After everything it took to get out of Egypt and walk the first three months through the desert to Sinai, with three days of special preparation we stood at the base of the mountain, listening. We waited for Revelation (or whatever was coming next). We did not know what was coming! We did not know for sure if we were on the right path, or in the right place. “Could this desolate spot be the place? Why here?”
I felt similarly almost five years ago about joining Rabbi Jill Jacobs and the T’ruah crew on a rabbinic mission to visit the Legacy Museum: From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, and the Memorial for Peace and Justice (which memorializes over 4,000 victims of racial terror lynchings), both projects of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Montgomery, AL.
I thought, “Shouldn’t something this important be in DC where more people will see it?!” And especially as a northern white Jewish person, I wondered if Alabama wasn’t too far into the dangerous wilderness.
With that attitude alone, I probably would not have gone. But somehow I felt the calling (“T’ruah”) to rabbis. So just like many of those former Hebrew slaves, somewhat reluctantly, I left my comfortable place in Denver and journeyed to the “mount” of Montgomery. And perhaps like those ancient Hebrews, with my fellow Jews I wondered, “Why here? What next?”
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From then until this day, when I attempt to describe to people what these EJI projects are about, they cringe. I can see it in their disturbed faces as I talk about slavery, lynchings, and mass incarceration. But I believe it is exactly this uncomfortable journey we must take if we wish to make progress towards the Promised Land.
And I think again about our ancestors at the base of Sinai. There are so many midrashim about what they heard and saw there. Revelation in their own language in a way they could understand. The silence of the opening aleph. Maybe they saw the “Or HaGanuz,” the primordial light of creation that God hid away for a future time, in which one could see the connections of all life everywhere across time and space.
Perhaps in that primordial light, looking both backward and forward in time, they also saw the painful, difficult truths of life and history: what we know but keep at arm’s length lest it overwhelm and demoralize us, the places we have missed the mark and will again. I would suggest that, though they didn’t really want that part of the revelation, it was essential to their liberation.
Perhaps only by receiving at Sinai both the Holy and the Profane, the joyful and the painful, would they merit reaching the Promised Land.
And I hear Rebbe Nachman saying: “Anyone who wants to experience a taste of the Or HaGanuz — i.e., the mysteries of the Torah that will be revealed in the Future — must elevate the aspect of fear to its source.” (Likutei Moharan 15:1:2) We are called to elevate the difficult truths, and sometimes our complicity in them, in order to “lift them up” for tikkun — for fixing.
The work of the Equal Justice Initiative and the museum and memorial site in Montgomery gives us exactly that opportunity. For me, it is both a horrible and a beautiful revelation as an American — a revelation that is upsetting and fills me with a sense of purpose. Perhaps, like our ancestors as they left Sinai, I left Montgomery with more energy and passion and compassion for my mission on the journey towards the great promise of democracy in America.
Now I can not be an American, a Jew, a rabbi, without working to acknowledge and repair and eventually erase the scourge of racism in this country.
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Rabbi Jacobs said she brought us because, as leaders, we would hopefully be bringing people to EJI in Montgomery in the future. Wisely, she understood that it is difficult to lead and simultaneously to learn and feel these powerful teachings at the same time. I returned to Denver with a passion to return with members of The Multifaith Leadership Forum of Metro Denver, which I lead. And exactly a year ago I did just that, co-leading a multifaith and multiracial trip of 21 leaders to Montgomery.
Since then, the Colorado Lynching Memorial has been launched, and we helped designate a site recognition in Denver and Limon, CO. One of my ministers just returned from bringing her church group to Montgomery. And my co-leader, an African American who directs the Colorado Council of Churches, brought a taste of his ancestral food to my Passover seder. And the work continues.
For me, the EJI sites in Montgomery are a major and incredibly important pilgrimage site in America. I expect I will be returning at least every three to five years. If the museum were in DC, where people could drop in as one among many museums, it would lose something. Part of the power comes from the pilgrimage, the dedicated journey to this site.
As my teacher Rabbi Art Green comments on the Chasidic text Sefat Emet about Shavuot, “The real revelation of Torah is the uncovering of the great secret of existence: that everything is animated by the single life-force that derives from the word of God.” (Language of Truth, p. 400) Good and evil are both part of that life force. And it is up to us to unify, to lift up, to return it all to the Source. Just as the rabbis did when they edited Isaiah (Isaiah 45:7) in our morning “yotzer” prayer, changing “evil” to “all,” so may we, as we hopefully re-experience the revelation of Shavuot, unify both the good and evil in our history as Americans, and take strong next steps to a redeemed country.
Rabbi Steve Booth-Nadav runs the Multifaith Leadership Forum of Metro Denver and is the Chaplain at Kavod Senior Life. He is a 1992 graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and a founding member of Ohalah, The Alliance of Rabbis for Jewish Renewal.
