|
Dear Lab/Shul,
Today I am watching this historic inauguration with tremendous optimism and hope, and with the resolve that comes from knowing there is much work ahead to be done.
Six months ago, Rabbi Amichai and I began a journey, from Separation to Reparation, to explore the extremely fragile notion of what it means to be a people divided. We faced the harm it has caused in this country and in our communities and claimed – with the resolve of a teenager standing for what’s right – the need for social, historical and even financial reparations in this country.
It is with humility, and yes, some trepidation that I choose to journey on this path again, beginning tomorrow – a path that seems a bit more treacherous since the last time we walked it.
When last we gathered, we were very much focused on how our journey would help us to embrace antiracism as a way of life. We were empowered to speak from an emboldening and yet brave space of how racism touched our lives. It was a vulnerable and deep soul search leading us to deepen our resolve to explore issues of equity, racism, economics, and how our varied spiritual expressions point us towards justices and rightness.
But now, we stand in an even more fractured space of history than we could have ever anticipated. A thread of fear is being sown into the very fabric of our security blanket of freedom, woven deep within the golden threads of optimism and hope. Rather than patch our quilt with new optimism and hope, there are those who would rather see it disintegrate than refresh it with new patches. What they do not understand is that the design of the quilt will never change and that there is a communal dedication to only make it better for the coming generations.
In the face of this intentional effort to fracture and separate “we the people” I find it imperative to explore and to determine who “we” are. And as a people, our disparate experiences call us to understand our struggles, fears, prejudices, as they all make up what is “our history.” The work of Howard Thurman allows us a framework through which we can work to hear and understand that very “we.” Together, we know that we all have moments in our lives, or the lives of our ancestors, of finding ourselves among the disinherited and the oppressed. Even those who choose insurrection over peace do so over a sense of disinheritance and oppression. The question that brings me to this table once again is, “Is there a way to claim and bestow rightful inheritance with equity?” It is not just a practical question for me but an ethical, moral, spiritual one.
I did not start to write this piece in this light but in order to understand my deep desire to be in community, to love, and be love this is part of who I am in my inner being. If there is going to be any hope of extracting that which makes me one who disinherits or oppresses, I must dig deep. I must go even deeper to speak to the healing I seek in my own disinheritance and oppression, to claim what is rightfully mine — justice, so that we can claim the same for ourselves and each other. |
