Rabbi Capers Funnye celebrated Martin Luther King Day this year in New York City at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, a mainstream Reform congregation, in the company of about 700 fellow Jews ”” many of them black. The organizers of the event had reached out to four of New York’s Black Jewish synagogues in the hope of promoting Jewish diversity, and they weren’t disappointed. African-American Jews, largely from Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens, many of whom had never been in a predominantly white synagogue, made up about a quarter of the audience. Most of the visiting women wore traditional African garb; the men stood out because, though it was a secular occasion, most kept their heads covered. But even with your eyes closed you could tell who was who: the black Jews and the white Jews clapped to the music on different beats.
Funnye, the chief rabbi of the Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation in Chicago, one of the largest black synagogues in America, was a featured speaker that night. The overflowing audience came out in a snowstorm to hear his thoughts about two men: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama. King is Funnye’s hero. Obama, whose inauguration was to take place the following day in Washington, is family ”” the man who married Funnye’s cousin Michelle….
Funnye hasn’t built all his bridges yet, let alone crossed them, but the progress he has seen ”” both as a black Jew and as a black American ”” has mellowed him. “You know, as a young man I was angry about the way we were laughed at and ignored,” he said. “I sometimes went down to the kosher meat market here in Chicago, put my face right up in the face of one of the Orthodox rabbis and yelled, ”˜I ain’t never seen no white Jews before!’ I was so hurt I became obtuse and bitter. But I don’t feel that way anymore.” He paused. “There’s no need to shout. People are ready for a dialogue, to talk and to listen.”
He’s an interesting character. Being Michele Obama’s cousin has certainly helped him get press coverage. Otherwise, I think the media would mostly ignore a population as small as 2% of African Americans.
When I read this piece it soon reminded me of another I read last night, about the transition of Israel from a fledgling nation founded in 1948 by pioneers, to a nation-state of victims. Here is a quote from that article:
“The events surrounding the Eichmann trial [in 1961, held in Jerusalem], and his execution in 1962 [b]made a noteworthy contribution to making the genocide of the European Jews the founding event, from the moral point of view, of the state of Israel[/b]. In this regard, the historian and diplomat Sergio Romano writes: “Up until that moment, the essential elements of Israeli identity had been the Zionist saga, the laborious progress of the Jewish presence in Palestine, the fight for life, the victorious war against the Arab states […]. The Eichmann case changed the picture and contributed to making Jewish genocide the cornerstone of Israel. The state of pioneers and farmer-soldiers [b]was thus replaced, in collective self-representation[/b], with the state of [b]victims and their heirs[/b].”
It occurred to me then that what is now underway with the Obama Presidency (I would choose a different name) is an incipient transition from the United States founded by pioneers and farmer-soldiers, to one in which the State is manipulated by hordes of victims (from slavery or Holocaust right through to the recent ravages of Wall Street), to obtain what they think they [i]and their heirs[/i] are owed by a system in which they did not get what they are convinced they are entitled to.
Without putting too fine a point on it, yet having also read the grievance-laden thesis that Michelle O. submitted for her degree at Princeton, I can too easily imagine a coalescing of religiously eloquent black and/or Jewish grievance-meisters in the national Capitol relentlessly displacing the founding cornerstones of identity of the USofA, in a similar way to secular liberal Jews’ effect on Israel. One way Washington would perpetrate this is to control the content of the education system – so thank God for Governors Sanford and Palin refusing the federal bail-out budget’s education funding.
(The quote I posted is from a very enlightening article about Pius XII in ‘Chiesa’ magazine.)
As you read the article, you can sense the journalist’s pride at members of the African American community wanting to become members of his own people. Jewish communal solidarity has always impressed me. I loved – and could not help but smile – the bit where the black congregation refused to affiliate with Reform Jews, because they were not observant enough.
The article refers on page 3 to a group of African American Jews founded in Israel by Ben Ammi Carter, a different group. If so then I can understand why this Chicago African American rabbi does not want to be associated with that group. The latter live in trailers near Beersheva in the far south of Israel and they are polygamous. No right thinking Jew would be associated with them.
A strange comment…
Abraham lived in Beersheva and had two wives. Sarah lived in Hebron and Keturah lived in Beersheva. (Read more about the pattern of chiefs having 2 wives at Just Genesis.) These black Jews are following the pattern of their father Abraham. The one difference is that as far as we know, only CHIEFS had two wives. I doubt that all of the men in black Jewish community at Beersheva are chiefs.
I’m reminded of the Leo Rosten joke about the American Jew who is astonished to discover one Saturday in Tokyo a Japanese synagogue filled with Japanese Jews, all chanting the Shema. After the American expresses his joy at this discovery, Rabbi-san stares at him and says: ‘Funny – you don’t rook Jewish to me!’