Telling the Whole Story: Reflections on a Trip to the American South

Adapted from a sermon given at Temple Beth Am on March 26, 2022.

My first conscious engagement with the Civil War that I can remember was in 7th grade, when we were assigned the novel “Across Five Aprils.” My first conscious engagement with a Black African American was a girl named Crystal, who I learned later was bussed from an economically challenged New Haven neighborhood to my nearly all-white suburban elementary school in Woodbridge, CT. Having just returned from a fascinating, illuminating, crushing and in many ways extraordinary trip with Temple Beth Am to the American South, I am now, nearly 40 years later, reconsidering what those encounters with a war and with a person really meant — and how they were lacking.

I have not read “Across Five Aprils” since 7th grade, but I remember the plot to be about a family with sons who fought on opposite sides of the Civil War. As a 7th-grader, I was impacted by the poignancy of the narrative. But perhaps I was oblivious to the poignancy that should have suffused any study of that material. I remember it being a novel about brother against brother — a family divided, civil war as its own detached horror, one that puts one brother in a position to have to violate his family commitment in order to fulfill his military, national one. 

 As a sibling who loved my family, that story pierced my heart. And yet I have no recollection of the novel itself, or our discussion of it addressing the essential thing the war was about: the centuries-old dispossession, enslavement, dehumanization and brutalization of Africans ripped from their homes in order to serve white men in the New World. In Hebrew we would say ikar haser min hasefer. The main point was missing from the book. My first encounter with the Civil War was a story denuded of the principal incivility of the conditions that created that war. I wonder if your schooling was similar or different.

 I remember that Crystal stood out, because she was Black. She was, for most of us Woodbridge kids, the first Black person we had ever met. I never once thought about what that experience was like for her. If I am honest, there is a good chance I was unkind to her at some point, perhaps even in a way that would now be seen as borderline racist. Kids notice things. They are aware of obvious distinctions, and skin color is one of them. Kids say things. I am sure that was a part of what took place in that 3rd grade melting pot.

 But I don’t think it was the dominant thing that took place. For the most part, Crystal was a classmate of mine, nothing more or less. So my first encounter with race went right to the heart of the debate still raging today, when identity politics wage battle with forces that ask us to transcend race. Dr. King’s dream that his children be judged not by the color of their skin but the content of their character is wielded by both sides of this battle, with one saying that the conditions are not yet right, not yet a sufficient disassembling of the racist history and structures that formed the evolving United States of America, for us to think that we can be beyond race; and another side saying that the way to get beyond race is to get beyond race. 

 I think of myself in Mrs. Shapiro’s class at Beecher Road School. And Crystal. And our interactions. I didn’t really know enough to know what her dark skin said about her family’s history, about the very way her ancestors almost certainly arrived to these shores. Maybe that was how it should be, my innocent and also uninformed self essentially rejecting identity politics before the phrase became a phrase? She was just a classmate. Isn’t that the goal, Dr. King? Or maybe it was an erasure, as well: an unconscious erasure, but an erasure nonetheless, given that I looked at her face and skin and didn’t see shackles. I didn’t see her ancestors on a plantation. I didn’t see how parts of my white American comfort — which is due in many ways to the doggedness and vision of my own ancestors who came to these shores under great duress, and with great obstacles in front of them — were also due in some inherited way to the very healthy economy that has its origins in the oppressive labor of this young girl’s great-great-great-grandparents.

Race and American history are complex. This is what made our trip so difficult, and so important. It was spending Shabbat at a joyful, active Conservative shul in New Orleans. It was visiting and bringing life and song to old-but-nearly dying shuls in Natchez and Vicksburg and Selma. And it was opening our pores, as Americans and Jews, and letting the full story of the American south penetrate our consciousness with no barriers.

 That included the Whitney Plantation, which I liken to a visit to Auschwitz or Majdanek, telling the story of the place from the perspective of the oppressed and murdered, not of the “genteel” antebellum southerners. It’s a brutal visit, appropriately. And the trip included the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, telling Rosa’s story of how a young woman who would not get up got so many others up in holy revolution.

 The trip included a visit to the Legacy Museum, from Slavery to Incarceration, alongside the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, colloquially referred to as the “Lynching Museum,” which tells a comprehensive and unvarnished story of the experience of slavery, the terrible inadequacies of Reconstruction, the era of Jim Crow and lynchings, leading to the Civil Rights movement and reinforcing how much of modern America, in ways we do not want to think about, are linked to this bloody and shameful history. 

