Please click here to view all of Rabbi Ariana Silverman’s 5781 High Holiday sermons, along with messages from our Board Members and Executive Director.
Yom Kippur Sermon Text:
Jonah is one of my favorite prophets. His words and behavior--running away, just wanting to sleep, feeling deeply alone and disconnected from God-- resonated powerfully for me when I struggled with depression in rabbinical school.
He is also one of the most successful prophets in the Tanakh. He speaks just five words, and more than 100,000 people repent for their evil behavior and strive to do better. And as Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz points out, Jonah is the only book of the Tanakh that ends in a question. A rhetorical question in which God challenges Jonah’s passion for preserving his own comfort in contrast to God’s passion for saving lives.
Jonah has been on my mind again a lot this year. God calls to him to get up and go to Nineveh and cry out but instead Jonah runs in the opposite direction. And there are many forms of injustice calling to us today, so many perhaps, that we just want to hide. But there is one in particular where I feel that we as Jews need to speak out, but we as Jews are sometimes reticent to do so. Particularly if we are Jews with white skin.
I know that as soon as I said the word white, I may have turned some of you away. Some of you may already be walking away from the screen, or at least minimizing this window. There are many reasons for this.
Perhaps it is because you are a Jew of Color and you are a little tired of people with white skin taking up space in the conversation about race. I hear you. I promise the Downtown Synagogue will continue to highlight voices of People of Color in our newsletter and in our work on racial justice. And I have also been asked to not be silent and so I will not be. In speaking out, I will make mistakes. You are not responsible for being my teacher. If you have the strength to give me the gift of feedback, I will listen. And I will change.
Some of you are walking away because you know, or suspect, my politics and you politically sit on the other side of the aisle. I have made that mistake, too. As my colleague Rabbi David Stern, Immediate Past President of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, has taught, we have become better at being “shomrim”--guards of one another’s speech--than “shomim,” people who listen. We have learned that at the first indicator that we may disagree with the speaker--because he uses the wrong term or she voted for the wrong candidate--we may stop listening.
Or we engage in “wrongspotting”--waiting for a mistake, and once the speaker has made one, discounting everything else that is said, no matter how much of it rings true. And speaking about race is particularly fraught. I am inevitably going to say something with which you disagree, or think is wrong, or insensitive, and I ask you to not focus solely on those things, although I am certainly open to correction. I ask you to “rightspot”--to find something I say that resonates or challenges you in a productive way.
Some of you may want to run in the other direction because talking about race is difficult and we don’t like having difficult conversations. It is hard enough to be fasting, to be praying in front of a screen, to be living a time of separation. Some of my rabbinic colleagues have suggested that this is not the year to talk about the need to be braver, to step up for others when so many of us are surviving on so much less, are so exhausted, have so much of our own pain. I hear that. The reason I want to talk about something hard is because I actually think it will make us stronger, and at a time when so many people feel helpless, it is important to know that we can indeed change something about our world.
And there are many things about the lived reality of Black Americans in our country that need to change. I know that some of us may disagree with some of the organizations in the Black Lives Matter Movement, including on Israel. Some of us may disagree about what is happening in the protests in our country. But we must all agree with the simple and foundational statement that Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter. And we want our country, our neighbors, and ourselves to affirm that not just in word but in deed.
And yet. And yet not every rabbi in America is talking about systemic racism. And it's not just because there is so much else going on. I think there are uniquely Jewish reasons why it is so hard for Jews to talk about systemic racism.
As Jews we define our lives in stories, and I would argue that our stories, and ironically the ones that should make us champions for racial justice, are sometimes challenged by the realities of systemic racism.
Let’s begin with the story of our Exodus from Egypt. We teach our children that we were slaves. For hundreds of years. And then God freed us from slavery. We left Egypt. And we are commanded to still talk about it. We read about it each year in the Torah, we speak about it every day in our liturgy, we are commanded to view ourselves in the narrative at our seders. It has been over 3,000 years and we are still talking about our slavery.
But the story that we tell is meant to end in freedom. And so the story of Black Americans runs counter to the narrative we have adopted as our own. As Tamar Manasseh, a rabbinical student who is also a Black woman, said at a Passover seder,
“What if we were slaves in Egypt and we never came out? We got our freedom, but we never left Egypt. Who would we be right now? Would we be free? Really?”
The Israelites left Egypt. A new generation entered the Promised Land. The descendants of enslaved people in America never left the country of their enslavement. They live in it each day. And Black Americans, including Black Jews, never fully achieved the freedom that is supposed to be the triumph of the Exodus. Systemic racism in 2020 is a counter to that story.
The same is true of the Civil Rights Era. The Jewish community tells a story that we understand about ourselves and makes us proud. Many Jews showed up in the Civil Rights Movement.
We all speak of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner and hold up the picture of Rabbi Heschel standing next to Dr. King. But while Dr. Susannah Heschel, Rabbi Heschel’s daughter, agrees that the photo should make us proud, she reminds us to see that photo not as a source of pride but as a challenge. That photo is almost 60 years old. Sixty years is a long time. Allyship is not a box that we can check off in the last century. If that photo is truly a symbol of who we are as Jews, if it truly makes us proud, the challenge is loud and clear that we need to be showing up and marching today. Many of us want to believe the story that racism was fixed in the 1960s. But it wasn’t.
And then there is the story that Jews with white skin sometimes tell ourselves that we are not white. It is true that Jews have not been treated as white for most of our history and are targeted today. Antisemitism has perpetrated suffering and death on a scale impossible to describe and was demonstrated to the world during the Shoah. Millions of Jews with white skin were murdered because they were not white. Antisemitism still exists in our country, has worsened in recent years, and unfortunately is likely to continue and possibly worsen further. We have witnessed the murder of white Jews by white supremacists in this country. For some of us, the narrative that Jews with white skin are white, enjoy white privilege, and are part of the system that dehumanizes black people seems to challenge our self-perception that we are historic victims. But can’t they both be true? As my colleague Rabbi Rebekah Stern has written, “Though all Jews are absolutely threatened by white supremacy because we are Jews, at the very same time, those of us with white skin who can often pass in an american culture that privileges whiteness, are also, often unwittingly, perpetrators of white supremacy. White jews are both victims and agents of white supremacy, eilu v’eilu.”
But if the Exodus narrative tells us something about Jews but is not currently encompassing Black Jews and Black people, and our Civil Rights narrative tells us something about Jews but the battle was not fully won and the allyship of white Jews is not currently fully present, and our fight against antisemitism tells us something about Jews but exists side by side with the white privilege that many of us enjoy, then what do we do?
We start to adjust the narrative. We do so, first, by listening. Particularly to the voices of Black people. And being open to the challenges of what we may hear.
Pastor Aramis Hinds has told me more than once that if anyone tries to hurt me, they’re hurting him. He’s got my back. What would it mean for me to have his? What does having his back look like when he tells me that he wakes up in the morning afraid that his son Aramis won’t come home? Or that he is struggling to be present for others because he keeps envisioning George Flyod suffocating to death? Or that a foundational principle of his country is that all men are created equal but that does not seem to apply to him?
Congregants have told me that their children or grandchildren have been told that they are not really Jews because of the color of their skin. That they have been harassed and ignored in Jewish spaces. That as Black Americans they fear for the lives of their children. What does it mean to be their rabbi?
I live in Detroit. Many of my neighbors are Black. They are part of the village that is raising my children. They have told me that they’re exhausted. What does it mean to be their neighbor?
If white Jews define ourselves as friends, as communal leaders, as neighbors, as allies, we all need to ask ourselves, what have we done lately to show that and what are we going to do now?
Pastor Aramis and Downtown Synagogue congregants and the neighbors on my street are people I love. People are hurting people I love. I can’t run in the other direction. I have to keep listening, and I have to make some hard choices.
Because those of us with white skin who can often pass in an American culture that privileges whiteness enjoy white privilege. Some find it hard to see that privilege. That is what makes it so insidious. And some are aware that sometimes rectifying a system with privilege means that the privileged have to give something up. That requires hard choices. We all make choices about where to live, where to shop, where to send our children to school, whether and how to vote, who to befriend, who to hire or promote, who to love. We know that dismantling systemic racism is going to require making hard choices.
But I believe there is the possibility, however unlikely it may be, that this is a moment in history in which change is possible. In part because of the upheaval, in part because of the passion of so many, in part because of the moral imperative that we honor the memories of those we have lost.
In one of our recorded conversations, Pastor Aramis said, “What if we could use a moment like this to provide some type of comfort, what if we could make this change so that the things that were suffered or the challenges that ensued, that we could at least say that in a moment of hardship...we did something meaningful that is destined to make this world better? And that is a way to pay tribute to every life that has been lost, that is a way to pay tribute for every person who did not have access to healthcare, to pay tribute to every person who lost several family members due to COVID-19 in one household, to pay tribute to the teachers who had to scramble to learn how to engage the students in a totally different way, the parents that had to maneuver and readjust, I mean, when we talk about the weight of what this world has been through, and in our nation, it is overwhelming, but that beacon of light that we see, I promise, it makes me very hopeful for a better tomorrow.”
The book of Jonah concludes with a question. Jonah is profoundly distressed over the loss of a plant that had been providing him comfort and shade, and God responds with the rhetorical challenge to Jonah to recognize the enormity of the potential loss of all of the people in Nineveh. We do not get Jonah’s response. Perhaps because it clearly had to be acknowledging that God was right. Or perhaps because the book allows God to be asking us as well. Can we learn to not hide, to speak up, to be willing to sacrifice some of our own comfort in order to save lives?
In the stories we tell about ourselves as a people, how are we going to finish this story?
“A Conversation With My Friend: Is this Time Different?” was recorded August 13, 2020 and can be found at https://vimeo.com/464067335