Reflections From A Religious Jewish March For Black Lives Matter

To begin, I want to commend the leaders of the march, including Maayan Zik, Miriam Levy-Haim, and Ephraim Eliyahu Sherman among others, for putting it together. To rise up and say something that they know will not be received well or understood by most of their community is a very, very painful thing. People like them don’t do it because they want to; but rather because they feel driven to, that they feel they cannot go on without doing so, as painful as it is, as uncomfortable as it is to walk the streets the next day and nod to their neighbors. So I want to first acknowledge that, how painful and hard it is to come up against a community that you love, that you have so much hope in, and to try to speak anyways, from a place of fear and concern, in hopes of bridging a gap.

The world has a racism problem, and the Jewish world, and the Chabad world is certainly no different. To think otherwise would be to avoid all of history, to avoid the recent reports of who has been dying disproportionately from the coronavirus and from police brutality. The need for a collective reckoning is obvious. Furthermore, those within the Jewish world, and the Chabad world, know specifically how racism affects those communities; the discrimination towards Jews of color, the derogatory words used towards those of color, the lack of Jewish leadership of those of color. We know these things.

To quote Glennon Doyle,

“Detoxifying from racism is requiring me to open my eyes to the elaborate web of white supremacy that exists to convince me that I am better than people of color. In America, there are not two kinds of people, racists and non racists. There are three kinds of people: those poisoned by racism and actively choosing to spread it; those poisoned by racism and actively trying to detox; and those poisoned by racism who deny its very existence inside them. I’ve decided that the people who called me a racist were right. And wrong.

I am the second type of person. I am a white woman who has come to the conclusion that the reason people call me a racist when I show up to speak about racism is that I am showing up as I am and I have racism in me. By what I say and don’t say, by the way I say it, people can see my inner racism on the outside.”

We live in a racist world, we drink in racist ideas subconsciously, daily. We cannot help but have racist ideas planted within us. But we can work on detoxifying, working on it every day, gaining more awareness, thinking more, doing more, and being humble enough to admit that I, and we, have a problem. A racism problem.

It’s a reckoning. But I would hope that I can be part of the group of people who are actively working on detoxifying, by learning, listening, and changing. And this is the heart of the matter of the group of brave Chabadniks who stood up and said, “I want to have this conversation within my own community, no matter how much it will hurt, or how awkward it will be, to do that. I want for us to have it, too. I want us to work on and think about this, together.”