 The trip also included a visit to the Old Oaks cemetery in Selma, home to the grave of a former U.S. Vice President, hundreds of Jews in their own section, the grave of at least one Black person, Benjamin Turner, who went from being a slave to being the first Black member of the U.S. Congress, and also to a Confederate Circle, with a tribute to Nathan Bedford Forrest, a co-founder and first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, dozens of Confederate flags dotting the aesthetically beautiful cemetery, and plaques telling the story of the “war of northern aggression,” or the “war between the states,” alongside the need to preserve southern culture and sensitivities. 

 Again, our kaleidoscopic, magnificent, miraculous country, which fought and won a war to emancipate the slaves, and which remains a beacon of freedom in a world that seems to lack more of that freedom with every passing week — is a country that is fraught. And its history is painful to encounter, when all the prisms and -isms are stripped away, and all you have are the raw facts.

 As many of you know, I spend the overwhelming majority of my time from the pulpit teaching Torah, the tradition, and steering away from raw punditry. I am not a scholar of American history. I don’t return from this trip an expert in any of this. But I have been a solemn witness, and so I choose, today, to use this pulpit to share what it is that I witnessed, and share how a Jew who seeks wisdom in our ancient texts might continue to think about these very ideas.

What does Torah say about partial, sanitized narratives? What does Torah say about the pathway to learning and redemption? A lot, in fact.

What does Torah say about partial, sanitized narratives? What does Torah say about the pathway to learning and redemption? A lot, in fact. I would say that the Torah celebrates full, unedited stories of what actually happened. And the Torah would say that the pathway to liberation, reconciliation and growth goes through the darkest muck of history. 

The most dangerous rebellion against Moshe and God comes from Korach and his minions. The rebellion is put down. God’s authority is restored. The wicked get their due. But the story, in all its ugly brutality, is not forgotten. It is actually consecrated. God tells Moshe, as the embers of the conflagration representing Korach’s defeat are still smoldering, “et mahtot hahataim ha’eleh b’nafshotam va’asu otam riku’ei fahim tzipui lamizbe’ah, ki hikrivum lifnei adonai vayikdashu vayihyu l’ot livnei Israel.”  Those fire pans belonging to the sinners? Hammer them into sheets and put them on the altar. They are sacred. And they will serve as a reminder. The Israelites’ relationship with God will go right through the story of some Israelites’ rejection of God. The full story will be told. And the darkest parts of it will be adjacent to the holiest ritual place that exists. CTT: Critical Torah Theory, if you will.

 Earlier in the story we learn that parts of the mishkan, God’s home on earth, were made using the mirrors that Israelite women took with them out of Egypt. There are two main midrashic/interpretive thrusts explaining this detail. Some say these mirrors were holy, as it was with them that the women, even when enslaved, wooed their husbands by showing coquettish, teasing faces in the reflection, thus resisting the culture of death by eking out of it love and new life. Others say the mirrors were symbols of vanity, the very vanity of paganism that informed and undergirded the culture of slavery that trapped them. In that reading, it would have been a relief, an unshackling, to discard those freighted objects and build sacred life anew. But no. The symbols of their degradation become an essential piece of future sanctification.

 And in our parsha, Shmini, a similar theme emerges. I am so taken by a commentary on Shmini offered by Rabbi Aviva Richman of the Hadar Institute. She reminds us that while Shmini focuses on Aaron, and his role in the eight-day ceremony to consecrate the new tabernacle, the story does not take place in a vacuum. In fact, when did we see Aaron, Moshe’s brother, last? At the Golden Calf: the egel hazahav. Ever since we saw him carousing and sinning and sullying the name of God, he has been absent in the story — until he is invited to offer the inaugural sacrifice in the mishkan.

 And what is that sacrifice he is commanded to offer? An egel, of course. A calf. It’s as if to say that the proper performance of God’s will must evoke and remember, with haunting specificity, the most improper way a Hebrew ever related to God. This time, the structure and setting in which Aaron will make the sacrifice are exactly as God wants them to be. But as he stands in his public role, he is reminded with uncanny overlap of how derelict, how broken, how unforgivable and how damaging the path has been to this moment, including his direct role in it.

 I am challenged and inspired by this interpretation. The interpretation does not endlessly blame Aaron for the golden calf. He is, in this scene, a respected elder and leader, the father of every future priest. But it does implicate him in his past, and force him to reckon with it, without cleaning it up too much. 

