Parashat Vayikra: Reflections on Adath's Civil Rights Trip

Rabbi Harold J. Kravitz
Adath Jeshurun Congregation
Minnetonka, MN
 
Parashat Vayikra
March 23, 2024
 
What we can learn from the Civil Rights Movement and Vayikra
​
As I mentioned briefly last week, a group of 39 Adath members returned from a powerful trip to the American South on a civil rights trip. It included visits to Atlanta, Birmingham, Montgomery and Selma, the very heart of where the battle for civil rights for African Americans took place in the 1960s to oppose the corrosive effects of a long history of slavery and racism with which this country continues to wrestle.

This morning is the first time I get to speak at greater length about that powerful experience. This Shabbat coincides with our beginning to read the book of Leviticus, Vayikra, which describes the sacrificial system through which the people of Israel served God until the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in the year 70 by the Romans.

I invite you to take a look at the various types of sacrifices described in this week’s portion Vayikra starting on page 585 of our Etz Hayim Chumash. You will see it describes an elaborate system of korbanot sacrifices for giving thanks, for alleviating the blot of guilt and of sin, both intentional and unintentional, and sacrifices for wellbeing. After the Torah service, I will ask us to reflect on what these sacrifices might teach us about how we respond as a country and as a Jewish people to the stain of this history of American slavery, and the continuing legacy of racism in this country

As I mentioned in my introduction to the Torah reading, I want to reflect this morning on the extraordinary 3 ½ day civil rights trip from which we returned recently. We were a group of 39 members of Adath, led by my wife Cindy and I, together with the co-chair of Adath’s Antiracism Committee Sharon Garber. You may hear of many Jewish groups taking such trips. Rabbi Davis led a similar trip for Beth El last week, with the same tour company Etgar 36, which conducts 70 such trips a year. Allow me to start by giving you a sense of what we did. It was a highlight that we got to meet and hear first-hand from people who lived through these events.
​
Our trip began in Atlanta, hearing from Lois Frank, a friend of mine from my years on the board of MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger. Lois is a respected Jewish leader in Atlanta where she is a past President of the ADL there and a widely respected figure who served as national President of the JCPA, the Jewish Council of Public Affairs. Her distinguished work on behalf civil rights goes back to her years as a college student at Emory University when she had the privilege of escorting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr to speak at school to a group of what was expected to be 35, but swelled to over 1000 people. The next morning, we started our tour on Auburn Street where Dr King was raised, succeeding his father in taking the pulpit of the modest original space of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, which is now well known.

We moved that afternoon on to Birmingham, Alabama and stood in the park across from the 16th Street Baptist Church where four little girls were killed in a bombing. We learned that, two weeks earlier, the local Conservative synagogue similarly had dynamite planted in its building, likely by the same people, that failed to go off. We met with the Rev. Bishop Calvin Woods, Jr, now 90 years old and still incredibly sharp and vibrant, as he recalled violent encounters with the infamous Sheriff Bull Connor and his men and he recounted his involvement in what became known as the Birmingham campaign working closely with Martin Luther King and other local church leaders.

An unforgettable moment of the trip was when Rich Fromstein of our group shared with Bishop Woods that his grandfather was Rabbi Milton Grafman, who had a distinguished career serving Birmingham’s Reform Temple Emanu-el. Despite the difference history records him having with Dr. King over tactics at that volatile time, Bishop Woods instantly acknowledged Rabbi Grafman and pronounced him, “a jewel of a man,” It was a moving movement for all of us.

We went on to Montgomery, AL seeing first hand a city that was the commercial center of the slave trade. Just across the street from where thousands of people were sold, we saw the spot where Rosa Parks became famous as she boarded a bus and refused to move to the back as was expected. We relived that experience, reenacted at The Rosa Parks Museum and Memorial. When this occurred, she was already a young veteran of the movement who insisted on not moving to the back not because she was tired, but rather because, as she said, “she was tired of being treated unjustly.” This small museum very effectively uses her story as a lens through which to understand the entire history of the civil rights movement.

From there we traveled to Selma to meet with Joanne Bland who as a little girl was on the Edmund Pettus Bridge when they were confronted by local police as they began their protest march to Montgomery. The police brutally beat the marchers including John Lewis, who later became a distinguished congressman, as well as Joanne’s older sister Linda, who Joanne held after she was bloodied by blows to her head that required 35 stitches. We walked across the infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge, that still bears the name of that Klansman, from which we could see the now faded sign of Tepper’s Department Store. It was owned by Sol Tepper, a Jewish community leader and a vocal advocate for segregation.

Finally, our trip ended in Montgomery, AL at the incredible National Memorial for Peace and Justice, established by Bryan Stevenson whose outstanding work as a civil rights lawyer is described in his book Just Mercy and in the fine film about him of the same name. This powerful memorial recognizes more than 4000 black people lynched in this country out of racial hatred, including 3 in Duluth in 1920. We concluded our tour at the outstanding Legacy Museum created by Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative that powerfully tells the African American story from the more than 12 million people seized from their home and sold into slavery, to the Jim Crow laws that followed the Civil War, to the excesses of mass incarceration that is a legacy of this country’s continuing systemic racism.

Our group members are still assimilating the lessons we learned and carried with us from this experience as am I. A rabbinic colleague Jay Kornsgold who recently went on a similar trip for Conservative Movement leaders, who by the way has just succeeded me as President of the Rabbinical Assembly, expressed it well when he said to me, “Seeing is believing.”

I will start with something Cindy observed, that the memorials we saw seemed to largely be established by non-profit organizations and private individuals, rather than by public entities. We would need to do more research to establish that as true, but there does appear to be a stark difference in what we saw in the South with what we experienced when we led an Adath group to Berlin in 2014. There we saw first-hand the way the German government takes so much public responsibility for the horrors perpetrated against Jews both during the Shoah and in the centuries that led up to it. In the American South we see an embrace of denial as evidenced by the call for the banning of books in schools and public libraries that reveal that painful American history.

