Last month marked the one-year anniversary of the deadliest attack ever carried out on the Jewish community in the United States. Eleven people were killed in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting and since then we have seen similar atrocities carried out by far-right activists targeting Jews, Muslims and sexual minorities.
As communities we have suffered, grieved, and healed together, and it is this fellowship that fills me with hope amid such profound despair – and why I am travelling to the UK which has seen rising levels of antisemitism in recent months.
The message of the hope I have witnessed working so powerfully in my own community is the one I will be delivering this week at the RISING Global Peace Forum in Coventry, an event which serves as a platform for inspiration and a place to exchange ideas.
But where does hope come from?
Well, for starters, who the hell wants a cynic for a religious leader? That’s a disaster. But I’m also hopeful because I’m a student of history. Our people have survived pharaohs and tyrants before.
Coventry is the UK’s only city of Peace and Reconciliation, however, I am somewhat allergic to the term “reconciliation”. For me, that can only happen when we seek and pursue justice. Reconciliation assumes that two people are on an equal footing – and in the US, there are strands of society where this is demonstrably not the case.
Take race. Black folks don’t have to reconcile with white folks. Rather, white folks have to atone for slavery, Jim Crow laws, and for the ways that we have marginalised and oppressed people and built up institutional racism. Once we have dismantled these systems - and we can offer appropriate reparations - then we can speak of reconciliation.
The rhetoric of our current President is driving a wedge through the country, and only serves to reinforce the very inequality we are seeking to overturn. But for many, the election of Trump was a line in the sand.
In my community in Minneapolis, Minnesota, we have been able to mobilise folks who did not traditionally come out on to the streets for these issues and who weren’t politically engaged. They have grasped that to do nothing is to be complicit in allowing hatred to flourish. It these moments which give me hope.
But for hope to prevail we must all challenge bigotry wherever we see it.
For me as an openly gay Rabbi it means that I go and sit in places – sometimes which make me deeply uncomfortable - with people who, on some issues, I fundamentally disagree with.
Only by venturing out of our comfort zones is it possible to break down the barriers of our isolation.
When the synagogue shooting happened a year ago in Pittsburgh, my friend’s moms were the first ones on the scene standing outside our synagogue to protect us. And following the Christchurch Mosque attacks in March, more than 1,000 Jews showed up in the Twin Cities for a vigil the next day. The symbolism could not have been clearer.
There is a lot of work to be done and politics makes for strange bedfellows but we must relentlessly keep at it. That’s what hope is for me – the tenacious belief that tomorrow can be better than today.
The very place where I am speaking this week underlines that powerfully. Coventry Cathedral was destroyed in World War II and the ruins remain for all to see – alongside the new Cathedral which was in itself a triumph of hope which bought local communities together and the world to the city. It is a lesson that rings true now more than ever.
Rabbi Michael Adam Latz will be speaking at a seminar entitled “Faith, Poverty and Peace” at the RISING Global Peace Forum, a partnership between Coventry University, represented by the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, Coventry Cathedral and Coventry City Council. The forum will be held at Coventry Cathedral from November 13 to 15 and is free to attend.
Rabbi Latz is the senior Rabbi at Shir Tikvah in Minneapolis and serves on the Executive Leadership Team of Rabbis Against Gun Violence, a national grassroots coalition of Jewish American leaders and faith activists mobilised to curb gun violence.
