Rabbi Ari Lev: Matters of Life and Death: Hearing the Call of the Movement for Black Lives
A collaboration with Rabbi Jordan Braunig
Kol Kidre 5777
October 11, 2016
?מִי יִחְיֶה וּמִי יָמוּת
Who will live and who will die?
There is no question that looms larger over Yom Kippur than this one.
The prayer from which this line is taken, unetane tokef, provides the dramatic drumbeat that gives shape to the day.
How many will pass away and how many will be born?
Who will live and who will die?
Who will perish by water and who by fire?
Who by sword and who by beast?
Who by famine and who by thirst?
The gentle rhythm of this prayer infiltrates us today, it infuses us with a sense of fear and awe, it invites us to step up to the void and peek over.
Today we refuse water and food, work and sex, bathing and the comforts of our normal life. Today we allow ourselves the opportunity to consider our mortality, to confront it, perhaps, to accept it.
Today we ask, who will live and who will die.
Even as many of us reject a theology in which God bears responsibility for the giving and taking of life, we find meaning in this prayer because it speaks to a deep, unsettling uncertainty that is part of our life. The prayer becomes an acknowledgement of the seeming arbitrariness of life and death. Who will live? And who will die? We speak these words, and in so doing, we admit that there is so much that we just don’t know.
Yet the message is not only one of chance and uncertainty for increasingly, we see that who lives and who dies is not merely arbitrary.
This year we have encountered the unjust deaths of far too many people of color, and this prayer demands that we take notice, that we bear witness to each and every one. As we recite its holy words, it is not difficult to make the connections.
Whose life is cut short - Tamir Rice.
Who by strangulation – Eric Garner.
Who by violence – Philando Castille.
Who will be tormented – Sandra Bland.
And who will be brought low – Alton Sterling.
Where some deaths come naturally at the end of long lives, and other lives are cut short in accidents that seem utterly random, the abrupt end to these black lives is tragically not random. These deaths can be explained, understood, and decoded. They result from systems of oppression that seek to control, to instill fear, to dehumanize. We are meant not to notice.
And yet, we are noticing. We are not remaining silent.
We are a mixed multitude, a majority white multiracial jewish community, we are the decedents of immigrants, slaves and slave masters.
We are raising our voices in solidarity, acknowledging and challenging our complicity in these systems. Declaring our personal stake in this collective transformation.
In the words of adrienne maree brown, “Things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered.” She urges, “We must hold each other tight & continue to pull back the veil.”
The Unetane Tokef begins:
"Let us now relate the power of this day's holiness, for it is awesome and frightening…”
מִי יִחְיֶה וּמִי יָמוּת?
Who will live and who will die?
Who by fire, and who by water,
Who by drowning and who by stoning
Who by gunshot, and Who by Hurricane
Who in Orlando and who in Charlotte
Who in Haiti and who in Aleppo
A few weeks ago I read an article online about the people of Ukraine, who have begun bringing mirrors to their protests. They say they’re doing it to force police to look at their own reflection, in a piercing psychological reminder of what they’ve turned into.
The idea came about after police were seen violently attacking hundreds of Ukrainians who are upset with their government. Several appeared to be ashamed or confused. Several others smiled as if to pretend that it didn’t get to them. Others turned away, not wanting to look at all.
The image was potent. A cop in full military riot gear, with a helmet, face shield and bullet proof vest was face to face with a civilian and she was holding a mirror up to his face. In the photo, the cop in riot gear averts his eyes.
The image called to me. It was the month of Elul, the month of Teshuva, this, I thought, this is Cheshbon Nefesh - holding the mirror up to ourselves for our own internal reckoning. It opened my heart. I could identify with both people. There was a humanity in the policeman that is not usually portrayed. There was shame in his abuse of power and there was power in the protester’s simple gesture.