 We Americans must go through yet more darkness to find our national light. As with all things reduced to slogans and acronyms, there is nothing simple about how history is taught in our country. Some folks see CRT (Critical Race Theory) for some of its glaring flaws, for ways in which it seems to suggest that every white person, no matter that person’s own origin story, is walking through American life as in a conceptual coffle, shackled to the sins of white men who led Black men, women and children in physical coffles, shackling them to slavery for generations. 

 Some folks see within CRT too many facile associations to the dangerous aspects of intersectionality, which inevitably makes an enemy of the Jew, the Israeli, the Zionist. But others say that the words themselves, “critical race theory,” ramifying way beyond the hackneyed initials, are about confronting our own history honestly, without defensiveness. Studying and teaching history this way is the ideological cousin to Korach’s fire-pans and idolatrous mirrors hammered into the mishkan, and to Aaron’s return to esteemed leadership being by means of his own tour through his devastating sinfulness.

 At the Whitney Plantation, I purchased the book “The Half Has Never Been Told.” It was written by Cornell professor Edward Baptist, and its title stems from a testimony offered by a former slave, Lorenzo Ivy, as part of a WPA program initiated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to collect the narratives of former slaves before they were all deceased. There is a half of American history that still, to this day, among well-meaning, non-consciously-racist, generally ethical and compassionate and educated Americans, has never been told. This book, which is not without its controversy and critiques, tries to tell it. 

 I am only just diving into it, but one of its notions is worth sharing here, and that is the decades-old American fetishization of the notion that slavery was a uniquely southern, regional, parochial enterprise, disconnected from the larger arc of the evolution of the United States. Baptist makes the argument that, at the very least, no cotton garment, no tobacco product, no tea sweetened with sugar was removed, at any distance, from the scourge of chattel slavery, and that that association remains true today even as economies have been transformed and reborn.  

 But that’s just the beginning. In his words:

“The practices of white enslavers rapidly transformed the southern states into the dominant force in the global cotton market, and cotton was the world’s most widely traded commodity at the time. The returns from the cotton monopoly powered the modernization of the rest of the American economy, and by the time of the Civil War, the U.S. had become the second nation to undergo large-scale industrialization. In fact, slavery’s expansion shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of the new nation, increasing its power and size…The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth.”

 In other words, the very thriving and wealth of an America that was able to welcome and absorb so many of our own ancestors as they came searching for their own freedom from oppression was built, literally and figuratively, on the backs of those suffering indescribable oppression. That is not our fault. It is not our guilt. We were not the perpetrators. But we are inheritors. And we must, as Jews and Americans, gild our altars to God, goodness and freedom with those terrible truths.

We are a wonderful, admirable society. But we are not out from under that cloud. The DNA of our nation’s original sin remains in this organism.

We are a wonderful, admirable society. But we are not out from under that cloud. The DNA of our nation’s original sin remains in this organism. We can disagree as to the extent, but not, I don’t think, about the concept itself. 

 There is no way to wrap this up neatly. I am still in the nascent stages of digesting my own experience. I’m not even 50 pages into the first book I committed to read as a result of our shul trip. 

 Who knows? Perhaps “Across Five Aprils” is a wonderful historical novel, and goes deeper into the issues than I remember. Who knows? Perhaps Crystal has pleasant memories of elementary school, of being treated essentially as a classmate.

 Who knows? Perhaps the greatest honor I can give to the next Black or African American face I look into is to see them as I see myself, a human being, a child of God, an American, a person deserving of respect and love independent of skin color, ancestry and personal history. 

 And who knows? Maybe the greatest honor I can give to such a person is to look into his or her eyes, and discern the centuries of tears that accumulate in that person’s inherited memory, see not only that person, free by law and hopefully by circumstance, but also a descendant of slavery, lynching and disenfranchisement and never being quite allowed to just be — just as I want a non-Jew to see in my eyes not only a full human, but also the ashes of the Holocaust/Shoah, the suffering of the Inquisition, the misery and tragedy of the destruction of Jerusalem, the very heaviness of being a Jew that we claim as part of our inheritance.

Who knows, indeed? But in order to try to know, we have to listen. And explore. And study.  And be willing to build future sanctuaries and societies out of the instruments of the processes that once weighed them down, and whose stain remains visible. It is from such darkness, and only such darkness, that light will ever emerge. 

Shabbat Shalom

Rabbi Adam Kligfeld is the senior rabbi at Temple Beth Am.