Indigenous Land Acknowledgement: A Jewish Version

In Canada, as part of a path of Reconciliation with the First Nations people for the harm caused to them, many gatherings open with an acknowledgement that the land where we are holding our meeting, synagogue service or conference on belonged to First Nations people. Here is a version I wrote (see notes for full attributions of component parts) that evokes Jewish intention, Jewish texts and speaks to our experience as both an oppressed people and a people who currently benefit from the effects of colonialism in our country. 

I will be using it at my seder this year.

Let me know what you think.

 

The Acknowledgement can be downloaded as a pdf here:

Land acknowledgement

Full text is available at :

Open Siddur Project -Land Acknowledgement

Strange Thought: A new take on Loving the Stranger

Crossposted at Jewschool and Reconstructing Judaism

When newspaper style guides started adopting “they” and “their” as singular, gender-neutral pronouns a friend told me, “I get why this should be done. It is the right thing to do. But it is going to be really hard for me to switch. It is not going to just roll off my tongue.” His words reminded me of someone who was on a rabbi search committee who was interviewing a female rabbis for the first time who confided, “I know I should give these women a fair shake, but it is not how I grew up. When I close my eyes and picture a rabbi, I see a beard and hear a man’s voice. If I do this I will be going against my gut feeling and not just now but for years when I will see them on the bimah”. Both these people made a significant effort to adjust their own thoughts and words and what go against what felt “natural”, to do what was difficult and unfamiliar because they wanted to bring forward a more just world.

During the Passover season we hear a lot about the biblical verses commanding us to love the stranger because we were strangers in the land of Egypt (Leviticus 19:33-3 and Deuteronomy 10:18-19). These verses have been used for generations to underline our Jewish obligation to care for the oppressed and marginalized and to advocate for refugees and immigrants.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks discusses how these verses refers not only to our actions but to our words, thoughts and emotions. He writes that God wants us to “fight the hatred in our hearts, “as our inclination at first is not to love the stranger, but to fear or hate them”.

Extending this metaphorical reading of these verses suggests that it is not just “strange” people that we need to accept despite our prejudices, but to create positive change we need to embrace unfamiliar ideas and habits of mind. For justice to proceed, we must allow in thoughts that are unfamiliar and ways of talking and acting that at first seem strange to us.

The ethicist Moses Pava writes that the commandment to love the stranger “challenges the very notion of a static and unchanging community” because it asks us to continually broaden our notion of community, which also forces us to “to transcend our current conceptions of who ‘we’ are.” He observes that to love the stranger we must transgress the status quo. Since the commandment is one that we are always obliged to do, it means we cannot allow ourselves to be comfortable once we have alleviated one form of oppression, but once comfortable with our new reality, push ourselves through uncomfortable ways yet again.

Just as every year the haggadah tells us we must see ourselves as if we personally left Egypt and were personally redeemed from oppression, so every year we must push ourselves out of our comfort zones and try to embrace new and “strange” habits of mind and thoughts. We cannot rely on what was once difficult and brave for us but is now part of our regular internal conversation or behaviour.

It is not enough to have stood with civil rights protests fifty years ago if your community is not supporting Black Lives Matter today. If thirty years ago you began including the matriarchs in your prayers, it may be time to stretch to something like female God language, which might make you feel as uncomfortable now as you did then. If twenty years ago you instituted having men involved in clearing up and washing the seder dishes, it is time to examine the cleaning, shopping, cooking and meal-planning. If you once championed inclusion at your JCC by having ramps and accessible washrooms, it is time to turn your eye to access to programming. Loving the stranger means stretching to new and previously uncomfortable places. For the child of the stranger becomes a native-born and the strange new words that we stumble through with brave intention but slower speech flow easily off the tongues of our children.

The Othering of Tzedaka in Jewish Education

Crossposted at EJewishPhilanthropy

PENNY IN THE PUSHKA
Penny in the pushka,
Penny in the pot,
We give tzedakah right before Shabbat.
Counting all the pennies, nickels, quarters, too
It’s fun to help each other,
It’s what we ought to do.
One for the family without enough to eat,
One for the poor folks that live down the street,
One for the little girl who learns in special ways,
And one for Israel and that is why we say…..

This is a song that countless children learn at Jewish day school and Hebrew school. On the face of it, the song reinforces the important mitzvah of giving tzedakah. However, something about the song always bothered me. At first I thought it was because it emphasized giving money as the sole method of giving Tzedakah, which in many senses is the easiest. Money does not force us to interact with a person in need who may be different from us; it does not force us to see difficult situations or real suffering in person.

In the past decades Jewish educators have made great strides in transforming Tzedakah and Tikun Olam from sterile money-collecting enterprises to deep, experiential learning and giving. In eye-opening programs children have given food and clothing had conversations with homeless people, served dinners in shelters, performed at nursing homes, cleaned parks, built homes and visited the sick.

As commendable and necessary as these changes are, I feel we are compelled to go farther. The problem with the song is that the ones we are helping are always framed as “the other,” (even if it is not the case in reality). We, the singers of the song, the teachers, the students in the class, are the “Givers,” who help the poor, those with special needs or those who do not have enough to eat. The idea that the children in our schools, or their families or neighbours may be those who are poor, who may not have enough to eat, who have complex needs or mental illness is never brought up in the context of Tzedakah in the classroom. If this were in fact true of the school population we would have a big problem in our community in that Jewish education would be only available to those who never struggled with these issues. (And it is a problem in that it is less available to those who do struggle). Jewish schools do have students who fit in to these categories and do have students who don’t lack for food but do require tuition subsidies and do have complex needs or have family members who do. By presenting those students as “Other,” as outside the defined “We,” who are the “Givers” but not the “Receivers,” we risk making those legitimate needs fell shameful and the receivers of help feel like that cannot speak of their experience in the communal conversation. It also risks allowing the student who sees himself or herself as a “giver” but not a “receiver” as thinking of herself or himself as being in a different group than those who do receive, and often subconsciously as being in a superior group.

While for privacy reasons we should not identify who gets a Pesach food hamper or who gets a tuition subsidy, we should acknowledge that they are among us; that they are indeed, Us.

We teach children that even those who receive tzedakah must also give tzedakah (Gittin 7b,). We need to look in the other direction as well. To borrow a phrase from another religion, we need a bit more of the sense of “but for the grace of God go I.” Students need to be reminded that we are all also recipients of the tzedakah of others: the donors of the buildings we learn in, the countless volunteer hours of those who make our shuls and schools possible, and the professionals who serve our community, making sacrifices to do so. A community is made of those who give and those who receive — and we are all both.

Getting in the mood for Pesach

My favourite way to get inspired for my seders is  watching the classic Freedom Seder  which took place on April 4, 1969, the first anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, the third night of Passover.

Hundreds of people of varied racial and religious communities gathered in a Black church in the heart of Washington DC to celebrate the original Freedom Seder. For the first time, it [explicitly] intertwined the ancient story of liberation from Pharaoh with the story of Black America’s struggle for liberation, and the liberation of other peoples as well.

Enjoy a young Arthur Waskcow and Rabbi Balfour Brickner and Rev. Channing Phillips. Rev. Phillips tells abortion jokes. It was filmed by the CBC. (Yes you have your 1960s era well funded Canadian public broadcaster to thank for this historic footage.)

You can get a copy of the haggadah in pdf here.

If anyone wants a copy of my current haggadah, let me know.