Professor Michael Zank: Good evening! My name is Michael Zank, and I’m the Director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies, and I welcome you to the 2021 Elie Wiesel Memorial Lecture Series. She is an innovative, charismatic, engaging spiritual guide. A deeply intellectual interrogator who leans toward careful intentional analysis and a compassionate, passionate leader of one of the most exciting religious communities of the last 30 years. She grew her community IKAR from a small group of people who wanted to experience a Judaism that they could really enjoy to a community that attracts several thousand worshipers. Folks from LA and from afar, as far away as Japan, Israel, and Europe. As an activist for social change, she has crossed political divides, opened dialogue with and among other faith communities, and befriended the poor and the humble, along with the well-known and the well-off. Mother of three children, one of whom is with us tonight, deeply connected with her siblings, her in-laws, her nieces, and nephews, she has traveled the world with a vision of a better world that is within our reach if only we put our minds, and our bodies, and our souls together. We are proud to have her open this year’s Elie Wiesel Memorial Lectures on human rights with a lecture entitled “We Belong to Each Other: a Jewish Framework for a Just Society.” Please help me welcome Rabbi Sharon Brous.
Rabbi Sharon Brous: Thank you so much, professor Zank; that was a really beautiful introduction. I’m very touched and very grateful, and I want to thank Theresa and your whole team for putting together this incredible lecture series. And I’m excited to see how this unfolds over the course of the days ahead and deeply grateful to be able to be here with my daughter, Eva here, on the east coast on a beautiful sunny day in Boston, so thank you so much to all of you for being here and thank you for having us. To the family and to the students of Elie Wiesel, I want to say what a profound honor it is for me to be invited to offer words tonight to honor his memory and also to participate in this year’s lecture series alongside Elisha Wiesel and my dear friend Dr. William Barber II who will be speaking in just a couple of weeks. And I just feel very grateful for the chance to be here and be part of this. On the morning of August 28, 1963, Rabbi Joachim Prince stepped up to the podium to speak just before Dr. Martin Luther King just delivered his “I have a dream speech.” He was a little-known Rabbi of a small synagogue in Livingston, New Jersey, not far from where I was born years later. And here is what he said that day. He said, “I speak to you as an American Jew. When I was the Rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime, I learned many things. The most important thing that I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful, and the most tragic problem is silence.” Rabbi Prince argued that Jewish involvement in civil rights and racial justice was motivated not merely by sympathy and compassion for Black people in America but, above all, he said, by a sense of complete identification and solidarity born out of our own painful historic experience. So I was invited here and asked to speak this evening about the Jewish foundation and legacy of a commitment to human rights and justice. And I wanted to start with Rabbi Prince because at the heart of this conversation for Jews is the intersection of legal, theological, social, and spiritual impulses. All of which converge around a core story, a shared meta-narrative. We know, of course, that the most powerful ideas are transmitted from one generation to the next, not only through law but through narrative. Stories are what help us make meaning of the past. We tell stories as a way of warning or protecting other people from the harm that we’ve experienced, a way of cultivating perseverance, instilling values, or ensuring vigilance. And this is true not only for our personal stories and for our family stories but also for our collective narratives. Schools and communities, universities, nations they’re all shaped by core stories that we tell about them. And so, as a people, as a faith community, we also have to have at our heart a great story. We tell these stories not to relay historical events necessarily, but really to convey critical ideas. A good story will offer a raison d’etre beyond historical obligations or communal commitments or demographic fears, or parental guilt. An attempt to answer what ultimately is all of this for. And the stories that we preserve and develop over the course of many generations offer us a sense of purpose and a sense of direction in a world that is often chaotic and hostile, and even violent. Holding up a mirror to our very humanity and helping us make sense of the devastation and the loneliness, and the loss, and the cruelty all around us in the human community. A really good story will prod us to dream of something different, something better, something bigger than what actually is in the present. A collective without a story is just a social club. But once we have an animating narrative, a core story, then every decision, every interaction, every single moment is read through the lens of something eternal, something that exists far beyond us but makes very personal, very real demands of us. Now, of course, Jews tell a lot of stories, but there’s one core Jewish story that has animated and has sustained the Jewish people for thousands of years, giving hope and strength in the darkest of hours. And that story stands at the very heart of everything, from what we eat to how we pray, for those who pray, to our heartache when we read the newspaper for those who read the newspaper. And all of it is inspired by one central operating narrative thousands of years old. This story is a redemption story, the Exodus from Egypt. In Hebrew, it’s called yetziat mitzrayim, literally emerging from out of the narrowest place. And the narrative arc of this story follows four of the five books of the Torah. Its central concern is not oppression, and it is not liberation but the journey from one to the other. This is a story of a people on a journey leaving behind tyranny and persecution to reclaim their humanity. The Exodus is a story, as many of you know, of a powerful ruler who violently suppresses the Israelite minority living under his rule, whom he fears will one day rise up and challenge