One of the things I love most about traveling in the United States is going over big bridges. Bridges help us pass over otherwise arduous obstacles, a hand of God lifting us over on wings of eagles. Passing over a bridge is a journey into the unknown, a journey of hope and clarity, from the clouds to the sun. Faith is about a willingness to cross over.
Some of the people we meet are bridges — those whose essence it is to lift us over and tell us, “It’s all water under; you can start over.” As we continue our journey through the holy lands of America, we continue to discover the beautiful places and beautiful people who do holy work.
On Sunday, we blessed a new community center in Lansdale, PA. On Monday, we visited Charlottesville, VA, where we offered a prayer for the memory of Heather Heyer. She was killed in 2017, when a man rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters. From there, we witnessed new life being baptized in Asheville, NC. It was in Nashville, TN, where our tour started following the trail of the Civil Rights Movement in the South. One was the locations was the iconic Woolworth store in which a group of Blacks, in an act of civil disobedience, pushed forward against segregation at the lunch counter.
We celebrated Shabbat in Birmingham, AL, the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King and members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference staged nonviolent civil rights demonstrations and were arrested. From his cell, Dr. King authored “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” a powerful piece of writing and a seminal text for the American Civil Rights Movement. Our friends, Bethany and Rabbi Stephen Slater, the spiritual leader of Temple Beth El, led us on a tour through town that teaches about the connections of the Jewish community to the Black movements.
Then we crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on the way to Montgomery, the scene of the Civil Rights March of 1965. Five years earlier, in March 1960, student activists from Miles College had begun department store sit-ins in Montgomery, demanding the end of segregation and discriminatory hiring. That bridge became a symbol of the transition from segregation to integration. In like manner, the event itself became a bridge.
My friend, the Rev. Jerria CurDaun Martin, whom I met a decade ago on a special program of Jewish and Christian seminarians to the Holy Land, was ordained at the Princeton Theological Seminary and returned to be active in her native Selma. In 2016 she was the first woman to run for Selma’s mayor. In one lifetime, Jerria’s father saw an amazing transformation from his mother, who lacked the right to vote, to his daughter, who ran for mayor.
Much of the black liberation theology draws on the themes of the Israelites breaking loose from the Egyptians. It was interesting to tour the American South on the week prior to Passover, which is an ongoing commemoration of the slavery, oppression, and the suppression of the voice of the Jewish people. Recently, Israel crossed another significant bridge — making the jump to widen Judaism’s Big Tent, if you will, by acknowledging non-Orthodox conversions. Every year, we need to ask ourselves, what bridge are we ready to pass over?
I look forward to being with you at our Zoom Seders on Saturday and Sunday, March 27 and 28, at 7:30 p.m. Happy Passover to all!
– -Rabbi Gadi Capela