The dialogue I wanted. I guess I wanted to say that one of the things that I really valued about being a congregational rabbi is that if you're in a congregation for any length of time, you, you, you, you build up relationships. Um, one of the things that was, I mean, there were a lot of wonderful reasons to come to Seattle, but one of the things that was hard for me in leaving Worcester was that I had been there for 16 years. And you build up relationships after 16 years, and then you have to start over, and that's hard. But by the time 17 years were over in Seattle, I had built up those relationships in Seattle. And what was nice was even though I was retiring, I didn't have to leave the community. I was rabbi emeritus, which means in the context of the congregation, I wasn't actively involved in the day-to-day life of the congregation. I wasn't on the bema, but I still knew a lot of people in the congregation, and I didn't have to lose those relationships. And I was able to tap into those relationships in a different way. Um, and that's what led me to get involved in a lot of projects that involved building bridges between different groups in the community, and knowing so many people in the Jewish community was a big advantage in creating those relationships outside the community. So the first one that I did was, well, I guess I want to say one more thing before that, and that is one of the things that laid the groundwork for this was when I was maybe in the congregation for two years, maybe three. Very early in my career at Herzl Ner Tamid, I gave a sermon in which I said something nice about President George Bush. Uh, now I'm a registered Democrat, and I didn't vote for George Bush. But this was a time of great danger for Israel. And President Bush had either said something nice or done something good. And I praised him for that in the bema from the bema, because I thought, it doesn't matter who the person is or what party they belong to, if they do something for Israel, I want to call it out and I want to give them credit. Well, I guess not everybody felt that way. Uh, and I was still relatively new in the congregation, and people didn't know everything about me, so I was visited. By the next day, I was visited in my office by what I call the Democratic Thought Police, who proceeded to tell me that because I said this nice thing about George Bush, therefore I must be pro-life. And they went through a long list of things that are associated with Republicans and conservatives. And it was then that I realized that something, something had really shifted in, not just in the Jewish community, but in the American community. And I gave a sermon about what I called the new heresy. Uh, it used to be if you said something outrageous about God or disrespectful about God, you could, you know, people would get very angry with you and you could even be excommunicated. Well, in the modern period, you know, in the 21st century in America, there's nothing you can say about God that's going to get people upset. You know, so many people don't even believe in God. But if you say the wrong thing about politics, people will literally stop speaking with you, and you'll be virtually excommunicated. So I called this the new heresy. No longer is the new heresy about God. It's about your political affiliation or your political views. And I thought that was really, really a shame. I mean, you know, the things that we talked about now, the polarization in America, the fact that politicians no longer reach across the aisle, that people are demonized. You know, for being, uh, you know, different from you politically. And, you know, friendships are broken up, families are broken up over political views that that didn't weren't always true. And I, began seeing that trend already, you know, back in as early as 2004. So by the time we get to 2016, after the Trump election, I thought, I really want to do something about this. I want to start to address I want to start to bring people together from different points of view, rather than thinking of it as, you know, one side has to defeat the other. And that's the way we're going to create change in the world. So the first one I did was something when I was still working at Hertz. I was it was a civil discourse, um, Experience. And my friend, Dr. Mark Jones was introduced to me, because he was one of the facilitators at this. It was the subject was immigration. And we wanted to get people to to think not in terms of Democrat or Republican, but to but to see that this is really a complicated issue and not not one that's black and white. Uh, and so, Mark and I work together and we liked each other very much. And we decided after this was over, let's do something on the Black-Jewish relationship. That's a relationship that had always been important to me, since I was a kid. I mean, I grew up in the 60s, at the height of the civil rights movement. My father went to the March on Washington in 1963 and stood next to Wilt Chamberlain. Um, I remember my father giving many sermons on civil rights, as a congregational rabbi. And I also remember my father bringing home an African American, fire chief who had moved into the town and, he couldn't find housing because of racism, because people didn't want him to live in their neighborhood. And I'm sad to say that some of those people were members of my own congregation. And my father went to bat for this, for this man and invited him over for dinner. Uh, and we talked about these things at the Shabbat table, you know, very often. And my father, I remember my father telling me people from the congregation came up to him and said, Rabbi, you belong on the pulpit. You should be talking about religion, not this. And my father, of course, said, this is religion, this is Judaism. Um, so I remember those days. I remember, the heroes, the great heroes of