his authority with the help of his ruthless enablers. Pharaoh brutally enslaves the people forcing them to endure generations of unimaginable hardship. The violence persists for so long that every single Israelite is the descendant of an enslaved person and no one alive remembers being free. Their bodies are broken, their spirits are nearly obliterated. But then, after hundreds and hundreds of years, God hears the people’s cries and redeems them with a strong hand and an outstretched arms, with plagues and with wonders. This is the origin story of the Jewish people. This is a story that attests to the eternal possibility of freedom over slavery, of dignity over degradation, of self-determination over systematized oppression. This, in a world of cruelty and injustice, is the greatest testament to the inextinguishable yearning, human and divine, for freedom. This is the origin of the dream of a just society. It’s a powerful story, and it’s even more powerful because of two elemental truths about this story. This is a story not about a one-time event but about an eternal truth. And it’s a story not for one people, but really for all people. So let’s take the first one first. The first satyr actually takes place before the Israelites have even left slavery in Egypt. On the night of the final and the most awful plague, the death of the firstborn. Before they set out on that long walk toward freedom, they are still surrounded by persecution, and plague, and death; begin the work of preserving the memory of the experience, preserving the memory of the suffering, yes, but also the promise of freedom. They’re already contemplating how they’ll pass on those lessons to their children and to their grandchildren. The assumption from the start was that the Exodus would not be a one-time event but an ongoing process, a daily reality, a paradigm of redemption. The story then doesn’t live in the past. It stands outside of time and space, an eternal frame of reference for all struggles past, present, and future. Many Jews, whether they’re secular or religious, experience the memory of the Exodus from Egypt during Passover every spring. But our Rabbis were unsatisfied with the idea of a story that would be told only once a year, and instead, they injected this narrative into Jewish ritual experiences throughout the year, at the start of the new month, on every single holiday, on every Shabbat, and three times a day when traditional Jews will recite the Shema central prayer. This is designed to be a regular collision with the Torah of ultimate possibility, a repeated articulation of our greatest aspirations as a people. And as much as the world has changed over the course of these many years, the story and the insights that it catalyzed remain absolutely central to the Jewish religious experience. Even 3 500 years later. Over the years, there have been archaeologists, historians, and rabbis that have grappled with the question of the historicity of the Israelite enslavement in Egypt and their redemption journey toward Kanan. I have to say that I find these analyses to be perhaps intellectually interesting but spiritually completely irrelevant. Because the Exodus narrative was never intended to be a historical reckoning, it was meant to be an eternal promise whose truth is not dependent on archaeological evidence. Its truth is attested in every individual and collective journey toward liberation. And that is the reason why even facing liquidation in the Warsaw ghetto, Jews prepared for seder. It’s why Jewish prisoners in death camps saved flour to make matzah and why they whispered the words of the Haggadah late into the night. This story and its moral message have been a source of strength through the darkest chapters of our history. So what does it mean for the narrative of the Exodus to be so central to a people’s collective self-understanding? This story, I want to argue, is a testament to the necessity of human dignity in a world of systemic oppression, to the possibility of change, in a world of political intransigence and stagnancy, to the inextinguishable yearning, both human and divine, for freedom, and for justice. This is a radical story, one that recognizes just how far we remain from the ideal. And that positions the religious life as a perpetual unfinished, moral, and spiritual revolution in the quest of the ideal. This story was never intended to be about one time but about all time. But that’s not all. This narrative centers the experience of the Israelite people, but it speaks not only to their descendants, to the Jewish people today. Michael Walter, as many of you know religious philosopher, writes that “wherever people know the Bible and experience oppression, the Exodus has sustained their spirits and inspired their resistance.” This is a perpetual lesson that has to be learned and relearned as long as tyranny and oppression persist in the world. He famously says, “wherever you are; it’s probably Egypt; if not for you, then for someone else.” In the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC, there is a Bible that was designed for use by enslaved people in the British West Indies. It was published in the year 1807. The slave Bible was edited to exclude all references to this story. The story of the Exodus from Egypt. So I want to ask you to imagine for a moment a Bible with no Moses, with no burning bush, no pharaoh, no split sea, and no Sinai. The slaveholders’ logic was really clear, there is power and there is danger in this sacred story. If enslaved people, they thought, were able to witness God’s identification with the oppressed, were they to witness the holy opposition to empire, were they to see the triumph of justice and faith over even the strongest regime in the ancient world, surely those enslaved people today would see themselves in the ancient Israelite struggle for dignity. How could this story not plant the seed of hope and possibility? How could it not spur rebellion among enslaved people? And, of course, we now know that just as the slaveholders feared, enslaved people in this country who came in contact with this narrative did, in fact, identify with the Israelites. White southern slave owners were seen as new world pharaohs, and Harriet Tubman and John Brown, and Frederick Douglass were seen as modern-day Moses. In Latin America, the Exodus narrative has been seen in the context of political and economic struggle, from torture and