Writing the Waves

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Wednesday, February 25, 5:00(ish) pm.

Dear CSK,

I’m sitting right now at the Birmingham airport. Our flight is a bit delayed, which is good
because it’s giving me a moment to sit at one of those kind-of-convenient but kind-of-
uncomfortable counters in the airport where you can charge your phone and rest your computer on a narrow desktop. There’s a lot going through my mind as I ponder the past three days with a group of 29 Jews and African Americans, bearing witness to some of the most tragic aspects of American history and weaving together a community better equipped to truly hear each other’s stories.

We arrived in Atlanta on Sunday, and since then we’ve done what is called a Civil Rights tour. From Atlanta to Montgomery to Selma and back to Montgomery—from MLK to Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers to Rabbi Heschel, the Edmund Pettus Bridge to the Montgomery “Lynching” Museum—we have been inundated with much of the worst of our country’s pockmarked founding and her close-to-impossibly unredeemable past. Notice I say “close,” because while redemption doesn’t fix the past, it can change the future.

I remember my 10-year-old self, watching the iconic Roots miniseries and, for the first time,
learning that it wasn’t just Pilgrims and men in white powdered wigs who were here long before we huddled [Jewish] masses landed tempest-tossed upon America’s shores. I certainly remember all that I learned in college about exchanging the melting pot metaphor for the salad bowl. (After all, who prefers a melted-down bowl of beige mush over a delicious bowl of unique and integrous ingredients that, when tossed together, make for a beautiful feast for the eyes and mouth?) And I remember being aghast while listening to The 1619 Project and its assertion that not only was slavery a profound blight on America, but that there is no America without it. Since then, I’ve had to learn to balance these hyperbolic claims against critics who insist that Nikole Hannah-Jones (the 1619 Project’s lead writer and architect) may have been getting a bit too “high on her own supply.” That perhaps there are other aspects of America not completely overshadowed by the 12 million people who were stolen and kidnapped from their home continent and forcibly brought to our shores to prop up a project that would ultimately help save the world from Japanese imperialism and German eugenics. See? I told you there is a lot on my mind!

But here are a few things that I learned in the past few days:

1. Dr. King made a bet with his older sister, three years his senior, that he would graduate
high school with her; after skipping the 3rd, 6th, and 9th grades, he stood right next to her
on that graduation dais.

2. Dr. King gave his wife, Coretta, roses every time he left for his travels. But before he
departed on the trip that would ultimately lead him to Memphis and his demise on that
infamous balcony on April 4, 1968, he gave Coretta artificial roses.

3. Even though it is true that the U.S. ended the Atlantic slave trade in 1808 (a good thing,
for sure!), the horrors of slavery at that point only grew. From that point forward, half of
all enslaved families were separated—most never to reunite again.

4. And perhaps the biggest discovery (for me) of all: While it is true that owning slaves was
made illegal in the Union states, as well as in England, long before the Civil War, both of these national entities grew substantial wealth as investors in—and guarantors of—loans,
investments, and insurance policies backed by enslaved people as the chief collateral. On
the eve of the Civil War, enslaved people represented the single largest asset in the entire
United States—more than railroads, factories, or banks.

The labor of enslaved people did indeed build fundamental foundations of this country and much of the industrialized world, and to pretend otherwise is to forget the past.

We are about to celebrate two holidays commemorating significant parts of our history—times when we Jews were oppressed, suppressed, and generally depressed by hegemons who used our difference as a cudgel against us. Today, we are still here and we are still different. And as writer Dara Horn says about us, “We’re just not the cool kids.” But as we have learned, it is often not the cool kids who make the greatest difference. It is those who commit to ideals and principles dedicated to the “prime directive” of us “non-cool” kids’ treatise—the Torah—in which we are instructed that all human beings are created b’tzelem Elohim, in God’s image.

That is precisely why we cannot pretend that this country came to be thanks only to principled, visionary men who sought to break free from England. We Jews mostly showed up decades and centuries after the blood, sweat, and tears that made this painfully imperfect nation possible. And thus we must remember that there is a through line from Pharaoh to Haman to the KKK. All of them believed that fear and intimidation would win the day.

While we are not fully cleared of any of them, none of them—even today—can take us down.