Our Burning Palace: Addressing Race in America - Kol Nidre Sermon

There is a certain hazy disorientation that comes with the birth of a child. I’m sure many who have raised children, remember that first night in the hospital. But for us, unlike with my son Lev, there was an added element to our first fitful sleep. By chance we had left the TV on, and waking up around 3am, half awake, Ayelet and I realized that the third precinct fire station in Minneapolis was burning to the ground. We both sat up, turning to one another. I don’t remember who said it, but I distinctly remember that one of us uttered, “It feels like the world is on fire right now.” 

Our observation that night was not new. In fact, the ability to see a world ablaze is at the heart of our ancestor, Abraham’s origin story. Though there are many legends about why God chose Abraham, one particular story finds Abraham walking down the street and noticing a palace aflame. Where others passed that house without saying a word, Abraham’s eyes were opened. “Who is the master of this house?” he asks. God hears the question. God realizes Abraham sees the fire, and moreover cares about the owner of the house enough to stop. Quickly, God choose Abraham to carry forth his nation (Bereshit Rabbah 39:1). 

Late May was a turning point in America. Many of us already cared about racism before Amy Cooper weaponized the police after being asked to leash her dog. Many of us cared before George Floyd was murdered in a modern-day display of the banality evil. Yet, for me, and I imagine for many of you, my eyes were opened to the magnitude of the problem. Suddenly the smoldering palace was set ablaze. We began to see that to be black in this country is to live in a perpetually burning house. 

And in its light, that fire has shed light on the wicked underbelly of this nation. Slavery is our country’s original sin and today we are still feeling its effects in subtle and overt manifestations of racism in our country. Racism is a reason for our broken policing system. It is inherent in school policies that keep kids segregated and voting laws that discourage minorities from entering the polls. Historically, redlining, which was banned 50 years ago, created a culture where there are white neighborhoods and black neighborhoods, where some families struggle to get out of poverty while others are born into wealth, and where education is bifurcated. 

There is a myth in the Jewish community that we understand. I was raised with stories of Jews marching alongside Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil right’s movement. And every one of them happened. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heshcel was friends with King and famously explained that when he marched in Selma, “it was as if my feet were praying.” Joachim Prinz, the Rabbi of B’nai Abraham down the street famously spoke before King’s “I have a dream speech” saying  that in our world, “"the most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence." In 1964, 17 Rabbis went down to St. Augusta to protest segregation and were arrested. Their letter from jail, written at 3am on the back of a mimeographed report of assaults by the Ku Klux Klan is one of the most important documents in American Jewish history. 

And we cannot forget that our own Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism was the location in Washington where major parts of the civil and voting rights acts of the 1960s were penned. 

But the 1960s were a long time ago and we have to stop relying on this history as proof that we take racism seriously. I thought I did, until December happened. 

Many of you likely remember the meeting of the 4th ward in Montclair when an invited official stood up, and in one speech hit on many of the classic anti-Semitic tropes and dog-whistles we have come to fear in this era. I don’t want to get into detail about this saga, in part because that’s not what this sermon is about, but also because we have since met with and reconciled with the individual, engaging in dialogue, educating him about anti-semitism, and accepting his apology. 

What I do want to talk about is another meeting that came out of this crisis. Knowing that the individual who spoke at the meeting was black and it happened on the same week as the attack at a Chabad at Monsey which culminated weeks of racial tensions in Brookyn between the wider African American community and the Jewish community, the Mayor called together African American leaders and Jewish leaders from greater Montclair to dialogue. It was, in part, an effort to quell any notion that those tensions exist here. I joined enthusiastically. 

And though we worked to educate our fellow clergy about the subtlety to anti-Semitism, I quickly found that I had even more to learn about racism. The first thing that was clear from walking into that room was that I was walking into a sea of strangers. In the year and half I had been living here, I had come to know many of the white Christian clergy well in town, but other than a few acquaintances, this group of African American clergy were strangers to me. We had no history, no trust. We lacked the relationship to have the real hard conversations. 

Much of this stems from the fact that there is an interfaith clergy association and a separate African American Christian clergy association that meets independently in Montclair. 

Over the course of our meeting I realized that if we expected this group of clergy to show up for the Jewish community in times of crisis, we needed to do the same for them. This is self evident but the reason we hadn’t fought the racism inherent in our town with anywhere near the energy that we fight anti-Semitism is because we have grown so used to see the palace on fire that we virtually ignore it. It disappears amidst other crises in our landscape. 

Racism is a many tentacled monster. That’s what makes it so dangerous and persistent. These leaders spoke passionately about how their congregants were being forced out of Montclair by gentrification and skyrocketing rents and how there was a glut of affordable housing. They bemoaned the fact that the predominantly black 4th ward neighborhood is a food dessert and that some in Montclair care more about the preservation of a historic building than in ensuring their parishioners have easy access to food. They spoke about run-ins their loved ones had with police and how the town seemed to give lip service to the achievement gap in school but did not take meaningful steps to correct it. 

Eventually, we chose to work on housing in Montclair together, as much to move the ball forward on the issue as to begin to build the kind of relationships you can only gain when you sit together in the trenches. 

More than anything, these conversations showed just how far we have to go. Once you realize the palace is burning, you may not ignore it. Our job is to figure out how to be part of the solution. 

Tonight, I want to propose three directions our community must take to make meaningful change. 