repression, to poverty and to war, inspiring oppressed people seeking to achieve liberation over the course of many, many decades. And the Exodus movement, this idea continues to fuel not only political movements but also to strengthen the hearts of individuals who are struggling with illness, and with grief, with addiction, and with depression. Just when it seems that the darkness in our lives and in the world will eclipse all light, just when we’re tempted to succumb to despair, we’re confronted once again by a great dream that was born thousands of years ago and that withstood the test of time by being told over and over and over again. When Moses stood before Pharaoh and demanded, “let my people go.” This meta-narrative, this core story, has persisted over time, not only because the work is not yet done. Because there continue to be, even in our own time, tyrants or would-be tyrants, oppressors, and persecutors. But also because this story actually contains within it two stories with two distinct messages. In times of struggle, when we’re suffering under the weight of violence, oppression, persecution, pandemic, the Exodus narrative becomes this unceasing reminder that our lives, indeed, that human history is on a trajectory, from darkness to light, from narrowness into expansive possibility. This story becomes the closest thing that we have to the generational transmission of hope. The most precious and the most daring intervention into the human experience. The hope that’s born and sustained by this story is not a drug; it’s not a panacea, it’s a force for social transformation, it’s a permission to future orient when the world tells you that you have no future. To cast your gaze forward even from within the depth of darkness. This is the most courageous expression of human agency. It’s an expression of faith. A faith that the world as it is, is not the world as it’s intended to be. Faith that love is far more powerful than hatred, even when every headline screams the opposite. Faith that compassion will prevail over human cruelty even when every act we see in the news contradicts that belief. Faith that every single one of us has a role to play in realizing a more just and loving world. And that the redemption will come even if not in our own lifetime. The long view is not a concession to evil. It’s a clear-eyed recognition that to achieve the just world that we seek and that we dream of, we will need to establish the foundation for the realization of our dreams in a distant tomorrow. Because transformative change actually takes time. This approach is a sustained protest against despair. It’s a protest against impossibility, and inevitability, and exhaustion. An Exodus mentality says that any moment could be the inflection point between the dark teary night and the joyous dawn that we are promised will always follow. But the Exodus narrative doesn’t stop at planting the seed of hope and possibility in the broken heart. After 40 years of wandering, the Israelites’ former slaves will enter into the land of Canaan, and there, they will have to build systems and structures that will ensure the free, and just, and equitable society that they dreamt of for generations when they suffered under bondage. In achieving liberation, the question for the Israelites shifts immediately, from how do I maintain hope when I’m powerless to how do I maintain humility and compassion and purpose when I am powerful. Years ago, I heard Archbishop Desmond Tutu give a talk at my friend’s church in Pasadena outside of Los Angeles. And he asked us to envision God seated on the throne of glory; “God is observing God’s children,” he said, war and poverty, and disease plague every inch of this planet. And God weeps because in the midst of all of that suffering, what are religious leaders getting up to preach about on Sunday morning and frankly on Shabbat? Not a Torah of love and forgiveness of hope and compassion, they are pounding on the table, exhorting their congregants to deny the rights of grown men to engage in consensual loving relationships with one another. And I think about that very often. I think about how many sermons have been preached over the generations against the sin of homosexuality, against the sin of abortion, and tattoos, and usury, and interfaith marriage. And yet the central obsession of the Hebrew Bible is none of these things. It is the treatment of the stranger. At least 36 times, we see that this community of former slaves is taught how to treat the [inaudible], the foreigner, the other, the stranger, the outsider, the vulnerable one. And their categories of commandments regarding the treatment of the stranger. All of them rooted in the same singular principle, “do not harm the stranger, for you yourselves know the heart of the stranger. You were strangers in the land of Egypt.” It happened 3 500 years ago, but we remember it like yesterday. We remember the bitterness and the isolation of being a stranger. We remember the sense of inevitability and invisibility. We remember the feeling that nothing could ever change. We remember how powerful people mocked our struggle. And how they added to our burden, and how decent people averted their eyes when we suffered so as not to confront the reality of our suffering. The Torah seems to have this implicit understanding that violence, dehumanization, hunger, and cruelty, all of these things are actually the way of the world. And our story, which we repeat year after year, month after month, week after week, even day after day, plants within us a permanent identification not with the powerful, but with the powerless, with the [inaudible], the stranger, the other. “Never forget that,” the Torah says, “that you were once a slave.” The Jewish tradition is crying out to us. And your freedom, my freedom, comes with a price—the price of remembering eternally and acting in a way befitting of the descendants of enslaved people because to be free means to create a society that stands in counter testimony to the oppressive norms that characterize the Egyptian empire. To build a collective whose strength emerges, not from its military power, its ability to suppress or repress the population. But rather from its affirmation of the dignity of every single human being and from their humanity. For the first time in hundreds of years, the Israelite people were finally going home to a sovereign state, where they would be ruled not by the