I too carry shame. I was raised in middle class suburb of New York City. I was not raised to have peer relationships with people of color. I have spent my adult life uncovering my own internalized racism. Learning to see my white privilege, learning to learning to have authentic, mutual, accountable relationships with people of color in my life and communities
In a recent article “White Jews, It’s Teshuva Time,” Jennifer Hirsch writes: “Adding racism to my personal Al Chet is not enough...Real T’Shuvah demands moving from the personal to the systemic...”
Where do we each personally, and just as importantly, where do we as a community need to reflect on our relationship to race and racism?
What actions do we need to take as a community to make Kol Tzedek a refuge from racism, especially for our congregants of color?
How can I, as a white Rabbi support the liberation and leadership of people of color in our community?
What does it mean for us to be a multiracial Jewish community, situated in a predominantly black neighborhood?
How can we teach our children to be conscious of race and empowered to interrupt racism?
I know these questions are not new to us.
I am grateful to be joining a community that has been been engaging with these questions since its founding.
Two years ago on Kol Nidre Rabbi Lauren talked about the need for Kol Tzedek to have more dedicated conversations about race and racism.
Michael Brown had been murdered just weeks before on August 9th 2014 and the uprising in Ferguson had begun. To some, it may have felt like a moment of heightened protest that would soon subside, as these kinds of movement moments often do.
Yet, here we are, two years later, witness to and part of a racial justice movement calling for decades worth of personal and political transformation.
A movement that started with a love letter to black people that Alicia Garza posted on Facebook. It concluded: "Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter, Black Lives Matter."
This movement has always had love at the center of its message.
In the words of James Baldwin,
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace.”
This movement is calling forth this state of being.
And so is Yom Kippur.
It is for this very reason that legal scholar and civil rights advocate, Michelle Alexander, author of the now famous The New Jim Crow, recently announced that she is leaving her appointment as a law professor and will be taking up teaching at the Union Theological Seminary.
Why?
Because she believes that the real questions that the Movement for Black Lives has raised, are ultimately spiritual questions. Questions about life and death, questions about our humanity and our morality.
Alexander’s newest project is a memoir describing “her journey from being a liberal civil rights lawyer who believed justice could be won through litigation and piecemeal policy reform to someone who now believes that a true revolution of values is required in this country — not simply a political revolution, but also a moral and spiritual revolution.”
What we are witnessing,
from Ferguson to Standing Rock,
is the rise of political movements deeply grounded in spirituality; connected to a vision of something larger than themselves, committed to cultivating hope and awe.
This is not new.
Powerful and successful social movements have often been connected to spirit, from Ghandi to Malcolm X and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. However with the assassination and imprisonment of so many leaders of the Civil Rights and American Indian movements, this kind of movement has been latent for decades. And in these decades the Jewish community has also moved away from the center of racial justice movements.
Leo Ferguson, a Black Jew and a lead organizer at Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, wrote in his recent op ed in Ha’aretz:
“We’ve come a long way since the glory days of the civil rights movement — of Heschel marching with King, and Jewish Freedom Riders desegregating bus stations. Driven by the inertia of assimilation, upward mobility, and the politics of respectability, we as a Jewish community have drifted away from our history of challenging the foundations of injustice.
And more importantly we have drifted away from our relationships with black people and their ongoing struggle for racial justice. When Black Lives Matter emerged in 2013, it had been decades since the mainstream Jewish community was actively involved in grassroots racial justice. Racism didn’t go away, Jews did.”
Leo Ferguson is holding up yet another mirror, this time to us as a Jewish community. This is the season of returning. And Leo Ferguson is calling on Kol Tzedek to live into our namesake, to be a Voice for Justice; to commit ourselves to this growing spiritual movement for racial justice.
We at Kol Tzedek are well positioned to respond. We too know know that spirituality and politics cannot be separated. That powerful social movements are grounded in a connection to the transcendent. That spiritual practices and community sustain us in the face of what would otherwise be unbearable oppression, loss and exhaustion.
Black Lives Matter is ultimately a rehumanizing project.
And so is Yom Kippur.
On Yom Kippur we call on the power of the collective. We speak in the “We” - “Al Chet Shechatanu - We have missed the mark.”
