Sermons: High Holy Days

The girl I saw in the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama this summer looked to be about ten years old.  Her mother stood beside her, one hand resting lightly on her daughter’s shoulder.

I noticed the girl because there were no other children in the museum.  The exhibits in this museum are difficult, even for adults.  There are flyers advertising the sale of enslaved people:  men, women and children. There is a photo of a man whose back is a thick mass of scars from the whippings he endured during his enslavement. There is postcard of a mother and her son lynched together, their bodies hanging from a bridge over a river.  The display says that this postcard was sold as a souvenir of the lynching.   

The mother and her daughters walked through the entire museum.  They paused at each exhibit and the mother gently explained to her older daughter what she was seeing.

The museum’s last exhibits are about incarcerated people.  The Equal Justice Initiative created this museum, and they believe that our country’s mass incarceration policies reflect the continuation of slavery and of Jim Crow.  The Equal Justice Initiative helps individuals abused by the system, including children who are imprisoned with adults.

I stood near the mother and her older daughter as they looked at a display of handwritten thank you letters, written by imprisoned people to the Equal Justice Initiative staff. One letter was written with a combination of upper-case and lower-case letters, labored and imperfectly formed.  The letter included a self-portrait of the author’s face, a simple oval with eyes, exaggerated ears, and hair represented by three or four lines drawn straight up.

“Look, this letter was written by a child,” the mother said to her daughter.  “Did you know that sometimes children are sent to adult prisons in Alabama?”

The girl kept her eyes on the letter as she listened to her mother.  She reached up to touch one of the colorful plastic barrettes on her braided hair as if for reassurance.   

An older woman nearby joined the conversation.  “It may not have been written by a child,” she pointed out. “It may have been written by an adult who did not have the benefit of an education.”

“Oh yes, you’re right,” agreed the mother.  “It may not have been written by a child after all.  I hadn’t thought about that, but you are absolutely right.”

She turned to her daughter and said: “You see, one way to keep people down is to deny them a good education.  This letter could have been written by a man who never had the chance to go to school.  Maybe that’s why he ended up in prison. That’s how important school is.”

The girl watched her mother’s face and nodded slowly.

I realized: I never had to be taught about access to education.  I accepted good public schools as my right.  No one ever blocked my entrance to a school, calling me vile names. Quite the opposite.  I was born into privilege and have remained there ever since.   

I walked away from the girl and her mother.  I felt ashamed. Then I remembered another conversation I’d had a year earlier in Montgomery.  A group from Temple Israel had traveled there as part of a civil rights tour of the South.  Some members of this group had previously traveled with me to Eastern Europe, where we visited the concentration camps at Theresienstadt and the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

On the congregational trip to Montgomery, I stood on a street with a woman in our group who had also traveled to Eastern Europe.  The street in Montgomery stretched down to the river where the slave-traders used to dock their boats. It was lined with old warehouse buildings that held enslaved people before they were sold, when slave traders separated husbands from their wives and parents from their children. The woman from our group said to me softly, “I think it was easier to visit eastern Europe.  There, our people were clearly the victims.  Here, we may have been identified with the aggressors.”

This is a day when we reflect on our wrongs.  Many of these wrongs are those we committed as individuals:  careless words that wounded another; thoughtless actions that led to harm; betrayals of trust.  With these wrongs, there is a path to teshuva, to repentance.  We can apologize to those we’ve harmed, we can make restitution, we can resolve to do better next time.  After we do that, the burden lifts.   We can move on.

But there are also wrongs that are more difficult to redress: unintentional wrongs that affect the entire community.  The Torah[1] asserts that the entire community can bear guilt for a wrong committed unintentionally.  That could happen because the leaders of that community led the community astray[2] into wrongdoing.  The burden of that wrongdoing extends into the next generations.[3] 

Today in this country we bear the burden of wrongs committed by those who came before us. That is our collective legacy. Four hundred years ago, the first ship carrying enslaved people landed on our shores.  Our nation’s prosperity rests on a foundation of slavery and of forcible removal of native peoples from their land.

We didn’t commit these wrongs. We were not here when they happened.  But we live with their effects. We benefit from political, economic and educational structures designed to privilege white people at the expense of people of color. We benefit from those privileges – we benefit from institutionalized and pervasive racism – whether we know it or not.  That’s what I learned from listening to the girl and her mother in the Legacy Museum.

It’s hard to believe that we Jews are also enmeshed in this guilt.  Our people have suffered.  We face threats.  Aren’t we immune from the taint of racism?  After all, we are a minority. We don’t fit comfortably into the category of “white” people.

Yet not everyone shares that perspective. In Montgomery this past August, an African American Baptist minister gently admonished me and other white rabbis as we met together.  He said to us: “Don’t hide behind your white skin.  I don’t know that you are Jewish until you open your mouths and speak.” Our words and our actions identify us and define who we are.  We are indistinguishable from those who are racist unless we stand with those who are targets of racism.

 Let me offer you one example of how we do this.

Earlier this year, the director of the Jewish Choral Music Festival invited our choir to perform in a concert.  Cantor Fogelman and our choir director, Eddie Pleasant, wanted our choir to sing a piece called “Total Praise.”   “Total Praise” is rooted in the words of Psalm 121:  Esa Einai el heharim – I lift my eyes to the hills/maayin yavo ezri/Where will my strength come/Ezri may-im Adonai/My help comes from the Eternal One.

This Psalm begins with an expression of desperate suffering.  It speaks to those who are low, those who lift their eyes to the hills in search of strength.  The composer of Total Praise set the words of this Hebrew psalm to a melody inspired by gospel music, a genre that is part of African American oral tradition.  It seemed like a natural choice. As our choir director Eddie Pleasant has written: the bonds between the Jewish and African-American heritages are forged in the music of shed blood, of real sweat and of bitter tears.

In recognition of these bonds, Total Praise has been adapted into Jewish settings, and been performed by synagogue choirs and cantors.  Given our congregation’s history of working for civil rights and racial justice, it seemed natural for our choir to sing Total Praise at the Jewish Choral Music Festival.   

The directors of the Festival did not agree with our choice.  They called the melody of Total Praise “foreign.”  They suggested that it wasn’t surprising that we wanted to sing it “given our choir director.”  

When I heard that Total Praise was rejected because it was “foreign” and that we chose it because our choir director is a black man, I was angry.  My first impulse was to boycott the festival because the rejection of Total Praise seemed racist. 

This would have been the easiest thing to do.  And it would have been wrong.

The Torah’s remedy to remove the burden of guilt that affects the entire community is the demand the sacrifice of a bull for a sin offering.  The word for “sacrifice” is hikrivu.  The same word also means “to bring near, to draw close.”

We couldn’t walk away from the Festival.  We had to draw close, to engage.  We had to open our mouths and speak, to argue with the festival director.  And that is exactly what Eddie Pleasant and Cantor Fogelman did:  powerfully, respectfully, and successfully.

Hakkrivu – bring close.  That is the challenge of our day.

It does us no good to dwell in the guilt of our nation’s past wrongdoing. Just as our Israelite ancestors sought to remove the guilt that affected their entire community, so must we. 

We remove this guilt by bringing close the painful history of our nation’s past, the horrific crimes committed against those enslaved and murdered.  We remove guilt by standing with those who are trampled by today’s racism. We remove guilt by engaging with those whose words reflect a lack of understanding, or whose words may offend us.  We remove guilt by opening our ears to listen, opening our mouths to speak, and by opening our hearts to sing a song of total praise to the Source of Goodness and Blessing and Life.

(CHOIR SINGS TOTAL PRAISE)