evil whims of an oppressive ruler. But by their own values, guided by their own priorities, their own principles, and aspirations. And this is perhaps the greatest challenge of freedom, the opportunity to decide who you really are. Not in opposition to someone else’s abuse of power. But in your own power. Coming out of Egypt, coming out of a land of oppression, and degradation, and cruelty. The people have two choices: when given the chance, should we rule with the same cruelty that we faced. Or should we build a society that is rooted in love and committed to justice for everyone? Should we perpetuate the injustices and the inequality because we can? Or should we fight to build a reality that is rooted in human dignity? That recognizes that every single human being is an image of the holy one? In explicitly linking the treatment of the stranger with the memory of slavery in Egypt, the Torah is very clear that the power of the Exodus narrative is not only in its ethos of eternal hope. But also in a distinct set of obligations and responsibilities. The message is clear. Our great aspirations mean nothing if they do not translate into core commitments to work to build a more just and loving society. Our story is not only told to build resiliency, and hope, and spiritual strength. Our story demands of us real moral action. Daniel O’Connor was known as the liberator. He was an Irish political leader in the mid-1800s who some of you know. And he embodied this ethos. This is what he wrote, “whenever and wherever tyranny exists. I am the foe of the tyrant. Wherever oppression shows itself. I am the foe of the oppressor. Wherever slavery rears its head, I am the enemy of the system or the institution. I am the friend of liberty in every climb, class, and color. My sympathy with distress is not confined within the narrow bounds of my own green island.”
He wrote, “No. it extends itself to every corner of the earth. My heart walks abroad, and wherever the miserable are to be suckered or the slave to be set free, there my spirit is at home. And I delight to dwell.” It’s there, in the struggle that the Jew, too, is at home. It’s there that we are reminded, again and again, that the work of leaving Egypt does not end once pharaoh’s chariots drown in the sea. “Until we are all free, we are none of us free,” wrote Emma Lazarus in 1883. This is the spirit that I know has driven many American Jews for a century into faith-rooted activism, seeing our destiny as tied inextricably to the health and to the well-being of this nation. This is what drove Rabbi Yochim Prince in the movement for Black freedom and equality in this country, the civil rights movement. And I am certain that this is what drove Elie Wiesel, so offended by the notion of neutrality or disengagement in the face of human suffering. Why must democracies live up to their moral obligations to defend human rights and hold other governments to account for their abuses? Wiesel said there may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice. But there must never be a time when we fail to protest, when we fail to try. This is the generational trauma and suffering of our past. And the privilege of our present, that demands that we do what’s just and what’s right today and every day. That we, whenever and wherever we live that we call for and we help usher in an era of truth-telling, of reckoning of real accountability, so that we can build those societies of truth and justice. This is, I believe, the truly radical nature of our core narrative, the Exodus narrative; because you were slaves and because you became free, the struggle of the slave today is your struggle. You know their heart, you know their suffering, you cannot ignore it. For those who have come out of Egypt, the past is very much alive today and every day. And so this story is equal parts an eternal reminder that redemption is always possible. And that the work of redeeming the world is not yet done. And that every one of us has a role to play in realizing the dream of a more just society. This is the central story that we tell. Not once, but always. Not one people but all people. Hope and radical responsibility, we tell the story not as past but as present. Not as theoretical but as personal. And I finally want to say that I’ve said, again and again tonight, that this story is eternal. That it resonates, and it reverberates across the generations. So I want to say a word about the times that we are living through today. It is very clear to me that the fault line at the heart of the culture war that is tearing this country apart today is one fundamental question. Are we ultimately responsible for one another? We are standing today at the nexus of multiple dangerous global trends. Our planet is becoming increasingly uninhabitable as autocratic anti-science, anti-democratic, neo-fundamentalist movements have been awakened in this country and around the world. Fueled by our collective inability to take seriously the sacred, timeless call to be our brother’s keeper. The intoxicating allure of power and profit has nearly eviscerated the ethic of collective responsibility in our time. And this is more than a political problem; this is a spiritual sickness that has allowed us to believe the lie that we live singularly and not in the plural. The lie that our destiny is not wrapped up in one another. That ideologies of racial supremacy and religious hegemony, that the desire for power, or profit, or popularity, that any or all of these things take precedence over human life itself. The lie that freedom means that I get to do whatever I want to do regardless of what impact it might have on you. The lie that I can eat and burn and destroy as much as I want, and it’s none of your business. The challenge of our time is to reclaim an ethic of shared responsibility brought into the world in the aftermath of our people’s enslavement in Egypt thousands of years ago. The ethic of shared responsibility, the recognition that we belong to one another, leaves us with two imperatives. First, to love, to be tender, and careful with each other’s bodies and each other’s hearts. To recognize that there is no greater priority than keeping each other healthy in body and in spirit. And second, to work to build a just society and a healthy ecosystem. So that even as we do whatever is in our power to prevent human suffering in the immediate, we’re also planting the seeds for a