In doing so, we have both the power of anonymity and solidarity.
And most importantly, the power of community.
Together as a community, we have the opportunity to do personal teshuva as well as collective teshuva . Please consider joining our newly forming Black Lives Matter study group. Help shape it. Come learn with us. The group will take many forms, from practical parenting tips to movie screenings and text studies. Tomorrow we will dedicate a section of our Mussaf Martyrology service to those who have died this year due to gun violence and state terror.
We are called to live into this political moment, not as activists or radicals, but as human beings, as mothers and siblings, as friends and neighbors, and as a community.
We are called to this as people committed to justice, people who want to raise kids committed to justice.
We are called to draw on the wisdom of Jewish spiritual and political traditions to guide us, to act from love and compassion, to remember that the political transformation we long for, is very personal.
On Rosh Hashanah, there are three shofar blasts. Tekah, Shevarim and Truah. The rabbis of the Talmud debate about the nature of the Truah.
What does that shofar blast actually sound like?
For them it is at least a technical problem. The Torah refers to the day as Yom Truah, but what after all is a Truah?
Their (somewhat unexpected) answer:
It is the sound of a woman weeping.
We too are called to hear these sounds.
These are the loved ones of so many lives lost.
It is the 4 year old in the backseat of the car and a girlfriend pleading “don’t shoot.”
It is the cop panicked, screaming profanities, realizing that he just murdered an innocent black man because of his racist fear.
We are called each year to listen for their weeping and to take collective responsibility for injustice.
The refrain that comes in at the end of the Unetane Tokef:
וּתְשׁוּבָה וּתְפִלָּה וּצְדָקָה מַעֲבִירִין אֶת רֹעַ הַגְּזֵרָה
But change, and prayer and the sharing of resources have the power to transform the harshness of our destiny.
These lines offer three paths to taking part in this holy work.
May we be brave enough to do the teshuvah, to gain self-awareness around our own prejudice – and to grow.
May we use tefillah, the language of our hearts to connect more deeply with ourselves and with each other.
And may we as a community at Kol Tzedek, be pursuers of tzedek, of racial justice and collective liberation.
Kol Kidre 5777
October 11, 2016
?מִי יִחְיֶה וּמִי יָמוּת
Who will live and who will die?
There is no question that looms larger over Yom Kippur than this one.
The prayer from which this line is taken, unetane tokef, provides the dramatic drumbeat that gives shape to the day.
How many will pass away and how many will be born?
Who will live and who will die?
Who will perish by water and who by fire?
Who by sword and who by beast?
Who by famine and who by thirst?
The gentle rhythm of this prayer infiltrates us today, it infuses us with a sense of fear and awe, it invites us to step up to the void and peek over.
Today we refuse water and food, work and sex, bathing and the comforts of our normal life. Today we allow ourselves the opportunity to consider our mortality, to confront it, perhaps, to accept it.
Today we ask, who will live and who will die.
Even as many of us reject a theology in which God bears responsibility for the giving and taking of life, we find meaning in this prayer because it speaks to a deep, unsettling uncertainty that is part of our life. The prayer becomes an acknowledgement of the seeming arbitrariness of life and death. Who will live? And who will die? We speak these words, and in so doing, we admit that there is so much that we just don’t know.
Yet the message is not only one of chance and uncertainty for increasingly, we see that who lives and who dies is not merely arbitrary.
This year we have encountered the unjust deaths of far too many people of color, and this prayer demands that we take notice, that we bear witness to each and every one. As we recite its holy words, it is not difficult to make the connections.
Whose life is cut short - Tamir Rice.
Who by strangulation – Eric Garner.
Who by violence – Philando Castille.
Who will be tormented – Sandra Bland.
And who will be brought low – Alton Sterling.
Where some deaths come naturally at the end of long lives, and other lives are cut short in accidents that seem utterly random, the abrupt end to these black lives is tragically not random. These deaths can be explained, understood, and decoded. They result from systems of oppression that seek to control, to instill fear, to dehumanize. We are meant not to notice.