the civil rights movement and how involved, the Jewish community was, in the civil rights movement and at a time when, you know, Blacks and Jews forged an alliance together to work for positive change in America. And then I also remember the relationship really deteriorating, and a real rift creeping into that relationship. And I always thought it was a shame that there was that rift. And if I ever had the opportunity to do something to make it better, to heal it, to bring it to a to a new level, I would want to I would want to be part of that. And I didn't do anything about it for a long time. But suddenly, for whatever reason, in 2016, I saw an opportunity. Uh, so Mark and I began to work together. Uh, we pulled together a group of like, a dozen people. Six from the Jewish community, six from the Black community. We had, like, six dinners, three hours, three hours each. Uh, we talked about some really emotional issues, and it was a very, very meaningful experience. And that led to the experience that I'm part of now, which is a Black Jewish clergy group. Uh, we decided to have rabbis and black ministers study the Bible together on a monthly basis. And we've been doing it now. We're now in our fifth year of doing this in Seattle. Uh, and the Bible becomes like a shared language, a shared sacred text that both communities revere. And it becomes a kind of safe vehicle for touching on some very emotional issues that might be harder to get to if we just went at them directly. But if we talk about the Joseph story, and in the Joseph story, there's a there's betrayal, like Joseph gets out of prison, and he tells, he tells and and I'm sorry, his cronies get out of prison. And they say when, when you he says to them, when you get out of prison, remember me? And they forget him. And when you tell that in a Black Jewish group. You know, you get some interesting comparisons where black people say, well, you Jews, you know, you, the Jewish community, you got out of prison, you rose and you left us behind. You abandoned us, you know, you don't remember. And the Jews, on the other hand, said the opposite. They said, you know, we were there for you. And then you turned. You turned your back on us and you. And there was, you know, Black anti-Semitism, and you supported you were you were you became anti-Israel. And so we had these emotional discussions through the study of the Bible. I mean, I often go back to a very famous Kurt Vonnegut story called It's in a Collection Called Welcome to the Monkey House. And the story is called Who Am I This Time? It's about two very shy people who, cannot form human connections, but they turn out to be great actors, and they end up acting opposite each other in a romantic place. Uh, and so, um, uh, they fall in love. But, they don't know what to do outside of the theater. So one day, the woman in the relationship comes up with a brilliant idea. She invites the man to dinner. She hands him a copy of Romeo and Juliet. And he plays Romeo and she plays Juliet. And, suddenly, they're together again. And so what happens at the end of the story is they get married and they spend the rest of their lives, you know, creating their own theater and speaking to each other through these great romantic plays. And, I think of that when I think of Bible study, the Bible for the Jewish people and also for Christians is very much like our Romeo and Juliet. Um, it becomes a vehicle for us to speak about things from the heart that might be difficult for us to say, but if we say, well, I'm not talking about myself. I'm talking about Moses. I'm talking about Joseph. I'm talking about Miriam. We project our own issues onto these biblical characters, and as a result, we're able to talk about things that mean a great deal to us, without feeling threatened by those conversations. And that's what's been happening in the Black-Jewish conversation. We now have not only a local conversation, but we have a national conversation where Blacks and Jews from seven cities are having these conversations on a monthly basis. We just had one yesterday that talked about Exodus chapter eight, and beautiful insights from ministers from Philadelphia, rabbis from Seattle and Atlanta and Chicago, New York, and Detroit. It's it's it's really been it's been great. We've been doing that one for about four years. Uh, and that led to, um, we always wanted to do action. Um, and um, so we eventually, um, uh, we spun off another, another group called the Multi-Faith coalition for Restorative Justice, which is about criminal justice reform. And what the stimulus for that was a film called Since I've Been Down, which was produced by a wonderful woman professor from Tacoma. Her name is Doctor Gilda Shepherd. She made the film, and the film was about a young man, Kimathi Carter, who committed a murder when he was 18 years old. He was part of a gang, and he was in a drive-by shooting. And they thought this other car was a rival gang. And it turned out it wasn't. And they shot into this car, and a young black college student was killed, and he got a life sentence. Um, but when this young man was in prison, after about ten years, he started his own peer to peer education program called GoTeach, taking education and changing history. Uh, and he created this remarkable school for prisoners, prisoners teaching prisoners. And it was so popular that it created a level of harmony among the prison population that never existed before. The Blacks and Latinos who never got along. They all came to this program. Even white supremacists came to this program. Uh, and, um, the people in the prison officials said they never saw anything like this in any place in Washington State. Um, and so, um, Camonte is now out of prison and he's in his 40s. But when you see this film, what you realize is here's a person with tremendous ability, tremendous leadership