vibrant, healthy, sustainable future for our children. The idea that we fundamentally belong to one another, as old as our oldest, most sacred story, is a daring and dangerous idea. So daring and dangerous that those who oppress don’t even want us to have access to this story. It prods us across the generations to imagine a world in which human dignity is real and shared by every single person, created in God’s image. A world in which that dream manifests as a collective commitment to building social structures that are equitable, just, and loving for our people and for all people. That is a world in which every child is safe, and is loved, is housed, and is well fed. Treated like the unique and infinitely valuable human beings that they are. A world in which we permanently identified with the most vulnerable, understand that we are called not only to do no harm but to build a society of radical accountability, a society in which we recognize that we are all bound up in the bond of life with one another. And that I believe is the great challenge of the Jewish tradition, echoing throughout the generations. Our story is a story of a people who suffered terribly and unjustifiably. And then we’re called to build a society rooted in love and dedicated to justice, living in the full awareness of our shared humanity and interconnectedness. That is our sacred call. Thank you
[Applause]
Q&A
Professor Michael Zank: It is curious because we were just meeting this morning with a colleague from Germany who was writing a commentary on Exodus. And her publisher was asking her to take the temperature of people and figure out how does the Exodus story reverberates in American culture. We hadn’t talked about this, so I didn’t know we were going to tell us the story of the Exodus today all over. Let me let me kind of put a little hook in a couple of things you said, just to hear more about it. You gave us some really beautiful formulations, and one of which stood out to me was that the Exodus story gives us permission to be future-oriented. I have a daughter who is about the age of your daughter, and in our dinner conversations, over time, and I know others have daughters and sons who are at the age where they are trying to figure out where are we, where is this world going, and where can we find hope. And I think what you’re doing is something strikingly different. By saying there are stories that give us permission to be future-oriented. Tell us more about it.
Rabbi Sharon Brous: That is interesting. After a recent election in the United States, when many of us were feeling a tremendous amount of despair, not immediately recent, but a little bit before that. My father-in-law wrote a beautiful letter to all the grandchildren. And the letter said, I’ve lived a long time, and this will not be the end of the world. That we’ve got some challenging days ahead of us, but you have to remember that we will see to the other side of this. And it was an incredible expression of faith and hope. And I saw the way it lifted all of our hearts and spirits to see that. What we see in the book of Exodus, in the first two chapters alone of the book of Exodus, is really a blueprint for resistance to tyranny. And what we see here is that there are many different ways to respond, to protest, to defy an unjust regime when it comes into power. Some of them are literally driving a spoke through the wheels of injustice, stopping the machinery of tyranny in the moment, as you can, everything in your power to. Some of them are to dream about a different kind of future. And so there’s a midrash or a commentary who is told about Miriam, who is Moses’s older sister. And as some of you know, Miriam was a child of five years old when the pharaoh’s decree came down that all of the Israelite baby boys would be drowned in the sea. And Miriam’s father, Amram, became so afraid that if he stayed married to his wife, that they would inevitably get pregnant again and have another child, and that child would be murdered. And so he took matters into his own hand. And he divorced his wife, according to the rabbinic commentary. And when he did, five-year-old Miriam was outraged. And the rabbis put into the voice of a small girl, a small child, this incredible act of rebellion against tyranny. She stands before her father, and she says, “how dare you do that. She says you’re worse than pharaoh because pharaoh will take the lives of these children, but you’re saying that there will be no more children at all. And so she insists that he think about what might happen afterward. And she plants the seed that it might be possible that something beyond this regime and the dictates of this regime might, in fact, lead to a different kind of outcome than even her parents could imagine. And her parents remarried, and then baby Moses came into the world. And actually, the Rabbis say that Amram was such a leader in the Israelite community that when he divorced his wife, all the other Israelite men divorced their wives too, and it really would have been the end of the Jewish people. So that is seen as a form of rebellion, of resistance against tyranny, just planting the seed of a different kind of possibility. She says to him, yes; things are terrible, unimaginably awful; we are enslaved people, and now our children will be murdered too. But you don’t stop loving; you don’t stop dreaming about the future. You don’t stop planting the seeds in the depth of exile that we might one day return. And I think that’s the power that this story holds for us. The chapters of darkness are not usually a couple of months long or even four years long, right. The chapters of darkness that we know from our own history and that we know from this story in the Exodus are much longer than that. And I noticed at some point years ago that it’s the same Dr. King who speaks about the fierce urgency of now, that also speaks about the arc of the moral universe being long. And it bends toward justice, but it’s long. We do not achieve the redemption that we dream of and that we’re fighting for in the immediate. And we have to learn how to work both of those muscles, how to work with everything we’ve got, for the kind of transformation that we need to seek in, this in the here and now, and also recognize that we won’t achieve it, that the world redeemed will come at some point in the future. And my kid will be part of achieving it, and your kids will too, and their kids will too.