And yet, we are noticing. We are not remaining silent.
We are a mixed multitude, a majority white multiracial jewish community, we are the decedents of immigrants, slaves and slave masters.
We are raising our voices in solidarity, acknowledging and challenging our complicity in these systems. Declaring our personal stake in this collective transformation.
In the words of adrienne maree brown, “Things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered.” She urges, “We must hold each other tight & continue to pull back the veil.”
The Unetane Tokef begins:
"Let us now relate the power of this day's holiness, for it is awesome and frightening…”
מִי יִחְיֶה וּמִי יָמוּת?
Who will live and who will die?
Who by fire, and who by water,
Who by drowning and who by stoning
Who by gunshot, and Who by Hurricane
Who in Orlando and who in Charlotte
Who in Haiti and who in Aleppo
A few weeks ago I read an article online about the people of Ukraine, who have begun bringing mirrors to their protests. They say they’re doing it to force police to look at their own reflection, in a piercing psychological reminder of what they’ve turned into.
The idea came about after police were seen violently attacking hundreds of Ukrainians who are upset with their government. Several appeared to be ashamed or confused. Several others smiled as if to pretend that it didn’t get to them. Others turned away, not wanting to look at all.
The image was potent. A cop in full military riot gear, with a helmet, face shield and bullet proof vest was face to face with a civilian and she was holding a mirror up to his face. In the photo, the cop in riot gear averts his eyes.
The image called to me. It was the month of Elul, the month of Teshuva, this, I thought, this is Cheshbon Nefesh - holding the mirror up to ourselves for our own internal reckoning. It opened my heart. I could identify with both people. There was a humanity in the policeman that is not usually portrayed. There was shame in his abuse of power and there was power in the protester’s simple gesture.
I too carry shame. I was raised in middle class suburb of New York City. I was not raised to have peer relationships with people of color. I have spent my adult life uncovering my own internalized racism. Learning to see my white privilege, learning to learning to have authentic, mutual, accountable relationships with people of color in my life and communities
In a recent article “White Jews, It’s Teshuva Time,” Jennifer Hirsch writes: “Adding racism to my personal Al Chet is not enough...Real T’Shuvah demands moving from the personal to the systemic...”
Where do we each personally, and just as importantly, where do we as a community need to reflect on our relationship to race and racism?
What actions do we need to take as a community to make Kol Tzedek a refuge from racism, especially for our congregants of color?
How can I, as a white Rabbi support the liberation and leadership of people of color in our community?
What does it mean for us to be a multiracial Jewish community, situated in a predominantly black neighborhood?
How can we teach our children to be conscious of race and empowered to interrupt racism?
I know these questions are not new to us.
I am grateful to be joining a community that has been been engaging with these questions since its founding.
Two years ago on Kol Nidre Rabbi Lauren talked about the need for Kol Tzedek to have more dedicated conversations about race and racism.
Michael Brown had been murdered just weeks before on August 9th 2014 and the uprising in Ferguson had begun. To some, it may have felt like a moment of heightened protest that would soon subside, as these kinds of movement moments often do.
Yet, here we are, two years later, witness to and part of a racial justice movement calling for decades worth of personal and political transformation.
A movement that started with a love letter to black people that Alicia Garza posted on Facebook. It concluded: "Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter, Black Lives Matter."
This movement has always had love at the center of its message.
In the words of James Baldwin,
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace.”
This movement is calling forth this state of being.
And so is Yom Kippur.
It is for this very reason that legal scholar and civil rights advocate, Michelle Alexander, author of the now famous The New Jim Crow, recently announced that she is leaving her appointment as a law professor and will be taking up teaching at the Union Theological Seminary.
Why?
Because she believes that the real questions that the Movement for Black Lives has raised, are ultimately spiritual questions. Questions about life and death, questions about our humanity and our morality.
Alexander’s newest project is a memoir describing “her journey from being a liberal civil rights lawyer who believed justice could be won through litigation and piecemeal policy reform to someone who now believes that a true revolution of values is required in this country — not simply a political revolution, but also a moral and spiritual revolution.”