ability, but nobody saw it when he was 18. Nobody saw it when he was 11. And his father died, and he joined the gang. Had he that potential been nurtured and seen? Imagine he may never have gone to prison in the first place. And how many cars are walking around today? Um, so, um, one of the, um, one of the principles that we talk about a lot because this is a multi-faith group and it's faith-based is, um, what does our faith teach us? What does Judaism teach us about why people hurt each other? I've taught some interesting classes about how the Bible, starting from the book of Genesis, which is the foundational book of the Bible, tells us, be wary of looking at the world as the good guys versus the bad guys. It's just not that simple. There's a little bit of bad in each of us. There's a little bit of good in the people we think of as bad. Uh, and, um, if you look at look at life in a more nuanced way, you'll end up creating much more goodness in the world and much more human harmony than if you simply say, well, the way we create a better world is to just kill all the bad guys, you know? Um, I had a teacher in graduate school who said to me that teachers classically make the following mistake. They think that if they just get rid of the three worst troublemakers in the class, their class is going to be heaven on earth. And what they find is that they get rid of those three, and three more take their place. Um, and what applies in a classroom applies in society as a whole. We sometimes think that if we just get rid of the bad apples or put them in jail, then everything will be fine. But unless we look at the larger picture, if we look at unless we look at the design of the classroom or the design of society, and ask, how can we address those issues in a different way? Hey, you end up putting more and more people in jail. Not really solving the problem. So, we had a lot of, um, uh, so we, you know, this multi-faith coalition is, is, uh, been around for two and a half years, and we're all learning a lot from each other. I should also say that one of my interests in doing this work is, believe it or not, has to do with Israel. I wanted to be sure that Jews have friends in the world. And when I saw that, you know, there was once a strong Black-Jewish alliance, and that Martin Luther King was one of the greatest supporters of Israel. And when I saw that support diminishing over the years, I asked myself, well, can we change that? Can we start to rebuild this relationship? And in rebuilding the relationship. Not only are we doing a good thing by helping promote racial justice in America, but we're also gaining some new friends and support when we're in trouble. Um, so, um, it's not a small thing that last night we had a big rally. Israel is in crisis right now. The worst crisis, really, in Israeli history. Uh, and, um, a thousand people showed up at Temple de Hirsch from across the Jewish community, but many non-Jews, too. And, some of those non-Jews were people from the African American community, people who we've studied the Bible with. Uh, and they were glad to be there. And they also wrote us very heartwarming notes, letters of support, and sympathy. And I don't know that that would have happened if we hadn't made the effort to cultivate this relationship and to show up for causes that were important to them. That's what friends do. They show up for each other. So, I found that this has had multiple levels of benefit, having, you know, cultivating these relationships. I recently had a conversation with Gilda Shepherd, and Gilda Shepherd is, fantastic lady. Um, and she's a person who's very much involved in a lot of left-wing causes. And the left in America lately hasn't been very kind to Israel. Um, but because Gilda knows me and I know her, and she knows lots of Jewish people in this, in our multi-faith group, we have a relationship with each other. And a couple of weeks ago, Gilda asked me a question about Zionism. She says, I want to know more about Zionism. Tell me about Zionism. And when I gave her my five-minute definition, she said, Well, wow, that's really interesting. It's a lot different than what my friend Angela Davis told me. Well, those who know Angela Davis know that she's going to have a very different perspective on Zionism and not very favorable. But Gilda is not Angela Davis, and she's curious and she's open. Uh, and it's because we have a relationship with each other that in a couple of weeks we're going to go out for coffee together. We're going to talk more about Israel and more about Zionism. And she's coming with an open mind. Uh, and that's, that's one of the benefits of, of, you know, I found, of creating these relationships over a period of time. And that's this whole all these experiences have led me to rethink my whole approach to social justice. And I actually really do believe that I would love to see the American Jewish community, especially the liberal Jewish community, do a paradigm shift on how we do social justice. And I've written a little bit about this recently, and I just I just sent a copy of my article to my nephew, who's an Orthodox rabbi in Israel, actually, um, and, um, what I, what I talked about was that when we talk about social justice in the Jewish tradition, we have two voices. We have a prophetic voice, and we have a rabbinic voice. The prophetic voice is the voice of the prophets, which is unequivocal. Uh, the prophets tended to see the world really, truly as the good versus the evil when they talked about the rich grinding the poor, there was no nuance in their, conversation. They were powerful. They were strong. They knew what was right. And there was no discussion. And sometimes you need that sometimes, you know, with some issues. I mean, you know, there's no nuance when you're talking about slavery, it's either right or wrong. There's no nuance when