue within the city limits of Saint Louis, Central Reform Congregation, known as CRC. Only moments later, white supremacists unleashed the hashtag #GasTheSynagogue - in theory a reference to the cops’ tear gas. But in truth, the imagery traces it lineage all the way back to my barefeet, standing in those abandoned showers that murdered millions of Jews, millions of people with disabilities, millions of queers, nearly 75 years ago.
The book of exodus is story of oppression and liberation, slavery and freedom. It begins by naming all of the Israelites that journeyed into Egypt, fleeing famine - refugees and immigrants unto their own right. And very quickly, only eight verses into the first chapter, the story turns.
וַיָּ֥קָם מֶֽלֶךְ־חָדָ֖שׁ עַל־מִצְרָ֑יִם
A new king arose over Egypt…
וַיָּ֥קָם מֶֽלֶךְ־חָדָ֖ש
A new king has risen.
And this King said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are much too numerous for us. Let us deal with then shrewdly so that they not increase; otherwise in the event of war they may join with our enemies in fighting against us and they will rise up from the earth.”
This is the voice of a paranoid authoritarian king that has become all too familiar this past year.
The Torah continues, “The more Pharaoh oppressed the Israelites, the more they increased and spread out... the Israelites were a thorn in the face of Egyptian rule.”
So too with us. With every xenophobic and oppressive executive order, masses of people took to the streets, to the airports, to city hall and sanctuaries alike. All together, with leadership from communities of color, we have taken down monuments and defeated bills. Like the Israelites, we have risen up in the face of authoritarian rule.
And it has not been easy. It has been, by every measure, a very painful year. Some of us have been targeted more directly than others. In particular, immigrants, Black people, refugees, Muslims, indigenous communities and trans people. We, the Kol Tzedek community, reflect the very mixed multitude that left Egypt. We are people of color and people with white access. We are immigrants of African, Arab, Latino and European descent. We are Jewish, Christian and Muslim, cis and trans, queer and straight. And many of us have been directly affected in multiple ways. What binds us most profoundly tonight is our presence in a Jewish community committed to justice and liberation for everyone.
One of the most significant changes for us, specifically as a Jewish community, since last Yom Kippur is the rise of visible anti-semitism. In the words of Rabbi Sharon Brous, “America is turning from a place with an undercurrent of antisemitism, to a place in which anti-semitism is condoned by the state.”
But it is very difficult to talk about anti-semitism. And even more difficult to know how to talk about it in public. It is difficult because it is very painful for me personally. And it is difficult because the term anti-semitism is a snare. It has been exploited, used as a tool for censorship and political manipulation. So much so, that it is extremely challenging for Jews and our allies to know how to define, name and relate to anti-semitism. It is also difficult because many of us struggle to discern what feelings about anti-semitism are grounded in what is happening in current time and what is based on historical trauma. I never imagined giving a sermon on the topic in my second year at Kol Tzedek. But the events of the past month have led me to hear the call of Hillel, our Elder: If not now, When?
If not when there are cemeteries being desecrated, when? If not when there are Nazi’s marching with torches screaming “Jews will not replace us”, When? If not when the President of the United States appoints nazis to his cabinet and refuses to unequivocally denounce white supremacy, when? If not when there is a viral hashtag, #GasTheSynagogue, then truly, when?
And even with all of this, I am still unsure how to gauge an appropriate response to the rise in anti-semitism this year.
On the one hand, there are flyers with swastikas created in real time, circulating about events whose primary thrust is anti-semitic white nationalism. White angry men with torches marched in public chanting: “Blood and Soil.” Anti-semitism is also alive and gaining mainstream visibility.
For those of us who were raised Jewish, for those of us with European ancestry, which I know is not all of us, this is the core fear many of us have been indoctrinated against. This is the moment we have been in training for.
On the other hand, we are immersed in a thriving, dynamic, creative Jewish community. I feel safe wearing a kippa in public. Judaism feels totally alive and well, and I feel sheltered from any real hatred that others hold for us.
Why then focus on antisemitism?
In the words of Eric Ward, a long time African American civil rights organizer who has spent the last 30 years studying white nationalism:
“And indeed—why? Why, when the president of the United States appears bent on removing as many dark-skinned immigrants from the U.S. as he can, and when men who look like me are shot in the street or tortured to death in prison with impunity?”
