It's Me

The following was delivered as a dvar torah at the Temple Shaaray Tefila Shabbat morning minyan.

In the summer of 1964—exactly 50 years ago—our beloved teacher, and one of the brightest minds in the history of American Judaism, Rabbi Dr. Eugene Borowitz, was arrested in St. Augustine, FL for praying in an integrated group of black and white men outside of a restaurant. In the sweltering 3:00 AM heat of the St. Augustine city jail, Dr. Borowitz wrote the following words: “We have been vocal in our exhortations of others, but the idleness of our hands has too often revealed an inner silence; silence at a time when silence has become the unpardonable sin of our time.”

On Thursday night, two others of our most beloved teachers—Rabbi Shai Held and Rabbi Jill Jacobs—were arrested for their participation in the protests on the Upper West Side. The next morning, Rabbi Held wrote: “A friend, an African-American, told me that when her young daughter saw a picture of Jill Jacobs and me at the protest, she said, "Mommy, they are not black. That is so nice of them." I cannot describe how deeply this moves me and how profoundly it breaks my heart. Let us dream of a world—let us build a world—in which my friend's daughter can say, ‘Mommy, they are human, too, And that is their responsibility.’”

In these past couple of weeks, I’ve found myself wondering what on earth I—an upper-middle class, college-educated, white, Jewish male—could possibly say about race in America. Of course, my heart breaks over the lives that have been lost. Of course I’m horrified to read statistics like this one: that in 2012 alone, 313 people of color died at the hands of police officers, security guards, and vigilantes.

And yet, I find myself thinking: “It isn’t me who shot Trayvon Martin. It isn’t me who shot Michael Brown. It isn’t me who choked Eric Garner. The painful debate about race in America isn’t about me.”

But saying “not me” doesn’t get us very far.

Two weeks ago, we read the story of Jacob, who, when asked by his blind father, “Which of my sons are you?” lied and said: “I’m Esau—not me.” And while Jacob’s deceit is far more outright than our own, we’re fooling ourselves if we imagine that race is America is about someone else, and “not me.”

In this week’s Torah portion, we find Jacob confronting his past. As he prepares to be reunited with his brother, he spends the night wrestling with a strange man, who at the end of a long struggle, asks him the same question that he had been asked so many years ago: “What’s your name?” But this time, Jacob tells the truth. This time, Jacob says: “I’m Jacob. It’s me.”

In the face of all this civil unrest, it can be hard to say, “It’s me.” The problem of race in America is so deeply woven into the fabric of our society that it’s often beyond our awareness. Whether or not whiteness is the primary identifier by which those of us who happen to have white skin identify ourselves—whether we primarily think of ourselves as Jewish, or in gendered terms, or some other indicator of identity—there’s no denying that when other people see our white skin, they make certain judgments about us based solely on our whiteness. Take for example the following video that’s been getting a lot of attention on the internet: three actors are given the task of pretending to steal a bike that’s locked to a sign in a public park. When a young white man tries to steal the bike, passersby notice but do not stop him. When a young black man tries to steal the bike, people intervene and call the police, even when he tries to explain that the bike has been left there for a week without an owner. When a pretty young woman who happens to have blonde hair tries to steal the bike, people go so far as to help her cut through the chain. Social experiments like this one demonstrate what Nicholas Kristof of the NYTimes has said about race in America to be true: that it is “not a black problem or a white problem, but an American problem.”

It’s time for Jacob to say, “It’s me.”

But where does owning our own privilege get us? How do we say “it’s me” without falling only into feelings of guilt, rather than feeling empowered to make change?

Rabbi Joanna Samuels teaches that there are two types of activism. One type of activism seeks equality—equal education, equal opportunity, equal protection under the law for blacks and whites. And the other, perhaps more elevated and certainly more difficult type of activism seeks systemic change—an America that takes responsibility for the success or failure of its most disadvantaged citizens, rather than wagging fingers and saying the fault is all theirs. And how, Rabbi Samuels asks, do we move from equality activism to systemic-change activism? By becoming an ally. By raising our voices, and saying: “It’s not just you. It’s me too. It’s us.”

If we can say “it’s me—it’s us,” then Dr. Borowitz’s words will continue to ring as true today as they did 50 years ago: “Injustice in St. Augustine, as anywhere else, diminishes the humanity of each of us. … We came here to stand with our brothers, and in the process, have learned more about ourselves and our God.”