you talk about segregation; it's either right or wrong. But most of the world, most of the problems we face in the world require a very different kind of approach. And I would call that the rabbinic voice, rabbinic approach. And the rabbis were famous for arguing back and forth and having different points of view on what the right thing to do is. In the Bible, it says, justice, justice, you shall pursue. That's what passion is: prophetic passion. But when the rabbis read that verse, they said, well, maybe this, maybe there's two ascetics because there's a little bit of ascetic on each side, there's a little bit of right on each side, and a little bit of wrong on each side. And those people have to learn to compromise with each other, and they have to learn to see each other's point of view. And when I think about the problems in the world today, especially the problems in America, I think most of those problems require more rabbinic voice than a prophetic voice. The prophetic voice isn't important. It is. Um, but if you think about the problems of homelessness or drug addiction or racism or Israel in the Middle East or immigration reform, none of those issues have easy, simple answers where you say, well, this is simply this we're going to do this and we're going to solve that problem. I'm really very passionate about this when it comes to, uh, you know, social justice today, that social justice has meant primarily prophetic. We know what's right, and we're going to do it, and we're going to defeat the bad guys. Um, but, you know, it's usually not like that. Um, so for example, um, I mean, here's an example of how you can you can use both of those lenses at the same time. So, Donald Trump on January 6th, what he did to the government his an attempt to overthrow the United States Constitution by not accepting the results of a legitimate election. That, to me, is an example of where you need the prophetic voice. There's nothing complicated about that. Simply wrong. Right. However, the problems of red and blue in America what's divided America. Um, you know, just the ability, our ability to solve the key problems of our society. That's much more complicated. Uh, that's where you need people in dialogue. That's where you need Republicans and Democrats to talk to each other. You need not just senators and congressmen to reach across the aisle, but you need everyday citizens to sit down together and work things out and hear each other's point of view and come up with something, something in the middle that's rabbinic voice. Um, when we don't know which voice to use, we get ourselves in big trouble. Trump and Charlottesville. Trump and Charlottesville thought he was doing the right thing. When he used the rabbinic voice, he said, Oh, there are good people on both sides. Well, that was a moment he should have used a prophetic voice, Nazis walking and saying, you know, the Jews will not replace us. There's nothing to argue that there's no nuance there, nothing to argue about that, that just deserves a blanket condemnation. However, if you're talking about how we deal with American history, when do we remove a statue? And when do we put up a plaque explaining the context, or do we put Robert E Lee in the same category as George Washington? Those are legitimate questions that would. Which are many-sided. And you, when you need people to talk to each other that's that's rabbinic voice. Um, look at the current crisis in Israel. It's a perfect example. I was pleased to see that so far, most of the world has understood that what we need now in the wake of these horrible atrocities is a prophetic voice. There are two sides to this, to Hamas. This, these these these are, these are these are barbaric acts. People who attacked civilians, killed babies, and raped women. There are two sides to that. That's a prophetic voice. Clear and simple, black and white, good and evil. Um, on the other hand, if you look at the larger picture of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, between Israelis and the Arab world, between Israelis and the Muslim Jews and Muslims over the past 75 years and more. Well, there's there's there's there's a lot of complexity there. And that's not something that's purely black and white, purely good and evil. So knowing when to apply each lens and knowing that sometimes in a particular situation you can apply both lenses, I think, is really important. And you know, I spent a lot of my time trying to deliver that message. Um, what else? What else can I tell you? Oh, you want me? You want me to keep going, or do you want or do you want to ask me something? I started talking about Israel. You wanted to know a little bit about my connection to Israel. Um, I guess I'll say what I've said to many people recently. I consider myself and this whole generation to be incredibly fortunate to be born into this moment in time. We live in a moment. We live. I would argue we live at the best, best time ever for Jews and all of Jewish history. Um, because we have a State of Israel and we never, ever had anything like this State of Israel, ever in our history, even in the days of the Bible, even at the height of biblical Judaism, we had King David and King Solomon. We never had anything like a state with 9 million people and flourishing economically and intellectually and spiritually, and culturally. This is just unprecedented. And it's just amazing to be part of that generation that has the State of Israel. Um, I remember when I was eight years old and my cousins, I saw my cousins off on a voyage to Israel by boat. My uncle was an Orthodox rabbi, and he had a sabbatical coming. So they went for two months. A month and two months were spent by boat, two weeks by ocean liner to get to Israel, and two weeks to get back. So we saw them off. We went to the dock and I got the autograph of an Israeli sailor. That