As a Black rabbi on Tisha B’Av, I’m mourning how Jews have lost Black allies since Oct. 7
The Jewish community is locked in the trauma from the Hamas attack, and our ability to find nuance is severely compromised
Friends and family members attend the funeral ceremony of Israeli soldier Staff Sergeant Aschalwu Sama, in Petah Tikva, December 3, 2023, after he was killed during combat in the Gaza Strip. Photo by Tomer Appelbaum/AFP via Getty Images
Heather Miller August 12, 2024
The following words might be shocking coming from a rabbi, but I am convinced that the traditional framing for how we prepare for Tisha B’Av seems ancient and out of touch compared to the complex grief we are reckoning with this year.
The Jewish community is locked in the trauma unleashed more than 300 days ago by Oct. 7, and our ability to listen and hold space for nuance has been severely compromised. Many Jewish leaders have abandoned long-held partnerships with Jews and non-Jews because of their feelings about the war in Gaza, especially with Jews of color and non-white communities. We have planted ourselves into “us” and “them” categories, responding to each other’s pain in shortsighted ways that aren’t going to serve us in the long term.
While the observance of this holiday does not need to change, we cannot simply dwell on the traditional calamities that Tisha B’Av marks. The American Jewish community must deeply reflect this Tisha B’Av on how our reaction to the ongoing trauma of the past year has damaged both internal and external allies.
Over the past 10 months, I have felt stuck. I have been trying to process my grief over Oct. 7 and its aftermath while leading through it as a Jewish communal leader and rabbi. I am also a Black Jew, an identity that has become even more complicated than usual since the Hamas attack and ensuing war.
As a Black person, I do not have the privilege of walking into Jewish spaces and have it be assumed that I belong. I’ve sadly grown accustomed to seeing the surprised and fearful expressions that initially flash across a person’s face when I enter a Jewish space, and the line of questioning that accompanies why I am there. But there are new questions now after Oct. 7, because the assumption is that my skin color comes with a set of beliefs about this conflict that would either grant me entry, or have the door shut in my face.
I am used to the reactivity that comes when the white-presenting Jewish community goes into “self-protection” mode after incidents of antisemitism or anti-Jewish bias. Yet this time feels different because of the pressure to have the “right view” on the war in Gaza to move through mainstream Jewish spaces.
While all Jews are feeling this pressure to some extent, there is an increased focus on Black Jews to ensure that the external tensions between Black and Jewish communities on Israel won’t become an internal tension as well. There is a demand for Jews like me to “decide” if we are Black or if we are Jewish, as if these identities are not intertwined.
Since Oct. 7, I have heard Jewish leaders say that they can no longer support the communities of color they had previously worked with because they did not fall into ideological lockstep with the Jewish community about which side they should be on in the Israel-Gaza war. It feels like many Jewish folks have seemingly thrown out all of the tools they gained from the anti-racism books they’d read and the trainings they’d attended, and fallen back into biased, victimized ways of thinking.
There is a renewed tendency to place conditions on Jewish allyship with non-white people, and increasingly the choice to burn bridges that we as American Jews desperately need to build. As a Black Jew, it is especially hard to hear this rhetoric and witness the degradation of relationships with these communities, because those communities are my communities too.
The challenges of being a Black Jew did not begin on Oct. 7. My eldest children are 16 and 15 years old, and they have been called the N-word (in English and Hebrew) more often in their young Jewish day school lives than I have in the entirety of mine. When they suffer racist insults at Jewish camp and school, there is a part of me that feels ashamed for having chosen to raise them in communities that have done them so much harm, and another part that feels blessed to have participated in the work that so many of my fellow Jews are doing to make their communities more welcoming and inclusive. That is why it is especially heartbreaking now to witness so many Jewish leaders expressing regret for including people that look like my family.
Whether we like it or not, Jews of color like me often serve as bridges who not only have challenging conversations in our Jewish communities, but also in the communities of color attached to our identities too. Sometimes those conversations dispel rumors, unravel conspiracy theories and get more people to see why we are stronger together. That bridging is made so much harder when Jewish leaders are so vocal about cutting ties and pushing those communities away.
There is a collection of Talmudic stories about the events leading up to the destruction of the Second Temple, and there’s one in particular I think about often. A man named Kamtza was on the guest list for a party, but his invitation was inadvertently sent to someone named bar Kamtza instead. When bar Kamtza arrived at the party he was approached harshly by the hosts, and despite offering to pay to remain, he was turned away from the party. To make matters worse, the Sages were reportedly witnesses to this scene, and did not intervene.
Embarrassed and humiliated, bar Kamtza ran straight to the antisemitic Roman generals and told them that the Jews were traitors who were plotting a revolt. This lie was all they needed to raze the Second Temple to the ground.
This year has been different and we have to approach this holiday differently. We cannot be the Sages who watched as bar Kamtza was excluded, humiliated and shunned. It is not enough to mourn the destruction of our Temples if we aren’t going to focus on the Temples within our contemporary Jewish communities that are on the verge of collapse.
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