Our Whispering Past
Protesting to close Rikers Island Jail yesterday
Dear friends,
* The promised note with words from Dr Lizzie Berne Degear had to be pushed back, and will be coming soon. Instead I offer some reflections on the past week:
Seventy-eight years ago today Auschwitz was liberated. What does it do, Auschwitz? Mostly it sits there in our consciousness, an elemental energy pulsating outward. “This is what human beings can do,” it whispers. “Be scared.” “Be brave.” “Be grateful.” “Be Jewish.” “Take words seriously.” “Care.” “Act.” “Remember.” Different whispers at different moments, different commands to different people.
Here are a couple whispers that I’ve been hearing this week.
This evening we will get the video of Tyre Nichols getting beaten to death by police officers in Memphis. We will put it in the category of African American lives taken lightly by police.
In Palestine we reached 29 people killed this year. Every day this month at least one life taken by Israeli soldiers or police. Five kids. A 60-year-old woman. Men in their prime. Some involved in violent resistance, others not. Lives cut short.
In New York City the mayor gave his State of the City address yesterday as a large group of protesters demanded he hold to his campaign promise and shut down Rikers Island. Maia and I stood holding a banner with the names of two of the 19 people who died in custody there last year. We heard family members of the deceased describe their loved ones. Most of them described people with mental illness, and indeed around fifty percent of the jail population there suffer from mental conditions.
It is a known fact that the Nazis first exterminated people with mental conditions and other “undesirables.” The first people to be murdered in in the earliest gas chamber facility, Brandenburg An Der Havel, were mentally ill prisoners. We are, thank God in a completely different situation than 1940 Germany. But since visiting Brandenburg An Der Havel I carry the understanding that what led to Auschwitz was the false distinguishing between people with value and people with no value. These people matter. These don’t.
So, when we were chanting “Treatment not Jail” yesterday, I could hear whispers from our past. And when we heard a bereaved mother describe the violence in their neighborhood when her son was growing up, the racialized segregation in our city came into focus, and with it more whispers from our past.
They all matter. Those killed by police like Tyre Nichols, those killed by the IDF like Magda Obaid, those who died by neglect in Rikers as they await trial like Mary Yehudah. Each of the approximately 1.1 million people murdered at Auschwitz.
There is something incredible that happens at protests sometimes, when you find yourself speaking words out loud. When we chanted “Treatment not jails,” over and over yesterday, the truth of it all, the pain and suffering it implies, the justice behind that simple demand all flooded my consciousness. Those whispers I was hearing were allowed out in the hopeful act of speaking truth with my fellow city-dwellers.
I remember a protest in Red Hook about ten years ago, before “All Lives Matter” became the anti-BLM slogan. My family and I were some of the only white people marching. At one point in the protest, the chant led by the mostly Black residents of the local NYCHA housing units turned from “Black Lives Matter” to “All Lives Matter.” I was amazed at the generosity of spirit displayed by this underserved, historically oppressed community. And I was further amazed at the feeling that accompanied speaking these words out loud with others. All lives, every single one, matters. There’s no doubt that what we need to be chanting in the US is Black Lives Matter. But it’s too bad that ALM was co-opted by those standing in the way of equality. What a hopeful, prayerful statement it is – every single one of our lives – yours, mine and that of every person - matters.
May that be the lesson of our whispering past.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha