Kehilla Community Synagogue
Oakland, California
10 Tishri 5762/September 26, 2001
Four very long months ago, I was asked to deliver a sermon on Erev Yom Kippur about Kehilla evolving into a multicultural and multiracial synagogue. As you can imagine, the past few weeks has not been an easy time to finish writing this sermon. I have gotten completely contradictory advice from congregants and friends during the past week: one pole being that I should address only the current crisis, because no one can really hear anything else right now; the other being that everyone is saturated with the current crisis and needs to stay focused on our longer-term enduring issues as a community. I am going to try to honor both those sentiments tonight. And I believe I'm not overreaching to assert that there is a connection between the two: that in the wider world and also here at home, we have a strong tendency to move into a framework of Them and Us, often projecting onto the Other instead of truly seeing them, and instead of truly seeing ourselves.
Last week at Rosh HaShanah services, I was mostly numb. It was warming and helpful to be here with a thoughtful and loving community, but for me, everything had an air of unreality. The previous week, I had been stunned by the attacks on New York and Washington, and despite the images of fire and collapse shown over and over again, it was hard for me to comprehend what had happened. As many of us do when we are shocked and overwhelmed, I reflexively gravitated toward feelings and beliefs that are most familiar to me and that I do comprehend: my fear of people's tendency to scapegoat; my aversion to any kind of flag-waving; my despair about a cycle of revenge and violence spiraling out of control; my deep and abiding mistrust of our own government; and my belief that every single day things happen that probably should rock our worlds, but we have become inured to most of them.
These feelings and beliefs are all shaped by years of life experience, reflection and activism. But I rushed there so fast, so automatically, that I didn't stop to grieve. I didn't fully absorb the horrible loss, the panic, the sadness, the courage and heroism. I didn't stop to think much about others gravitating toward their own pillars of familiarity and comfort, such as the flag. And I didn't stop to notice that, as frightening as things are, some are not quite as bad as I had feared: bombs did not start flying immediately and indiscriminately; many are questioning the wisdom of inflicting violence on people who have already been victimized; there is widespread awareness of the need to take a stand against anti-Arab racism and anti-Muslim discrimination; and there are even some glimmers of awareness that most people who live in this country know so little about the rest of the world and have no idea why many have such antipathy towards us.
I don't think my reflexes are so bad, and I think it's important that many of us are immediately ready to sound a cautionary note in the midst of potential danger. But it's Yom Kippur, the time for deepest self-examination, time to take a good long look at my reflexive feelings and assumptions, not merely to defend them or find others who can prop them up. It's time to look at my own numbness and misperceptions, as well as other ways I have missed the mark. I am not likely to sort it all out in the next 24 hours of Yom Kippur, but I commit myself to looking deeply and honestly and to challenging others to do the same.
I trust that each of us here has been thinking long and hard about how to understand and respond to what we currently face. I believe we are a community of extraordinarily smart and good-hearted people, and we would do well to provide the space for a whole spectrum of thoughts and feelings to be expressed among us. We can content ourselves with talking about what we agree on fairly easily: that we generally favor peaceful non-military solutions, that we do not want to harm innocent civilians, and that we fear all forms of religious fundamentalism. But I am much more interested to know what you are thinking about questions like: How do you feel about living in this complicated and contradictory country? How do you determine when we have a moral obligation to intervene in injustices and atrocities around the world, and how do you use the Holocaust as a reference point in figuring that out? What do you think it means to have compassion for all people? I want to know what you're really thinking about Israel, whether you are hopeful or despairing, and whether you think there will ever actually be a long-term peaceful accommodation of Jewish and Palestinian nationalisms. I want to know whether you are frightened; I want to know what you are telling your children.
Let's be honest with each other. Especially now on Yom Kippur, let us be a community of soul-searchers, willing to risk disagreement among ourselves, and even inside ourselves. Let's admit the thoughts and feelings we would rather not talk about. This is the time to be honest, at least with ourselves, as a starting point for deeper awareness.
I challenge us at Kehilla to provide something so sorely needed now: a place for people to talk honestly and vulnerably and to listen with respect, not with a pre-determined outcome and also not with pretending that we don't already have strong opinions and principles. We don't have to change our minds, although that's always an option. But we do need space to feel deeply, to think clearly and boldly, and to decide how - individually and collectively - to take action.
We will all be tested in the coming weeks and in this coming year, finding how we are able to stretch ourselves, our abilities to listen and understand and act. We will all have many opportunities to live according to our most deeply held values. We already do, every day, but this year it will be more obvious.