would seem so naive today, but in 1958, Israel was only ten years old. The whole idea of Israel was so miraculous to us. The idea of an Israeli soldier who spoke Hebrew. It was like mystifying and mystical, and beautiful. Um, that's the atmosphere that I grew up in. I lived there for a year in 1972. I lived there, as I mentioned, in Kiryat Shmona. I took numerous congregational trips. I took my congregations to Israel six separate times. Um, by the time I retired, I was going to Israel pretty much every year for the like for the past 6 or 7 years. I would, you know, of my career, uh, and my daughter actually lived in Israel for six years and became an Israeli citizen. Now she's back in Boston, but I would often go and visit her and then study at the Hartman Institute. And I became very active in AIPAC. Um, so, um, so when it came time for, um, and people in the congregation knew me and knew me as somebody who would, who would always stand very firm for Israel and, um, you know, defend Israel. Um, and so when it came time to do something more difficult, which is to to speak out, um, against something that an Israeli government was doing. I believe I had the credibility to do that because people people knew that I wasn't I wasn't somebody who who typically did that who or whoever did it. Um, and so, um, when the Israeli democracy movement started happening and Israeli Israelis across the board were alarmed by things happening in, in, in the Israeli government, the most right wing government Israel has ever had. And they were concerned about threats to Israeli democracy and, and and Israelis who never, never criticized Israel in public was saying to the American Jews, we want you to speak out. And so what I did for the when I did that for the first time, um, in downtown Bellevue, my speech was picked up by Haaretz, uh, precisely because I was somebody who had been a supporter for my entire career, and they thought they saw this as kind of a kind of man bites dog story, like, wow, even this apex supporter is part of this and that. That just showed that this was not really about politics, but it was really about that. Right? Right or wrong. So, you know, I love Israel and I want the best for Israel. And I'm now participating in a small group of people who are, uh, you know, right now we're preoccupied with this crisis. But God willing, Israel will get through this, and then we'll turn to the exciting task of figuring out, well, what do we want? What do we want Israel to go from here? How do we want Israel to rise to the next level? Um, and you know, what's our vision of the Israel of the future. What's the Israel that we want our, our grandchildren and great grandchildren to experience? Um, and now's the time to be thinking about those things. And I'm excited about being part of that. Part of that conversation. I also think, by the way one of the unique things and I've said this to members of my congregation frequently, one of the unique things about living at this particular time is that in spite of the anti-Semitism we see and in spite of what we saw in the past week we Jews are still vulnerable, and there's still so much hatred of our people. It's hard to believe that 75 years after the Holocaust, we still see such intense hatred of the Jewish people. In spite of that, we're in a position right now that we have not been in 2000 years, and maybe we've never, ever been in this position before. Um, we are strong enough because of Israel, because of the strength of the American Jewry. We're strong enough to finally be able to play offense and not just defense. And what I mean by that is we've been so preoccupied with defending ourselves against attacks for the past 2000 years that we really haven't had the bandwidth emotionally or physically or any anyway, to concentrate on our true mission, which is to be a light unto the nations to be a blessing to the families of the earth. I mean, hoo hoo! How could my Zaidy think about things like that? Living in Poland, where he had to be worried that if he walked down the street, he could get killed by somebody who just was an anti-Semite. He didn't have any way. He just was, you know, he just wanted to survive as a Jew in those circumstances. But we are living in a situation because of our strength, in spite of our vulnerability, we actually can speak to the world today and with a reasonable confidence that the world will be interested in what we have to say. Um, we've made huge contributions to human history. But we're not done. We're not done. It didn't stop with our giving the world the Bible. It didn't stop with our giving the world the belief in one God. That was 2000 years ago. What do we what are we giving the world today? We're in a position now to be givers, to participate in a world conversation, the global conversation about human ethics, about making the world a better place, and have a place at the table, have a serious place at the table, and have people listen to what we have to say. And of course, we'll be listening to what other people have to say. We don't have all the answers ourselves. But, um, so that's what makes me an optimist in the long run. I see a lot of challenges. I see a lot of hurdles this week. Those challenges are particularly prominent. But you can't be a Jew and be a pessimist. To me, a Jewish pessimist is an oxymoron. Uh, we were created to transform the world in good ways. And you can only transform the world if you love the world. You can't transform the world if you hate the world, or if you think the world hates you. Um, there's plenty of hate. But there's a lot of love, too. And there's a lot to love in the world and other people, in other cultures. And so I feel privileged to live at this time in history. And I hope in a small way, I can I can contribute to our speaking in new ways to the world. How are we doing on time?
