Yom Kippur Haftorah: Black Lives Matter |
Yom Kippur Haftorah: Black Lives Matter
Medium
2016-10-12
 The opening chapter of a handwritten Book of Esther. source: Wikipedia |
You shall love people — including Black people — with all your heart
I shared this with my synagogue during Yom Kippur 5777 Shacharit services.
To grow up Black in America is to know that your humanity is always in question.
I have a lot of memories of this from my childhood, but one stands out in particular.
When I was 15, I was thrown out of a New Year’s Eve party because Black people — or as they repeatedly shouted at me, N-words — were not welcome.
Later, when I was an 18 year old college sophomore, a white Jewish leader of Harvard Hillel yelled at me that I was an anti-Semite because I was at a peace rally organized by Arab students. She could not imagine that someone my color was an Ashkenazi Jew too.
Now at 34, every time my mother calls me, I think it’s to tell me one of my cousins is dead. Or in jail. A couple of weeks ago a phone call from a cousin was in fact about another one who was in jail, falsely accused by a white person who wanted to teach her a lesson…
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Tags: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Medium