What we are witnessing,
from Ferguson to Standing Rock,
is the rise of political movements deeply grounded in spirituality; connected to a vision of something larger than themselves, committed to cultivating hope and awe.
This is not new.
Powerful and successful social movements have often been connected to spirit, from Ghandi to Malcolm X and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. However with the assassination and imprisonment of so many leaders of the Civil Rights and American Indian movements, this kind of movement has been latent for decades. And in these decades the Jewish community has also moved away from the center of racial justice movements.
Leo Ferguson, a Black Jew and a lead organizer at Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, wrote in his recent op ed in Ha’aretz:
“We’ve come a long way since the glory days of the civil rights movement — of Heschel marching with King, and Jewish Freedom Riders desegregating bus stations. Driven by the inertia of assimilation, upward mobility, and the politics of respectability, we as a Jewish community have drifted away from our history of challenging the foundations of injustice.
And more importantly we have drifted away from our relationships with black people and their ongoing struggle for racial justice. When Black Lives Matter emerged in 2013, it had been decades since the mainstream Jewish community was actively involved in grassroots racial justice. Racism didn’t go away, Jews did.”
Leo Ferguson is holding up yet another mirror, this time to us as a Jewish community. This is the season of returning. And Leo Ferguson is calling on Kol Tzedek to live into our namesake, to be a Voice for Justice; to commit ourselves to this growing spiritual movement for racial justice.
We at Kol Tzedek are well positioned to respond. We too know know that spirituality and politics cannot be separated. That powerful social movements are grounded in a connection to the transcendent. That spiritual practices and community sustain us in the face of what would otherwise be unbearable oppression, loss and exhaustion.
Black Lives Matter is ultimately a rehumanizing project.
And so is Yom Kippur.
On Yom Kippur we call on the power of the collective. We speak in the “We” - “Al Chet Shechatanu - We have missed the mark.”
In doing so, we have both the power of anonymity and solidarity.
And most importantly, the power of community.
Together as a community, we have the opportunity to do personal teshuva as well as collective teshuva . Please consider joining our newly forming Black Lives Matter study group. Help shape it. Come learn with us. The group will take many forms, from practical parenting tips to movie screenings and text studies. Tomorrow we will dedicate a section of our Mussaf Martyrology service to those who have died this year due to gun violence and state terror.
We are called to live into this political moment, not as activists or radicals, but as human beings, as mothers and siblings, as friends and neighbors, and as a community.
We are called to this as people committed to justice, people who want to raise kids committed to justice.
We are called to draw on the wisdom of Jewish spiritual and political traditions to guide us, to act from love and compassion, to remember that the political transformation we long for, is very personal.
On Rosh Hashanah, there are three shofar blasts. Tekah, Shevarim and Truah. The rabbis of the Talmud debate about the nature of the Truah.
What does that shofar blast actually sound like?
For them it is at least a technical problem. The Torah refers to the day as Yom Truah, but what after all is a Truah?
Their (somewhat unexpected) answer:
It is the sound of a woman weeping.
We too are called to hear these sounds.
These are the loved ones of so many lives lost.
It is the 4 year old in the backseat of the car and a girlfriend pleading “don’t shoot.”
It is the cop panicked, screaming profanities, realizing that he just murdered an innocent black man because of his racist fear.
We are called each year to listen for their weeping and to take collective responsibility for injustice.
The refrain that comes in at the end of the Unetane Tokef:
וּתְשׁוּבָה וּתְפִלָּה וּצְדָקָה מַעֲבִירִין אֶת רֹעַ הַגְּזֵרָה
But change, and prayer and the sharing of resources have the power to transform the harshness of our destiny.
These lines offer three paths to taking part in this holy work.
May we be brave enough to do the teshuvah, to gain self-awareness around our own prejudice – and to grow.
May we use tefillah, the language of our hearts to connect more deeply with ourselves and with each other.
And may we as a community at Kol Tzedek, be pursuers of tzedek, of racial justice and collective liberation.