I am going to shift now to the original focus of this sermon, with a reference that may seem strange for Yom Kippur, since it has to do with food - I won't pretend that this is a seamless segue….
In New York in the 1980's, there was a famous ad campaign for Levy's Rye Bread, recently echoed by Noah's Bagels locally. For Levy's, there were billboards, each with a big photo of an Asian child or an older African-American man or another person of color, biting into a pastrami sandwich, with the caption, "you don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's." It was a clever and probably effective marketing campaign, with the main intended message being, "Jewish food is for everybody. Try it!" And sure enough, a decade or so later, there's a bagel shop on practically every corner. The message of the campaign was also, "We Jews have really arrived. We're safe here. Everyone loves our food, and maybe they even love us." But there was another powerful implicit message of the campaign, which was, "the people in these ads - the Asian girl, the African-American man - couldn't possibly be Jewish." We absorbed that message, and many of us still, on some level, believe it.
Katya Gibel Azoulay, an anthropologist born to an Ashkenazi Jewish mother and a Black Jamaican father, writes: "Among American Jews, the initial assumption is that only white-skinned people are Jewish, despite the knowledge that not all Jews are either white or European." For those of us who are white and European Ashkenazi Jews, we may be sophisticated about knowing that we are one branch of a people who have migrated far and wide and are of many colors and cultures and national identities, but on a gut level, many of us still don't fully get it.
So here's a statistic that should help us. The Institute for Jewish and Community Research recently conducted a Bay Area Jewish demographic survey. For the first time in this country, a survey sought information about Jews of color and multiracial Jewish families. The result: they found that 15% of Bay Area Jewish households are multiracial or are solely composed of Jews of color. 15%. Clearly it's time to challenge the notion of Jewishness connoting whiteness. It is an imposed, inaccurate framework, one that renders many of us invisible.
This is, of course, not really a new issue. It is especially familiar to Sephardic Jews long accustomed to being invisible - or exoticized - in the eyes of the Ashkenazi majority in the US Jewish community. It is a particular issue in the very obviously multiracial Jewish community in Israel. And it has historically been a complicated issue in this country, where European Jews (along with Irish, Italians and others) were first perceived as not-quite-white and only gradually were seen as having a "white identity," a complex social construct not solely correlated with skin color. We were forced to assume a racial identity, one that never actually fit all of us. And now there is a new surge of visibility and awareness as our families and communities grow steadily more multi-racial due to relationships, conversion and adoption.
Here at Kehilla, I've been especially aware of this new wave of visibility during the past few years of monthly Shabbat gatherings of our congregation's youngest members and their families, seeing the spectrum of kids who are entering our community. The face of Kehilla's future is African-American, Guatemalan, Pakistani, Peruvian, Chinese, Mexican - and even children of Ashkenazi European background. In the process of thinking about this sermon, I talked with quite a few Jewish parents of children of color, hearing about what has been helpful and welcoming, what has been difficult, and about what kind of community we envision for our kids, the children of our congregation.
Much of what I hear from them, from Bishari in her powerful sermon last week, and from others, is about assumptions, starting with the obvious one: What do we mean when we say that someone "looks Jewish?" (Do I look Jewish?) Do we mean that they look like a certain kind of Ashkenazi Jew, with a certain kind of dark curly hair, and with certain distinct facial features? That is a wonderful, beautiful way for a human being to look. But it is not the definitive Jewish look.
In her book, Black, White and Jewish, Rebecca Walker, daughter of African-American writer Alice Walker and a white Jewish father, writes, "For many years I tell people whom I think will be shocked about my Slavic, Jewish ancestry. I get a strange, sadistic pleasure from watching their faces contort as they reconsider the woman who was more easily dismissible as Puerto Rican or Arab. On the subway, surrounded by Hasidim crouched …over their Bibles, I have to sit on my hands and bite my tongue to keep from shouting out, "I know your story!" I don't feel loyalty as much as an irrational, childlike desire to burst their suffocating illusions of purity. I want to be recognized as family."
We all want to be recognized as family. And we need to make room for all kinds of family trees that have all kinds of branches, stretching ourselves to picture them as all being part of the same orchard. Which may be a corny image, but we need new images to better reflect our reality as a community, and our more narrowly constructed familiar images are more deeply rooted than most of us imagine. Parents I spoke with all talked about the dearth of images that reflect their Jewish families. We - all of us - need to be part of a broader movement to create a multiplicity of multiracial Jewish images for books and posters and videos, the way that we are still engaged in creating new Jewish images to reflect new Jewish gender roles, and the way that we're still barely beginning to create images to reflect lesbian and gay Jewish families.
