"Give me your tired, your poor," says our Statue of Liberty, lipsynching the words of Sephardic American poet Emma Lazarus. "Your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."
In 1883, when Lazarus wrote these words of welcome to future immigrants, I am not sure what breathing free in America meant, just as I am no longer sure what it means today.
In 1883, the Emancipation of Black people from slavery was only 20 years old, less than a human generation. Were all Americans breathing easier? Were former slaves breathing free? The yoke of slavery had given way to the chokehold of racist terror. Between Emancipation and the 1960s, thousands of Black Americans were killed by lynching; millions more were suppressed by the threat of it; by the very specific threat to the ability to breathe free.
So when a white cop in Minneapolis kneels on the neck of a subdued Black man until the life is out of him, it is not and can never be about one bad actor and one innocent victim. It is a calling forth of a centuries-old effort to suppress the breath; to suppress the spirit, the soul, of a people.
Black people, including Black Jews, know this without having to think about it. And more people are knowing it, through tragedy after tragedy, murder after murder. Maybe sitting for months, confined within this pandemic, staring down a disease that can put you on a ventilator, being denied freedoms while wearing masks that make breath heavy and strained – maybe this too is helping more white people know it on a visceral level.
And so as our children go out to march and as we read our friends' Facebook posts, many of us struggle to find our place within this struggle.
We Jews are everywhere in this story, playing all sorts of parts, intentionally and unintentionally. Many of us Jews are people of color, and are identified first that way wherever we go. Others of us look white and have varying degrees of white privilege. For many of us, our Ashkenazi grandparents left a European world where they were people of color, persecuted and perpetually seen as alien. And they came over on ships, yearning to breathe free. They tossed their tefillin overboard along with their languages, rituals and personal histories. They watched over the generations of their children and grandchildren and saw their Yiddishkayt dwindle to punchlines and character types. They had succeeded, perhaps more than they intended. They had sacrificed their particularity so that we could be Americans. By which we now understand – so we could be White.
And many of us Jews with light skin have accessed the manifold advantages of being white. We arrived in time to take formative roles in new industries like Hollywood, even when we were kept out of the industries that pre-dated our arrivals. We came to feel important and almost immune. Most of us were spared the horrors of the Holocaust. We lived in what we touted as a post-anti-Semitic world, perhaps hoping to see ourselves as post-Semitic. We were becoming white people like other white people. Even in our proud if romanticized memories of participating in the civil rights movement, many Jews showed up as the white people who did the right thing. Doing it for important moral and religious reasons to be sure. But as the righteous white people. Not as fellow oppressed people whose fortunes would rise and fall with the Black community's.*
And that has been our history in this country. Not knowing if we are majority or minority. Powerful or powerless. Exploitive or exploited for our convenient position in the middle of it all. We toy with privilege. We eschew it and we benefit from it. We are embarrassed by it and I know I have felt safe within it.
But we have re-learned in a very short period of time that that safety is illusory and our whiteness (for those of us who look white) remains provisional. We learned it in Pittsburgh and in Charlottesville. We have been kindly reminded of it by Breitbart and the Daily Stormer; by this president's White House staffing, and by sly tweets referencing George Soros. We learned it in the first weeks of this epidemic when our then-undefended Zoom Room was taken over by White Supremacists, calling members of this congregation by name and spewing anti-semitic and racist taunts, which they saw no need to distinguish from each other.
So we know now, we really do know, if we didn't know it before, that our fate is tied to the fate of communities of color. It is for all of our sakes that we need to be at the barricades. That we need to give money to Black candidates and to Black Lives Matter. We need to lift up Jews of color who are more and more the future of our people. Which means we light-skinned Jews stop asking Black Jews how they became Jewish as if they are visitors. Our tribe needs to be big and expansive and inclusive of all of us who are called to be part of the Jewish and Jew-ish people. And we Jewish and Jew-ish people need to be part of the bigger tribe of brave souls who will put this monster of White Supremacy out of its misery at last.
To take our place in this movement, there's more we need to do besides marching and giving. We have a task – at least those of us who read and live as white – which is to dissimilate. To unlearn. To unlearn all the lessons that whiteness has taught us about who we see and who we don't see. Whose life matters more and whose less. Whose stories get told and whose ideas are listened to. Who we encourage, who we delight in, and in whose creativity we take pride. Whose breath is essential.
When my father was born in 1925, he was not breathing. The delivery doctor thought quickly and called the fire department. They raced to the hospital with a suitcase-sized pulmotor and ventilated the newborn. I owe my existence to men in uniform offering breath. What if all breath, everyone's breath, were sacred? So sacred that endangering it would be – simply and across the board – unthinkable?
In Hebrew, as in Latin and Greek, the word for our soul, for our spirit, is the same as the word for our breath. Tonight, as we welcome Shabbat, as we pray together, as we sing together, let us breathe and notice our breath. Breathe for and with all of humanity. Let us direct our breath to the most vulnerable and hold them in our hearts as our companions, allies, teachers, and friends. Feeling their lungs as well as our own, let us notice every breath – the centrality of it and the privilege of it.
And together may we all, at long last, breathe free.
Footnote
* This felt right to me when I wrote it. It started feeling less right to me when I pressed the “publish” button. It’s continued to sit oddly for almost a week, for me and for a couple other people who have been kind enough to take it up with me. I am not in a position to speak to the motivations of Jews participating in the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, all of which motivations were good. So let me change this from an assertion to a wondering. How has white Jewish participation in anti-racism work felt to black people and how does it sit with each of us white Jewish people doing it, in any era? I guess I’m wondering what is the mix of moral outrage vs strong affinity in our impetus (and does it really matter)?
I am 87.9% certain that Rabbi Mike Rothbaum was my source of ideas about trading Yiddishkayt for whiteness. I am also grateful for having had opportunities to learn from Graie Barasch Hagans, Rabbi Mordecai Liebling, and Yavilah McCoy. I am also grateful to Rachel Plattus for her sharp ears and sensibilities.
For more reflections during the COVID-19 epidemic, click here.