Professor Michael Zank: So, in other words, you plant the seeds for the future. Now that’s a story from between the desire for revolution now, and this advice, they said yes, you want to do that. But you also want to plant the seeds for the future. How do you really resolve this tension? And where do you think Judaism, if there is such a thing, comes down?
Rabbi Sharon Brous: I don’t think we resolve this tension. I think we live in this tension. It is both a spiritual and a political challenge for us. To live in both realities at the same time. Both to live in the fierce urgency of now and with the recognition that the ark of the moral universe is long. Right, that the story of the Exodus from Egypt is the story of a long journey. I mean, what are we to learn from the 40 years in the desert? It’s an 11-day trip. So we’re training the heart that even when it’s achievable, it’s going to take longer than you think. And yet, that you’re not free to stop walking every day toward redemption. You’re just going to go a little bit in a roundabout way in order to get there. But you can’t not walk right. So I think that our work is not to resolve it. It’s to live in it. And that’s part of the power for me of the model of the rhythm of Shabbat, which is every week, we engage in that tension. And fight, and push, and protest, and react. And then, on Shabbat, we reflect, and we dream again, and that’s what gives us the fuel to continue to push. So we live in this kind of perpetual revolution, in the language of Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, that the work is not going to be finished. And yet every week, we’re moving a little bit closer and closer, hopefully, to the achievement of that goal. And I think what we’re doing is training our hearts and minds and bodies that we’re in this for the long haul. That it’s not over. And by the way, if people think that, it’s you know, that one election resolves everything. What harms a society, the disease at the heart of a society, does not disappear. And so what we have to do is really deep transformative work. And it starts with every day being involved. But it also requires of us that we know and understand that it will take generations to achieve.
Professor Michael Zank: Now the Jewish population from Eastern Europe that came to these shores a hundred years ago, over 140 years ago, brought with them an ethos of struggle, and they have built the labor movement. Where do you see the Jewish community participating in the struggle today?
Rabbi Sharon Brous: I mean, you’re right; there’s a long history. Obviously, you’re right; you’re a professor, you know things. There’s been a very long and proud history of Jews involved in the movements for social change in this country, from the labor struggle, to the struggle for LGBTQ equality, to the feminist struggle, to the struggle for civil rights, that is very much a part of our story, and it continues to be part of our story. And we saw this over the course of the last five-six years, that there was an emergence of movements, of particularly young Jews, who said very clearly this is what it means to be a Jew in the world. That you know, you want to put children in cages at the border? I can’t live with that because I was a stranger in the land of Egypt. That you know, you want to ban people from certain countries from even coming into this place? I can’t live with that because you would have banned me too. And so what we’ve seen now is there’s a new kind of revitalized Jewish social justice movements, especially in the course of the last, I would say decade or half-decade. I think it’s faith-driven, it’s faith-rooted, which doesn’t mean that every person who engages in this struggle as a Jew is doing so as a religious Jew or that they’re Shabbat observant. But they see this as part of what their Jewish identity means. And to this day, we continue to see this kind of re-emergence of the faith of Jews in the faith and justice struggle. And very powerfully, what I see, and Bishop Barber can speak to this as well, I mean part of the way that I know him is because this is a fusion moment and a fusion movement. And so, there’s a recognition now that our struggles are linked to one another. That antisemitism is a form of racism, and it makes no sense to address one without addressing the other. That the struggles that many of us are facing in this country are actually linked to one another. And so, we need to work together and find our way into allyship and real partnership and friendship so that we can most effectively work together. And I see that spirit really thriving in this country in this moment. It’s actually a very exciting moment because we’re seeing that flourish in a way that I think even a decade or two ago was not as strong as it is now.
Professor Michael Zank: I’m glad you mentioned it. We have an event tomorrow night with Yavilah Mccoy, who is meeting with students to think about what it means to build allyship across racial lines and what Jewish students can do here, on campus, to learn how to make a difference.
Rabbi Sharon Brous: I’ll say, I mean, Yavilah’s work has actually transformed the American Jewish community. I mean there are now prominent voices in the American Jewish community that are holding our community to account to recognize not only what it means to be really engaged in the struggle for Black lives and for dignity for all people in this country. But really, to think about what our own community looks like. So it’s not only that we fight for racial justice out in the world. But how do we build communities that actually recognize, and honor, and lift up, and affirm the true diversity of our own Jewish community and so I’m very grateful that the community is not where it was 10-20 years ago, and that’s because there’s a kind of stretching open of the spaces of the institutions, of the hearts now. There are voices that are actually transforming the way that our institutional spaces think about and understand who we are and who we’re called to be in this country, in this time.
Professor Michael Zank: Do you think that this is particularly true of Los Angeles? Or do you think the East Coast also has such a change?
Rabbi Sharon Brous: You tell me, I don’t know. I’ve only been here for three days. I only spent my first 29 years on the East Coast so. But I’ve been in LA for the last, I guess, 18 years or so. And I think there’s something very special happening in Los Angeles, in the sense that we have really prioritized these multi-faith relationships, and especially in between the Muslim and Jewish communities and the Black and Jewish communities, which of course, are overlapping communities, because we have a lot of Black Jews in my community in Los Angeles, and more broadly, of course, across the country. But we’ve really prioritized building these relationships and showing up for each other when it’s most painful. And you know, there was a day I think about this often after the 2016 election when so many people felt so vulnerable and terrified. I was invited to a gathering of clergy at the Islamic Center of Southern California, and one of the members of the leadership of the Islamic center stood up. It was mostly Latino clergy in the room, and then a few Rabbis, and a few Muslims, and a few Black clergy. And this Muslim leader stood up and said I want to speak specifically to the Latino community here. When you are targeted under this new administration as they promise that you will be, we will be there to wrap you in our embrace of love and protection. And I was so astonished by it and burst into tears. I thought like the Muslim community itself was under attack. And the way that they responded to their own vulnerability was by promising to love and protect those who are even more vulnerable in that moment. And it’s powerful again and again over the last many years; we have stood together, Jews, and Muslims, and Christians, and Sikhs, and more, to say we are in this together. And when it happened on Wilshire Boulevard a few months ago that a group of Jews who were sitting at a restaurant were violently attacked by a bunch of guys who rode by in a pickup truck and said, “are there any Jews in there?”, you know and started attacking people. The first people that I heard from were Muslim colleagues and friends. The first people who called for a press conference to be held on the steps of city hall were Muslim leaders in the community. So things have shifted. And it’s because we’ve been in relationship with each other. And when there have been attacks in mosques, whether here or in New Zealand, the Jewish community has shown up in really profound ways. And, you know, when there’s a shooting in a Black church, the Jews and the Muslims show up. We’re really in this together. So I believe that there’s something very important that’s happening in Los Angeles. But it’s not only happening in Los Angeles. It’s happening nationally. And again, Bishop Barber will speak to this because his work over the last several years has been literally just to travel the world and build a fusion movement. To speak in churches, and synagogues, and mosques. And say, we are all in this together. My Jewish language is, we belong to each other. But we’re not alone. There are faith leaders, really around the country who are working to change the ethos. To change our understanding of how we need to relate to one another. And I believe that that’s the only way that we will birth a true multi-racial democracy in America is if we’re able to actually do this work together.
Professor Michael Zank: I want to ask you another question, if I may. Do we have time for another one more question? One more question. I’m curious how you would think; what is your advice for people who want to build a kind of conversation across these very polarized communities that we are, that we see in this country, in particular, but also not just in this country. Yes, we can build alliances between like-minded people who believe that this struggle for liberation is what we should be engaging in. But of course, there’s a whole other side with whom we also need to engage. Because in these election cycles every four years, you exchange the government, and so, in other words, to see the arc of justice kind of, well, where is it going exactly. Every four years, you have a different regime. So I think it’s very important to have conversations across the political aisle, the kind of conversation that we don’t have anymore. Where would you suggest people should start?