And then there's food. What's Jewish food? And how did it get to be that way? Do we really think that people ate pickled herring at Mt. Sinai? The point isn't to take anything away from Ashkenazi customs and certainly not from the food - it's just to recognize them as Ashkenazi, and not as THE Jewish customs and food and looks and whatever else. This may seem elementary, but I believe it points to something much bigger. Namely, that when it comes to inclusion, many of us have deeply rooted notions of scarcity. We fear that something is going to be taken away. If we make room for THEM, will there still be enough room for ME? How much space will they take up? Will I become invisible? And the truth is, sometimes we do have to give something up - some space we've claimed, some authority we're not accustomed to sharing, some assumptions about the way the world is. But there is much to gain: a more expansive sense of space, the relief of being able to share authority and responsibility, and a clearer and richer picture of what the world is. When dealing with any issue of inclusion, we get the opportunity to deepen our understanding of our essential connection to other human beings, expanding our picture of who "we" are. Clearly, this is a global and political issue as well as a deeply personal and spiritual one.
Last week on Erev Rosh HaShanah, Chaya said, "We see the outside of each other but what goes on inside another human being none of us knows. We human beings are an assembly of walking secrets." Then the next day, Bishari spoke eloquently about assumptions, of us thinking that we know who a person is and how she identifies herself without really knowing that person. People do get tokenized, objectified, exoticized; people get seen as "group representatives" instead of as individuals. We need to be very aware of our own assumptions and projections. But I hope that we aren't so overly "careful" that we can't talk with each other, check things out with each other, and take risks with each other. The only way we can get past assumptions is to find out the real story. And right here in this room, we have so many stories to tell.
I have heard many stories lately. Stories from a white Jewish woman trying to decide whether her Chinese daughter has the time to go to both Hebrew school and Chinese school. Stories from a white Jewish mother of two Black daughters considering moving her family to a community where her daughters won't be the only Jewish kids of color. And stories from a white Jewish mother of two biracial African-American and Caucasian children, who has found and created community where her kids are fully accepted as Jews, but she wonders whether they are fully accepted as Black, whether they are encouraged to share all of who they are in Jewish contexts, or just the parts that fit in most easily? Where do they have space to be their whole selves?
Each one of us has more than one identity - some of us have many. We are Latino and Asian and Black and Jewish and Buddhist and male and female and bisexual and disabled and working-class and older and younger and many other things. None of us is half anything. We are whole people. We are "both/and" people, not "either/or" people. And if one thing is absolutely required for a spiritual community, it is that there must be space for people to be whole. In our liturgy, in our school curriculum, in our observances and celebrations, we need to embrace diversity and wholeness.
As I near the end of my remarks, a caveat: acknowledging and embracing the presence of Jews of color is not a substitute for white Jews dealing with our own racism. In fact, it is likely to bring it up more sharply. Those of us who were raised as white in this culture have unavoidably picked up racist beliefs and feelings. It is fine for us all to feel good about our diversity, but it doesn't mean that all our problems have been overcome.
Finally, I am recalling that the last time I had the honor of giving a High Holiday sermon was in 1993, when I was asked to speak from my perspective as a gay man about what Kehilla needed to consider in becoming more fully welcoming and inclusive of those of us who are lesbian, gay or bisexual. In writing this sermon, I've been thinking about how Kehilla has grown during these last eight years to the point where for many of us, diversity of sexual orientation is such a matter-of-fact aspect of who we are as a congregation that we barely think about it. We've gotten here by making space for people to be visible and feel welcome, by listening to each other, by taking public stands as a community, and a lot by building personal relationships over time. There is a visible critical mass of those of us who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and hopefully soon also transgender, and that in itself has transformed the culture of the congregation. We have become part of the Us and no longer Them, though of course it's not always that simple, and of course is easier for those of us who have been around for awhile than for those who are new. But the fact is, Kehilla has done well, and that progress is worth noting and celebrating. And worth building on. Surely we can move now to apply that experience to more fully listen, embrace, welcome and support those of us who are people of color.
May all of us be listened to and embraced and welcomed and supported - and challenged - in the coming year. And may it all be in the context of a world of increasing peace and justice.