Lifting Up Our Asian Fellows

“It’s a rough time to be a Jewish person in America.” That’s what I told a class of college students in an Introduction to Judaism class the day after the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. That day came after many waves of bomb threats to Jewish community centers and schools, other attacks on visibly Jewish individuals throughout the United States, and (newly at that moment) a gut-wrenching shooting at a synagogue. This sort of viscerally agonizing experience–the shock, revulsion, rage, and despair—is what so many people in the Asian community are feeling right now.

Pesach is right around the corner, so we’ll soon hear the familiar refrain: we must not harm the stranger, for we were strangers in Egypt. Empathy from shared experience is at the root of it all. And, here, we certainly have some shared experience. I don’t know how a Jew in America could fail to know the pain etched into the hearts of their Asian peers.

We should get it: we are all those strangers in America. We know what it’s like when people just like us are killed…for being just like us; to feel like it might not be safe for our children to go to religious school or our elders to go to services. I have sought to reassure SO MANY people over the past few years that our community would keep their loved ones safe. I’ve applied for security grant dollars, gone through lock-downs, trained Sunday School teachers on how to run from armed terrorists. And all the while I, myself, have done things like spend time on the bimah wondering what I’d do if a gunman actually came in and started shooting while I lead services. Because, truthfully, it was never really impossible.

It’s time for us Jews in the US to put up or shut up. Whether Asian American or Jewish American, this place has felt a bit too much like “Egypt” these days, a dangerous foreign land. Jewish friends, it’s our turn to reach out to Asian Americans and see how they’re doing—to give them an extra (virtual) hug, to send a text message checking in, to tell them we love them. And, perhaps most importantly, if you see something, say something…because we are also commanded lo ta’amod, to not stand idly by. It is intolerable that anti-Asian racism has proliferated to the point it has reached today, and every one of us has a supreme religious obligation to stop it. Because it’s not OK, and it never has been.