Erev Rosh HaShanah: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2018/5779

Rosh HaShanah is the celebration of the creation of the world. The rabbis in the Talmud tell us that when we as humans create something, we actually create the same thing. If we create coins in a mint, the coins all look the same. But God is different. God creates human beings from one source and none of us look exactly the same.

Judaism teaches us that in God’s unity, we see it in the diversity of the human spirit, in the diversity of the world. That’s why in Kindergarten we here at Temple Israel have each of our Kindergartners create their own skin color. We have paints; we have black and we have white and brown and yellow and green and pink and beige. And each of the Kindergartners have to create their very own skin color. Everybody has multiple colors in their skin. Some of us have more pink, some of us have more brown, and some of us have more black. And it’s to teach our Kindergartners the very lesson that the Talmud teaches us: We are each unique beings and our skin color is the beautiful creation that God gave us. And then when they find the very palette of their skin in the mixture of the colors of the paint, on a huge mural, each one draws their face. 

Over the years the mural has changed. We have many more children with brown and black and it is beautiful and it is wonderful and it is the changing nature of our Jewish community. 

Jews of color who grew up here have told me many interesting stories. They tell me that when they leave the cocoon of this community that they experience things – and even in this community the stories are powerful. You see, through adoption and conversion and intermarriage, the palette of our faces and of our skin is changing. 

Jews of color have told me that sometimes they don’t feel Jewish. A Korean-born adoptee by white, Ashkenazi parents went to Hillel her first year of college and was questioned: “Why are you here?” She had her Bat Mitzvah here. She grew up here. “What are you doing here?” 

A young woman with a Latino father said that she felt like she had to leave her Latino identity at the front door as she came into Temple Israel because no one ever asked her about her heritage as a Latino. 

We have many more stories like that. 

A family who have children from Guatemala – after a history lesson here at Temple Israel, an ancestry lesson, came up to me and showed me the map. Asia, Africa – they were not there. There was an assumption that one’s ancestry came from Eastern or Western Europe. And South America was cut in half. Part of it wasn’t even on the sheet. 

We at Temple Israel and in the Jewish community – we need to discuss race and we need to discuss it from the inside out. Our Board of Directors has made this one of our main principles out of our strategic plan and I feel proud that we are doing it. 

But let’s take a moment and figure out how we got here. How did we get to the point where when we think of the person, a Jew, we think of somebody from Eastern or Western Europe? How did that all happen?

Well, in the 1800s there were about 2.5 million Jews in the world. We grew fast. By 1900 we had about 9.5 million Jew and by 1939 we had 16.6 million Jews in the world. And 9.5 came from Europe, 6.5 came from North and South America, and 1 million from Asia. We understand 1939, the Holocaust, and 6 million European Jews were killed, slaughtered. And what has happened is that we, in this United States, the majority of us came from Western or Eastern Europe; there were migrations from those places, so we have become the majority.

In 1960, the census in the United States Jews for the first time were able to check off Caucasian. All of a sudden the idea of our race became white. For white, Ashkenazi, European Jews.

What has happened since then, is that now in Israel there are 70 countries represented by the Jews who live there and this country is changing as well – 75% of the Jewish community lives in the United States or in Israel, North America probably -- I’ll add Canada. And so, we now must wrestle with race in our community.

But let’s go very far back. Where do we come from? We come from Asia and Africa. I’m pretty sure that Sarah and Abraham, I’m pretty sure that Moses and Miriam and Aaron were brown people, not white. We know that Zipporah, Moses’s wife, was Ethiopian. We know that Joseph’s wife was Egyptian. And so our people were very much an integrated whole. We came from various places with different shades of reality, but we always had one thing in common – we had the similar rights, rituals, and symbols that bound us, connected us, beyond the different realities in which we lived. 

Asian and African and Latin American Jews – they have different experiences, they have different foods, they have different understandings and narratives that we’ve never actually listened for. But in this day and age when we’re so worried about Jewish survival, it is the very door that will open the possibility of growth. A growth of population, a growth of narrative, a growth of food. 

