I logged onto the livestream of Shabbat morning services at B’nai Jeshurun, a 200-year-old, non-affiliated synagogue in New York City. (Side note: I was one small degree of separation from BJ when I worked for Rabbi Rachel Cowan, z”l, in the mid-1990s, but alas, in my early 20s, I was not yet at a point on my Jewish journey to appreciate what getting involved might have offered me.) In any case, when our local services were canceled due to snow, the opportunity to check out services presented itself. I was not disappointed. I spent the morning making small watercolor paintings as I sang along with the three rabbis at the bimah whose voices blended so beautifully.

What I didn’t know when I hopped on YouTube was that there would be a special guest speaker that morning in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. My soul was tenderized after two hours of praying and following along with the Torah service when Rabbi Felicia Sol introduced Eric Ward, a writer, civil rights strategist, Executive Vice President of Race Forward, and a former Senior Fellow with the Southern Poverty Law Center.

I listened closely as she spoke:

“Belonging, not fear, is the foundation of a just society,” she began. “In a moment… when the Jewish community has been filled with a lot of fear and is pulling away from intersectional spaces, and there’s been a lot of challenge around the intersection of antisemitism and racism, and the Jewish community has not always had the resilience to stay and try to work through where there’s challenge… Eric has been a gem.”

She went on to address Ward directly: “I want to thank you not only for your persistence and your commitment and your saying hard things when we need to hear them, but for staying, which is not always true for many, many people…”

I want to pause here to tell you something. When Rabbi Sol said the words “pulling away from intersectional spaces,” I nodded, recognizing my own reticence around formerly welcoming intersectional spaces that became hostile to anyone who expressed a shred of solidarity with Israel after October 7, 2023.

I also need to say that I noticed how defensively I reacted, internally, when she said, “the Jewish community has not always had the resilience to stay…” This isn’t easy for me to admit, but you need to know this part of my whole truth.

The Jewish community didn’t have the resilience to stay? Stay, when we were called baby-killers? Stay, when Jewish students were being ostracized and alienated? Stay, when we were lectured about what counted as antisemitism, despite years of practicing “impact over intent,” stay, when hostage posters with babies’ faces were torn down, when Israeli survivors of sexual violence were ridiculed and doubted?

Like I said: Defensive.

I also know better, and I also knew that there was some truth in it, a truth maybe I didn’t and don’t particularly want to face or grapple with. But grapple I must, because the Jewish people are not the only people in peril. We are all connected, and to forget this would be a terrible casualty of my own trauma.

I am not ashamed of burrowing into Jewish spaces and relationships with such passion and ferocity. I am not willing to disavow my whole complex Jewish self to be nominally or conditionally accepted by the progressive left. But these do not diminish my commitment to civil rights, socioeconomic and racial justice, human rights, immigrant rights, women’s rights, LGBTQIA rights, interfaith work, multiracial belonging, education, the arts, freedom of speech, and the hope of living in a country where these are paramount and, most importantly, constitutionally protected.

In a word, I was ready to listen with an open mind and heart to Eric Ward, who began his talk with an invitation I fully took him up on: “Take a breath with me. Not a polite breath. A true breath.”

(Go ahead, try it. Never gets old.) Eric Ward at B’nai Jeshurun, January 17, 2026 // image screenshotted by the author from @BjOrgNYC on YouTube (screenshot used in accordance with Clause 27a of copyright law)

Ward spoke of MLK Day as not a tribute, but a covenant. He spoke clearly, compellingly, and challengingly about the relationship between racism and antisemitism and how, together, they pit us against each other and create a wedge that “breaks our ability to tell the truth about power.”

He warned of what the Torah warns us this week: That “a hardened heart is what happens when suffering becomes background noise, and cruelty becomes routine.” When a society gets trained to harden its heart, when we forget how to hold grief without turning into hate, when we forget the multiracial and interfaith requirements of a “grown-up” democracy, that’s when we’re in real trouble.

None of those requires uniformity of politics, perspectives, or beliefs. What it does require is something far more precious, and potentially more difficult: A refusal to harden our hearts. He insisted that our work is to show that it’s possible to “hold tension and still belong to each other.”

He ended the talk with a vow, “out loud, so it does not just remain a nice idea.”

“No more rehearsal. Divide and........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)