Rabbi Sharon Brous: We have to start local. It is extremely difficult to talk to people across the political divide right now. Because we see each other as an existential threat, and we can’t minimize that. That’s true in the Israel-Palestine conversation. That’s true in the conversation in this country. And we have to start local. And we, actually, have to cultivate compassionate listening skills, in which we see each other as human beings. And it’s very, very difficult to do that. Because there’s just so much at stake in this moment. But I’ll tell you a story that’s really been top of mind for me. A couple of years ago, I was invited to participate in a small, very diverse group of scholars, who were brought in, at the request of president Ruby Rivlin, into Jerusalem, to sit together for a couple of days. To try to answer the question, what, if anything, unites the Jewish people. And it was a really interesting, really diverse gathering that included a couple of orthodox settler leaders, leaders of the settler movement, far-right ultra-nationalist Jews, very progressive artists from Tel Aviv, scholars from Budapest, a couple of women Rabbis. A really interesting, diverse collection of Jews. And what happened was we basically sat together for three days and realized we couldn’t agree on anything. I mean, it’s kind of devastating, but the reality is that there’s really very little that unites all Jews. Because you can’t even say, you know Shabbat. Because, of course, not everybody cares about Shabbat. You can’t say God because not everyone cares. You certainly can’t say Israel; that’s the thing that drives Jews apart, I think, in many ways. Anyway, toward the very end of the conference, I was asked to speak before the President and to share my reflections, my perspective as an American Jew. So I did. I shared my view, my views. Some of what’s going on in Israel, what’s going on in the United States, the movements for racial justice, the movements to build a real shared society in Israel. And I talked a bit about a growing trend among many people who call themselves religious in Israel to engage in and justify acts of violence against our Palestinian neighbors. And how it left me heartsick, and that was one of many things that I said that I think upset people. But he asked, so I, you know, I spoke honestly. And after it was over, one of the settler leaders approached me, and he started berating me and told me how upset he was to hear what I had to say. That I was slandering his community, that it’s a lie, there’s no violence among the religious communities, that you know there are some bad apples, every now and then. But it’s not true that there’s a trend among, you know, of religious violence in the Jewish community; other religious traditions have their violent extremist, Jews do not. You know we could not see eye to eye on anything. And then he said, and I was heating up, and I was about to react. You know, I’m like listening and taking it in, and then he said that I hurt him, that I hurt him when I said those things. And you know, something happened to me when he said that. And I moved from fight or flight to I hurt another person in speaking the way that I did. And I want to understand more about who he is, and what drives him, and how he reads Torah, and how does he understand the 36 prescriptions in the Torah that we should not harm the stranger. I mean, he built; he’s really one of the leading voices of the settler movement. And so I asked him when he said that if he would have lunch with me, and he said yes, and we sat down together for three hours, the two of us, and we were joined by his wife, and we just talked. Instead of shouting at each other, I asked him all those questions, and he asked me all of those questions. And he said afterward that he felt I listened to him, and I felt that he listened to me. Okay, so you know, he invited me to come to his settlement for Shabbat. I said, no, thank you. I invited him to come to IKAR for Shabbat, my community in Los Angeles, and he said, no, thank you. And we said, maybe one day, we’ll meet again in Jerusalem. So two years later, then COVID comes, and you know I haven’t spoken to him. Two years later, there was just an article in Israel Hayom, a couple of weeks ago, which is Israel’s leading daily newspaper, most I should say, most circulated daily newspaper. Not necessarily the best. But the most highly circulated. And it said that this Rabbi, he issued a very striking condemnation of religious settler youth who were bussed into Jerusalem in order to engage in acts of violence against women who were praying alongside men the at the Kotel at the western wall. And he issued a very striking rebuke against them, and he said violence in the religious community is real, and we need to speak out about it, and I’m not going to stand for it. And it said in the article, that his associates, you know say that, so first of all his followers are very upset, his most zealous followers, and they say how could it be that like he, you know, he’s never spoken out like this before, what’s happening. And so his associates say, well he’s had a few conversations with a few women Rabbis from [inaudible], over the years, and you know, it’s made, it helped him see things that he didn’t see before. It didn’t change his life, you know; I would much prefer if he left his home and moved back to Israel and lived in Jerusalem and helped, make, build, you know, a shared society of justice and peace. I’m sure he’d be very pleased if I left some of my core commitments and met him in a place that would be comfortable for him. But it did change him a little bit, and I know that talking to him changed me a little bit. Because we found a tenderness toward one another that opened us up, both of us. And so the answer to your question is, it’s very hard because there’s so much at stake, and as I said when we started this long answer to your short question, we don’t just see each other’s political foes today, we see each other as an existential threat. And yet, the only way to advance this conversation is to move from seeing one another as a threat to seeing one another as a human being who has a different perspective than I do, who’s also in pain, who’s also hurting, who also has children, you know, and is worried about the next generation. And when we lead with that kind of humanity, I think it changes everything. And I’ll just close by saying, this society that I spoke about tonight, that we’re called to bring into fruition, you know, in our lives, and if not in our own lifetime, then in the lives of our descendants, that society will include that Rabbi too, and it will include the people who don’t vote the way that I do in presidential elections, you know, and it will include the people who refuse to wear a mask and even the people who are burning masks on the steps of the statehouse in Idaho, who have their children, burning masks, right, in protest. They’re gonna have to be part of that shared society too, and they’re gonna have to be part of that vision of a world redeemed too, and so we all have to stretch to change our perception of one another and to really see each other as fellow human beings.
Professor Michael Zank: Thank you very much!