Now let’s be honest, we all want to be Sephardic around Passover, don’t we? Have you ever heard of mushroom, jalapeño matzo balls? Mexican. Have you ever tasted not dill or garlic powder, but turmeric and cinnamon? And the beauty of cumin – Jewish Moroccan dishes are full of the smells that we love. 

In India, the haroset is actually dates, very much like the Sephardic tradition, but actually they are cooked and then put through a cheese-cloth so it’s a syrup, not a paste. So much easier to spread on matzo! Where have we been? 

We have a lot to learn. We have a lot of places to grow. And I believe it is in our hands. 

The Talmud teaches us of an emperor who questions a rabbi by holding a dove in his hand. He is trying to trick that rabbi and he says, “Rabbi, is the dove alive or is it dead?” The rabbi knows exactly what will happen. If he says alive, then that emperor will crush the bird with his bare hands. If he says dead, the emperor will let it go. So instead he says, “Dear Emperor, the answer is in your hands.” 

The answer is in our hands. We just need the courage to do the work.

Robin DiAngelo, PhD., speaks about white fragility. And she teaches us many lessons. It is a powerful book. It is a life-changing book. And she shares many things, but I want to share two of them. She says there is no colorblindness in this world. We all have grown up with the messages about what it means to have dark skin. None of us – none of us – are immune. And when we say we are colorblind or race doesn’t matter, what we do is we shut down conversation. And she says that people with white skin privilege often cannot even put a sentence together when they’re talking about race because we haven’t flexed that muscle enough to talk about it, to hear about it. And when we don’t allow ourselves those kinds of very uncomfortable situations, but necessary; we leave race up for the radio and tv waves out there – that allows and brings people to call police on two black men who were waiting at Starbucks for a business meeting to begin. That didn’t only happen at Starbucks in Philadelphia. That’s happened in coffee shops right in our neighborhood, let me tell you. Hurtful, hurtful realities. 

If we don’t talk about race, then what happens? Somebody calls a police officer on a Yale student having fallen asleep in a common area. If we don’t talk about race, then Colin Kaepernick’s Nike advertisement – I think I have heard more conversations about why he shouldn’t have been part of the advertisement that what he is trying to teach us. We have stopped talking about race. We have not gotten ourselves to talk about what he wants us to talk about. Forget about Nike, let’s talk about race and racism in this country. And that is what he wants from us as well. But instead we get distracted by who should be on the billboard for a pair of tennis shoes. 

It is in our hands. It is in our hands and we can do the work.

Robin DiAngelo tells us that she doesn’t care how she gets confronted about her own racism, she doesn’t ask somebody to be nicer or quieter or less emotional as we all have done. She just wants to hear the feedback because that’s how she’s going to grow. 

I want to hear the feedback of my implicit bias. I want to be confronted about my own racism. I want to become better. And this congregation, at its heart, has always grown and expanded with the issues of the time. And this one we will do together as well.

So what do we do?

This past summer I had a brunch at my house with congregants of color and the conversation was enlightening. And it was amazing and it was profound. We are going to get this group of people, many of whom are not Jewish but raising their beautiful children of all colors in our congregation. We must do the work for those children. They are our children. And so this group will get back together we will continue. And just watch out for many wonderful things. We talked about having a festival with Moroccan food and Indian Jewish food and Chinese Jewish food. I called it anything but Ashkenazi, but I don’t know if that’s so cool. You’re not laughing – I thought it was funny. We’re not going to have matzo balls unless they’re jalapeño and mushroom.

We also have made a commitment here at Temple to do implicit bias work and training. We are going as a staff and clergy and security and administration. We are all going to wrestle with race in order to change the world from the inside out.

The Jews of color of this community and this congregation demand that we go out into the world and change it as well. And so, this year 5770 in Hebrew spells out “taf shin ayin tet.” What that means is get moving. Get moving. And we’re going to get moving because guess what? As Nike says, just do it.