He offers this answer:
“...Antisemitism is the lynchpin of the White nationalist belief system. That within this ideological matrix, Jews—despite and indeed because of the fact that they often read as White—are a different, unassimilable, enemy race that must be exposed, defeated, and ultimately eliminated. Antisemitism... is a particular and potent form of racism so central to White supremacy that Black people would not win our freedom without tearing it down…”
Ward continues, “Antisemitism fuels White nationalism, a genocidal movement now enthroned in the highest seats of American power, and fighting antisemitism cuts off that fuel for the sake of all marginalized communities under siege from the Trump regime and the social movement that helped raise it up…”[1]
Jews are not being targeted in isolation. Antisemitism is virulent and violent. And it exists within a larger context of racism and white supremacy.
Eric Ward developed an analysis of anti-semitism because he wanted to smash White supremacy; because he wanted to be free.
So, if we want to be free, which I believe we do, then we too must come to understand how anti-semitism works, how it is central to white supremacy, how it lives in our bodies, how it divides our communities and undermines our social movements. If Eric Ward is right, and I believe he is, we need to lead the way so that we can uproot anti-semitism within ourselves,our communities and our world.
While I have spent a lot of time this year reading and feeling and talking to academics and rabbinic colleagues, these are not things that I fully yet understand. I am inviting you to learn about them with me.
There is one thing that I know, and that brings me back to the Mount Carmel Cemetery.
In truth, looking back I was not afraid in that cemetery. I had arrived on the scene of a hate crime in which no one was hurt. It was violating but not violent. I was there with rabbis whom I trusted and sympathetic media.
Just moments after arriving, a man I did not know got out of a lyft with suitcase in hand. I know at least some of you have heard me tell this story. Tarek El-Messidi is a local philadelphia Muslim leader and runs an organization called Celebrate Mercy. He was one of the people who had organized the Muslim community to help fund the repair of the cemetery in St. Louis. And he had been on his way to the airport to visit his sick nephew, when he heard about the Mount Carmel cemetery vandalism. He skipped his flight and came straight to the cemetery. Tarek stayed all the through the day and into the night. He walked the rows and helped to lift up the toppled gravestones. He joined us in song and stood with us as we recited Kaddish. Tarek’s presence at the cemetery undermined everything I had been taught about Never Again. His presence embodied my own theology of safety and echoed the words of my great uncle Simone Piperno’s letter. It is our relationships and our interdependence that will save us.
In the words of Hillel, the elder: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, who am I?”
Former executive director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Dove Kent wrote just yesterday: “This moment requires acting in solidarity — having other people’s backs and enabling people to have ours. As Jews, we need practice in both.” [2]
And at Kol Tzedek we are already practicing. . The week after the violent protests in Charlottesville, I reached out to Rev. Eric Goode from the People’s Baptist Church, who will be speaking here tomorrow during the afternoon service. It was clear that what we all needed was connection and community. We contact several other churches and faith leaders in the neighborhood. And what transpired was so simple, so obvious and so subversive all at once. A multi-racial, multi-faith affirmation of our shared humanity and our commitments to each other. Those who were present will certainly remember the Reverend Isaiah Bank’s sermon on our need for vision; the candles we lit and the choir leading us in song. Amidst so many new faces, there was a palpable sense of connection in the room. That evening is what I know of solidarity and safety.
And it echoes the words of my Uncle Simone’s letter:
“And so it is that at last we are safe and free among free people, protected by the feeling of strength and justice which springs from the flags of the United Nations, as we were protected until yesterday by the feeling of human solidarity which sprang from the souls of the largest majority of the Italian people, from the Holy Father, down to the last commoner, with so many manifestations of brotherhood and selflessness that gave us strength to resist the ordeals we went through.”
Together as a community, if we are brave enough to talk about anti-semitism and to feel the pain, loss and fear it inspires, we have the potential to create new ways of responding, rooted in the feeling of human solidarity.
וַיָּ֥קָם מֶֽלֶךְ־חָדָ֖ש
A new king has risen.
And so have we.
חזק חזק ונתחזק
Courage, courage, Grant us Courage!
[1] http://www.politicalresearch.org/2017/06/29/skin-in-the-game-how-antisemitism-animates-white-nationalism/#sthash.HriabPuh.dpbs
[2] https://jewschool.com/2017/09/80330/yom-kippur-torahfortheresistance-jewish-allyship/