As I write this message, incidents of antisemitism are rising worldwide — in schools, on academic campuses, in synagogues, malls, gathering places.
Thousands of miles away, Israel is at war. My friend Judith and I talk every day about Israel and the vulnerabilities of the people and the country itself. She tells me about the sirens, how little children race through the streets to safety in bomb shelters. “Even at their age, they know what the alarms mean,” she says. She tells me how at the sound of the sirens, mothers lie face down on the ground to protect their children with their own bodies.
She has family there, as do many of our shul members. They live the war and the fear of its consequences every day.
Here at home, our shul community is meeting unexpected challenges. As president, I live that conflict every day. Just as I know in my heart that Israel will survive this latest hurt, I know our shul will conquer its challenges and continue moving forward with strength, with initiative, with success.
There have been times in my own life, when I have faced darkness. I have a secret weapon that gets me through troubling times. I go to my file drawer, and I seek out the one marked “John Lewis,” the legendary U.S. Representative and civil rights icon, and I read the prologue to his book, Walking With The Wind. I’m going to share it with you here — share it in the hope that John Lewis’s words may serve as a metaphor for the struggle in Israel, the ugliness of antisemitism, and a temporary period of unrest here in our own spiritual home — that his story may give you hope for the future, as it does me, and that faith in what the people there, and yes, here, too, can overcome together.
John Lewis wrote, “About 15 of us children were outside my aunt Seneva’s house, playing in her dirt yard. The sky began clouding over, the wind started picking up, lightning flashed far off in the distance, and suddenly I wasn’t thinking about playing anymore; I was terrified…
As the sky blackened, and the wind grew stronger, Aunt Seneva herded us all inside. Her house was not the biggest place around, and it seemed even smaller with so many children squeezed inside. Small and surprisingly quiet. All of the shouting and laughter that had been going on earlier, outside, had stopped. The wind was howling now, and the house was starting to shake. We were scared. Even Aunt Seneva was scared.
And then it got worse. Now the house was beginning to sway. The wood plank flooring beneath us began to bend. And then, a corner of the room started lifting up. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. None of us could. This storm was actually pulling the house toward the sky. With us inside it.
That was when Aunt Seneva told us to line up and hold hands, and we did as we were told.
Then she had us walk as a group toward the corner of the room that was rising. From the kitchen to the front of the house we walked, the wind screaming outside, sheets of rain beating on the tin roof. Then we walked back in the other direction, as another end of the house began to lift.
And so it went, back and forth, 15 children walking with the wind, holding that trembling house down with the weight of our small bodies.
More than half a century has passed since that day, and it has struck me more than once over those many years that our society is not unlike the children in that house, rocked again and again by the winds of one storm or another, the walls around us seeming at times as if they might fly apart. And then another corner would lift, and we would go there. And eventually, inevitably, the storm would settle, and the house would still stand. But we knew another storm would come, and we would have to do it all over again. And we did. We still do. Children holding hands, walking with the wind…”
May the winds of war sweep clean Israel’s enemies. May prejudice and hate be carried aloft, never to return to Earth. May our shul thrive in the warming breeze of harmony.
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