The New Old Black-Jewish Alliance

It was Sunday morning, and I was in church. Being Jewish, this is not how I typically spend my weekends, but attending Washington, DC’s Nineteenth Street Baptist Church was an attempt to show —in my own small way— solidarity with a community that has once again suffered a miscarriage of justice.

The service did not disappoint. The Reverend, Doctor Derrick Harkins, delivered a powerful sermon on this critical moment— in the aftermath of Ferguson, Cleveland, and Staten Island— in America’s long fight for justice.

It’s a battle that historically, African-Americans and Jews have fought together— even as we have also often struggled through both real and perceived divides between our two communities.

In Judaism, we frequently begin religious gatherings with what might best be described as an old Hebrew spiritual: “Hiney ma tov u’ma-nayim, shevet ach-im gam yachad”— “How good and pleasant it is to sit together as brothers and sisters in unity.” At 19th Street Baptist, I felt that same feeling of brotherhood sweep over me.

The concept of brotherhood, of course, is a long-standing way to demonstrate unity across America’s diverse society. But brotherhood is not simply a Hallmark card relationship. It’s a relationship that in addition to love can also encompass jealousy, rivalry, hatred— or worse.

Brotherhood is not simply a Hallmark card relationship.

Yet, reflecting on both the full complexity of brotherhood and its simultaneous eternal nature could also help—in its own way— to heal America’s deep racial wounds

From the perspective of Judaism, brotherhood has been a relationship defined not only by shared blood but also by spilt blood. Nearly all of our Biblical forefathers struggled with their brothers: Joseph was sold into slavery by brothers jealous of his position as their father’s favored son; Jacob stole the birthright of Esau; Moses was raised as the adopted brother of the Pharaoh; Abraham’s two sons— Isaac and Ishmael— were divided by their mothers’ conflict. At its most extreme, of course, there is Cain‘s murder of his brother Abel.

God replied to Cain’s cynical question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” by placing a mark upon him-- both as an implicit reminder of his own crime and as a warning for others not to seek vengeance against him.

This Mark of Cain still belongs to all of us as Americans. Today, our crimes against each other – our brothers– extend far beyond the scourge of police brutality. More than one million Americans have been killed by guns since the Assassination of Martin Luther King. More than 150,000 of them were killed in the decade after 9/11, a horrific attack that after its initial effect of unifying Americans has by now also contributed to our deep polarization.

Yet, as citizens we must now learn to fully live up to our responsibilities as our brother’s and sister’s keepers. This extends far beyond the admirable “Brother’s Keeper program initiated by President Obama to help ensure that young men of color have equal opportunities to the full fabric American life.

That point hit home for me at church. When I took my seat, the woman sitting in front turned to me and politely asked if I was looking for a synagogue. As I began to impishly explain my intention in attending, she warmly explained that the Church was once a synagogue, pointing out the menorahs and Stars of David that still adorn the building. Apparently, people occasionally wander in expecting it to still be so.

I told her that my synagogue-- Washington DC’s Sixth & I congregation-- used to be an African-American church.

“Turner AME,” she said knowingly.

Our country is so simultaneously enmeshed-- and divided-- by race, religion, and neighborhood that we often don’t recognize the deep and overlapping bonds that weave us together.

To quote Martin Luther King, “we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Sixth & I and Turner AME, in fact, not only jointly hold a beautiful annual Martin Luther King Day service, they marched together in this past Saturday’s “Justice for All” rally.

Yet, for all the important gestures –  and the repeated calls for a “national conversation” on race – America’s racial wounds remain largely unaddressed.

We have never fully come to the grips with the Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde reality of America’s national character-- or of our own.

We are a nation whose “father”, George Washington, wrote to the Jewish community of Rhode Island after a visit that "...happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens..."— even as Washington owned slaves.

Yet, for all the important gestures – and the repeated calls for a “national conversation” on race – America’s racial wounds remain largely unaddressed.

We are a nation whose national creed— “That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” —  was authored by a founding father who not only owned slaves, but fathered several children by at least one of them.

We are a nation that still largely lives in denial of the full impact of what New America CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter succinctly described as the reality that “my ancestors owned slaves; my responsibility”— or that even for many of us whose ancestors didn’t own slaves, we still benefit from its legacy and subsequent institutionalized systems of racism.

The Black-Jewish relationship has been a similarly complicated and bittersweet subset of America’s own racial legacy.

Our communities have both been, to use the words of Moses, “strangers in a strange land”-- even if that land has treated us distinctly.

The first Africans came to English-controlled America in 1619— the year before the Mayflower. Over the ensuing decades, they were ensnared into their own “400 years of slavery”— before reconstructing their community as free citizens against the backdrop of continuing terror and discrimination.

The first Jewish community in what was to become the United States arrived as refugees in 1654: Dutch Jews fleeing the Portuguese Reconquista of Northeastern Brazil— and its attendant Inquisition— seeking safe harbor in the port then known as New Amsterdam.

While the successive waves of immigration that built America’s Jewish community have experienced discrimination, it has paled to the horrors of their original homelands. Today, New York is one of the greatest cities in the Jewish people’s long history-- and America’s Jewish population rivals that of Israel.

Our communities’ fate as minorities in America have been both deeply intertwined and divergent. And we have experienced alternating senses of kinship, familiarity, misunderstanding, suspicion, and distance.

The historical highs points of the “Black-Jewish alliance” are well-known: the battle against lynching from Reconstruction through Leo Frank; the partnership between Martin Luther King and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel; the martyrdom of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman.

The lows are no less real: from Judah P. Benjamin’s service to the Confederacy to Louis Farrakhan's anti-Semitism; from the Crown Heights riots to the growing socioeconomic divide that affects the nation as a whole.

Yet, in this season of renewed activism, we should take comfort in the fact that the bonds of brotherhood-- as religious communities and citizens-- are more powerful and resilient than we tend to acknowledge.

No matter the very real differences we may have-- or the violence we have perpetrated-- we should not be content until the day when, to paraphrase Dr. King’s Dream, all God’s children “will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood” and, free at last, sing in words of that old Hebrew spiritual: “Hiney ma tov u’ma-nayim, shevet ach-im gam yachad”— “How good and pleasant it is to sit together as brothers and sisters in unity.”