The first thing we need to do is educate ourselves on the myriad of ways racism manifests in our society. After George Floyd, many thought leaders put together lists of books, documentaries, and movies that touch on race. Whether you’ve read them or not, you can’t ignore their impact. If we were in person I would have you raise hands if you’ve read or seen Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson or spent time wrestling How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X Kendi, or screened the award winning documentary 13th. If you haven’t, you should. And if you have, you should find people to talk about these with. We will work to provide those avenues here. 

But one’s education should also be diverse. Don’t just read about racism. If you only focus on the negatives of a culture it paints them as victims. Instead, to understand the Black experience, read Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes. Watch films by Jordan Peele or Steve McQueen. 

Empathy and understanding are the fuel behind any great ally-ship. If we are going to be a voice for change, standing against racism, we need to understand how it works, our role in it, and what needs to be done to deal with it. 

However, these books and movies, while an important first step cannot be the end product. As our ancient rabbis teaches us, learning should always lead to action. 

Yet, finding the right action isn’t always easy. There is no question that broad-based coalitions effect change better than singular groups do. And as a Jewish community we are poised to be allies in those partnerships. I’m going to say something that Jews don’t allow ourselves to say enough: we are privileged that over our time here in America, the Jewish community has found a voice that the rest of society will listen to. That should be celebrated but also used. As hard as it was to hear, there was truth to claims made about the Jewish community in the aftermath of the December meeting that when one person spoke ill of the Jewish community at one meeting we got calls immediately from the mayor and from our Congresswomen and when one swastika was drawn in the High School multiple papers covered it. I’ll never apologize for using my status to speak out for my people, but woe are we if we stop there and don’t raise our voice to amplify the needs of our neighbors. 

Our job is to listen people of color and through their stories, to better see the injustices around us. And when we do, it will become clear what needs our attention. In my conversations with folks doing this work here are a few places we can start: 

We can look at the schools and ask: is there enough diversity in staff teaching our children? Are there many types of voices on our respective school boards?  Are black and brown children graduating at the same rates as their white counterparts? 

We can look at our police departments budgets and ask: Are officers being sent out on calls that would be better done by a trained social worker or drug counselors? Are black or brown people stopped for traffic violations at the same rate as their white counterparts? 

We can look at housing and ask: How do we ensure that we close loopholes that landlords use to avoid building low income housing in their units? How do we keep a middle-class family that has lived in an apartment for over a generation from enduring a 30% rent increase, year over year? 

There are people working on all these issues. Our job isn’t to tackle them alone, but rather to add our voice to the chorus calling out for change. 

And that’s where our community comes in. Through educating ourselves and by building relationships, we can have a sense of where our voice might best be used. A number of months ago, our community was integral in passing drivers licenses for undocumented immigrants. As luck would have it, one of the deciding votes in the State senate was our own Nia Gill and our pressure helped ensure that she would vote for the bill. But we didn’t come to the issue of driver’s licenses in a vacuum.  We listened to immigrant rights groups who taught us why, among all the issues that needed their attention, they cared about licenses. Then we paid attention to where our voice could help. Rather than support a bill that was going nowhere, we saw the issue had legs and went after it. 

The same must be true in our racial justice work. Not every moment is ripe for leading. We have to listen to our partners on the ground who have been doing this work for decades. 

But as important as education and advocacy work are, perhaps the most important thing we can do as a community is to get our own Temple Ner Tamid house in order. 

Our third task as a community, along with education and action is to make our community more welcoming, more open, and more embracing of Jews of color. Recent studies have shown that nearly one in eight Jews are Jews of color, yet consistently in report after report, study after study, article after article, these Jews report feeling othered in their own community. 

Writing about this phenomenon, April Baskin, a well-known author and advocate for inclusion in the Reform Movement spoke about a conversation she had with a peer about a painful memory he had walking into a synagogue: 

A young biracial Jew once shared with me the negative experience of “people questioning other people's identity. If there are five Jewish people in a room, all of them white except for one person who's black, invariably, one of the white people will ask only the black person: ‘So, how are you Jewish?’” 

These behaviors are engrained, and though we may understand racism on a large scale, we often forget about the subtle acts we perpetrate when we are feeling comfortable, like in the familiar walls of our community. 

This past December, at the Biennial conference of the Reform Movement, Maara Gad was invited to present on her book, “The Color of Love: A Story of a Mixed-Race Jewish Girl.” One would think that this conference would be a safe place for her because it had thought to include her book in their rich panel of programming. Unfortunately, the conference modeled exactly the opposite of what it intended. She was first denied her credentials as a presenter and told “the real Maara Gad” would need to get them. Then, people mistook her for staff, even though her credentials said “presenter” asking her to help turn a room over. 

We may have not seen overt behavior like this at TNT, but I promise, it’s likely happened. And even if we have avoided scenes like this, even our best intension can be hurtful. A simple game of Jewish geography seems like a nice way to connect to someone new but it actually quickly reveals who is in and who is out, who was born Jewish and who converted, who could afford to attend camp and who could not. 

It will take time, but in addition to asking hard truths about race in the world, we need to ask the same about the way we behave in our walls. 

That’s why I want to challenge us all to get involved. We’ve begun a racial justice task force at our congregation and are looking for volunteers. And as outlined, it will have three mandates, education, action, and looking at how we make our community the most open and embracing of Jews of color. 

Will you join us in this effort? 

But whether you do this work with us or not, the key is remember that was cannot ever become complacent. There is too much work to do. 

Thankfully, our eyes are open to the burning palace before us. And like Abraham we ask, “who owns this palace?” The answer is simple. We do. And we can only put the fire out together.