Yesterday's Shattered Glass is Today's Call to Action
/by Donna Berman
The sound of broken glass. The shattering of windows. The shattering of the rule of law. The shattering of democracy. The shattering of lives.
Tonight, we come together to remember two nights in 1938—November 9th and 10th, when the Nazis unleashed their hatred and, in state-sanctioned violence, went on a rampage, breaking the windows in Jewish homes and businesses, in synagogues, setting the stage for the horror that was the Holocaust. According to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel, “When the violence of Kristallnacht ended, 92 people had been killed, 30,000 had been sent to concentration camps and 1,400 synagogues had been destroyed.”
This is the first time since the pandemic that we are gathering in person to commemorate this very sad, painful anniversary and it is so comforting to be in your presence and to see your beautiful, beloved faces. When we began this annual multi-faith, multi-cultural observance in 2002, the world was very different. We came together to make sure we remembered history lest it be repeated. We came together with some sense of confidence that it wouldn’t be, that while vigilance was still warranted, the lessons of the Holocaust had largely been learned, at least for that moment.
All these years later, our gathering takes on more immediate urgency. The Anti-Defamation League estimates that there was a 167 percent increase in antisemitic assaults from 2020 to 2021. Many in the public eye--including athletes and entertainers and a former president--have contributed to a growing chorus of antisemitic rhetoric and tropes that have inspired hate and violence against Jews. That is what is different about this year. What remains the same is our understanding that antisemitism, systemic racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny are pieces of the same puzzle, they are interlocking oppressions, tools used by the few who want to dominate and control the many.
Each year, it is as if we pick up a piece of the glass with which the streets of Germany were strewn and use it as a lens to look at the injustices that continue to plague us. Poet Adrienne Rich exhorted the Jewish community to use the pain and suffering we have experienced as a “keen lens of empathy.” But if we have learned nothing else from the past few years it is that in addition to having empathy for all who are oppressed, we must understand that all of our fates are bound together.
In the past few years, the murder of George Floyd and the 1,000’s of other people with black and brown bodies who have been killed by police, the passing of anti-trans laws, the attempt to limit women’s agency over their own bodies, the separation of children from their parents at the border, in a country of so-called “family values,” the maligning of people with disabilities, the creation of laws that make the telling of the truth about slavery’s legacy illegal, the banning of books, the normalization of cruelty—all these things are connected, all of these things are strategies taken from the dictator’s handbook. They are signs of a withering moral compass, the weakening of democracy, the establishment of the fertile soil in which fascism can grow. Kristallnacht teaches us this.
I tell you nothing that you don’t already know. We are all painfully aware of the situation, however more heartened some of us may feel as a result of Tuesday’s election results. As James Baldwin tells us repeatedly in his work, we cannot move forward, as individuals or as a society, until and unless we face reality. It is only in looking the truth in the eye that we have any chance of transformation.
So, tonight, we do just that. For tonight is not only a commemoration. Tonight is a reckoning. Tonight is a call to action. Tonight, the mantel of responsibility rests on our shoulders. Tonight we are asked to do something very courageous—to take our sadness, our fear, our pain and turn it into resolve, turn it into moral leadership, turn it into the sweet, nourishing, nurturing, curative nectar that is kindness, graciousness, love, hope, wisdom.
Tonight we are asked to stand together—Jews, Christians, Muslims, Black and Brown people, Asians, Indigenous peoples, the LGBTQ community, the immigrant community, the disability community. We are asked to stand together with all whose very existence threatens the arrogance, the violence, the myth of white supremacy. Apart, we are at the mercy of those whose strategy is to engender fear and hate, to divide and conquer. Together, we are a powerful, unstoppable alliance for change.
Friends, this is the moment. This is our moment. Let us learn from history and envision and make real a future that enables all of the people of the world and our precious earth to have what we all need to flourish, to live in safety, to live in abundance, to live in fullness and wholeness.
As Tim Ryan said in his concession speech the other night: “In this country, we have too much hate, we have too much anger, there’s way too much fear, there’s way too much division. What we need is more love, more compassion, more concern for each other. . . .”
Tonight, let us, in word and deed, in a commitment deep enough to last well beyond this hour and far beyond these walls, take Tim Ryan’s words to heart. What we need is more love, more compassion, more concern for one another. I can think of no better, more beautiful, more powerful and enduring way to honor this anniversary of Kristallnacht. The memory of those who lost their lives, the memory of those who endured so much suffering and trauma and somehow survived demands nothing less of us. May we have the strength and conviction to heed that call. Amen.
Rabbi Donna Berman is executive director of the Charter Oak Cultural Center in Hartford. She holds a Ph.D. in Religion and Social Ethics from Drew University; these remarks were delivered at a recent community commemoration at the Center. The building was the first in Connecticut to be built as a synagogue, in 1876. Under her leadership since 2001, Charter Oak Cultural Center has become one of the area’s most vibrant arts centers, the only one whose mission is explicitly to do the work of social justice through the arts.