Just this past Weds., Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed a sweeping bill to restrict the teaching of “divisive concepts” and to limit diversity, equity and inclusion programs at public schools, universities and state agencies that is similar to the so-called, “Stop Woke Act,” which was passed in Florida last. A fair description of the bill requires ones to acknowledge that the bill does not prohibit teaching curriculum “in a historically accurate context.” But apparently, it seeks to restrict any attempt to act on the lessons one would likely derive from studying that history.

This brings me to turning the mirror on us as a Jewish people. A year ago February, I participated in the Conference of Presidents of Major North American Jewish Organizations in Israel, of which I was a member the last two years. In the very last session of the conference, I sat through a presentation by Gil Troy and Michal Cotler-Wunsh, Israel’s special envoy for combatting antisemitism. Troy is a noted Jewish historian who most recently issued an updated version of a classic history of Zionism by Walter Hertzberg that he has retitled, The Zionist Ideas. Both of them launched into harsh critiques of American Jews involvement on behalf of  DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion that spread rapidly in American corporations and universities after the murder by police in Minneapolis of George Floyd. Coming from Minneapolis where we have seen the demonstrable impact of systemic racism, I was astounded by their dismissiveness of Jew’s involvement in combating racism.

Since the heinous attack of Oct 7 and the support for Hamas by some in the black community this line of thinking has been spreading more widely among Jews looking to defend Israel and Zionism. This year I again attended the Conference of Presidents and I also served as one of 180 delegates on the General Executive of the World Zionist Conference, which represents those of who affirm unapologetically the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in our ancient homeland. I was deeply disappointed to hear prominent Israeli politicians, including those I hold in high regard, go after DEI as being inherently antisemitic.

I think this is a terribly misguided idea. There is nothing wrong with calling out the excesses of DEI- diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. As Jews we have seen the way in which that effort has a serious blind spot about the reality of antisemitism. The answer to this problem is not to go after efforts to deal with the racism deeply embedded in this country that is real and evident by so many measures from housing and education disparities to continuing income and medical inequalities. The projects of the Equal Justice Initiative we visited in Montgomery demonstrates convincingly the through line that links American slavery to the Jim Crow that were imposed from the end of the American Civil War until our time, most dramatically found in much that has been written about the sins of mass incarceration in our times.

It is a huge mistake for those of us who identify as Zionists, which I do quite publicly, to attack DEI and other efforts to address systemic racism in this country. It is also a strategic blunder as it only serves to reenforce the libel that claims that Zionism is Racist. Furthermore, it undermines Jews of color, a growing portion of our Jewish community, who we need to embrace. It is both wrong and impractical to think that Israel advocates will vanquish DEI. Instead, we should be identifying appropriate allies with whom we can both advance the work of antiracism and advocate against antisemitism, and I would add against hatred in this country directed against Muslims.

With all this in mind, let us turn our attention to this week’s parasha, Vayikra, with its detailed, seemingly arcane, description of the sacrificial system that defined our people’s religion from biblical times through the destruction of the Temple and continues to influence how we understand the world. Our Torah reading lays out a system by which the people of Israel served God. Before they could enjoy the fruits of their labor as they prospered through cattle or crops, they needed to bring thanksgiving offerings to the ancient tabernacle, which developed into the Temple in Jerusalem.

The ritual described in today’s reading also provided them with a means of dealing with guilt and sin through the chatat and asham offerings. Finally, we read about the shelamim offering.

This civil rights tour brought home in a powerfully the ways so many in this country prospered by exploiting the labor of those who were brough to this country in chains, exploited and subjected to horrific oppression, treated as less than human so others could live well. There is guilt and sin in our country’s history which needs to be faced.

Our Torah portion Vayikra does not leave it there. It provides for offerings of guilt and sin in which we accept blame for misdeeds and try to create a process of cleansing. Our ancient prophets always reminded the people that it was not sufficient to go through the motions of religion to achieve purity. People’s sacrifices had to be matched with behaviors that reflected the values that were to be exemplified. The Torah as interpreted by our rabbis took this message even further, insisting that our work of seeking forgiveness from God had to be accompanied by restitution and asking forgiveness in order to effect true repentance.

One cannot come away from the trip we just took without seeing the enormous injustice inflicted on African Americans. Although the family of most Jews in this country arrived in this country well after the Civil War, we cannot wash our hands of this sin. The fact that we have a long history of contending with antisemitism that is coming at us now with increased tenacity, does not permit us to ignore the wrongs that face others. Since most of us present as white skinned, we have been able to have the privileges that whiteness has long bestowed, and so we need to do our part to address it.

This takes us to another kind of sacrifice describe in this portion, that of the shelamim- the peace offering, or the offering of well-being. Talmud Scholar Ilana Kurshan describes the “shelamim- the well-being/peace offering- as the opposite of the sin and guilt offerings. The word shelamim comes from the Hebrew words shalom and shalem, meaning peace and wholeness. The shelamim sacrifice, once offered, is shared by the donor and the priests. Whereas the individual who has sinned is caught up in an inner conflict, the individual who is whole and has achieved inner peace can reach out and share with others.”

This week portion falls at a good time for us to consider the lessons that many of us have seen firsthand in our trip of the American South. Adath’s Antiracism Committee works to help our congregation grapple with the fact that the sins of the South extended to the North, including in MN. Let us learn from the hattat and asham offerings the importance of accepting responsibility and taking steps to acknowledge and atone for it that we may ultimately reach the kind of wholeness, integrity and peace that are ultimately achieved by the those who are shalem.