[The opening section of this sermon does not appear below as it was meant only to be shared in the context of the community fasting and praying together in sacred space. If you were in attendance, heard it and wanted to find it here so you could share it with friends, I invite you instead to share with them what you remember of it and why it moved you to want to share. Blessings, Vicki] Three things we must do, in my opinion, if we wish to nourish an upcoming generation of United States Jews of Color:
1) We each need to truly understand the nature of institutionalized racism in our country, something that we all breathe and eat every day, something manifest as "whiteness" and "blackness" as caste categories. For more about what this means I refer you to a book by Jane Lazarre called Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness.
2) We need to educate ourselves, all of us, in the history of people of color in this country, not just in the faraway places our ancestors may have come from. A good place to start is with a greater knowledge of African America, one of the most far-reaching and influential streams of American culture, too often co-opted and unacknowledged for what it is, the foundation of U.S. history. We could then follow with a study of those of us who never arrived here at all, but have been here all along, as well as the study of all manner of immigrant groups. What I'm getting at here is that: more than teaching our children about the heritage of the "old country" (whichever one we might mean), we need to help them recognize, and improvise responses to, the racism they will undoubtedly encounter, & which United States people of color have creatively responded to for a very long time to keep body, mind, soul and community intact.
3) As Avi Rose mentioned so eloquently last night, we need to see our Ashkenazic tradition for what it is, specific rather than normative. To read more about that from two different Mizrahi Jews themselves I refer you to materials I have left in the lobby and which I will leave also in the Kehilla office. [links below]
I know we are capable of holding these things in our consciousness this year. I want to bless us all that we grow in humility toward the experience of another that we cannot ourselves know. For this is the true strength of group diversification: the ability to allow an expression of human cultural development that's different from my own to step in and take the lead in places where I myself am not quite as strong.
L'Shanah Tovah - May we all be inscribed for a rich, loving & rewarding year. Thank you.
Articles available in the sanctuary lobby on Yom Kippur: