As I write this message for the March issue of The Shofar, the snowfall that began a few hours ago is deepening on my property. From the windows of my office here at home, I can see it accumulating, hanging heavy on the pine trees. It is still February as I write, a time designated to observe Black History Month. And like every year at this time, and just a night or two ago, I re-read John Lewis’s prologue to his book, Walking With the Wind. It strikes me today that as the two elements converge — the snowstorm’s purifying whiteness and feeling of renewal, and the words from that towering figure for civil rights, they help me grapple with the terrifying situation in the State of Israel that haunts me daily — a time of fear for the survival of the Jewish homeland, its people, and citizens displaced in Gaza. But as thoughts coalesce, they deliver courage.
John Lewis’ story (reprinted below) focuses on circumstances close to him, and yet I see in that story a universality that points just as determinably to circumstances close to me — foundational from ancient times that, perhaps more than ever before, touch me, enrage me, shock me, but strengthen resolve. May you find the setting — the cleansing snow blanket and John Lewis’s words — as aspirational as I do.
Sara Bloom
“Walking With The Wind”
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, lighting flashed far off in the distance, and suddenly I wasn’t thinking about playing anymore; I was terrified…
Aunt Seneva was the only adult around, and as the sky blackened and the wind grew stronger, she 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 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 clasp hands. “Line up and hold hands,” she said, 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.
It seemed that way in the 1960s, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, when America itself felt as if it might burst at the seams — so much tension, so many storms. But the people of conscience never left the house. They never ran away. They stayed, they came together, and they did the best they could, clasping hands and moving toward the corner of the house that was the weakest.
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.
And we still do, all of us. You and I. Children holding hands, walking with the wind…
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