UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS / PART 3 : WITNESS TO RAGE : MAKING SENSE : ‘Perhaps Jews could somehow be the mediating force here.’

Hearing the verdicts was one of the most painful moments in my life.

Our synagogue became the collection point for food for people who have suffered in this. Since then, there have been a series of meetings. We have an awful lot of people who are very confused. I’m sure old prejudices are surfacing.

When I was a rabbi in Oakland in the 1960s, I went through something like this. This time, it was the Koreans who were targets. In 1965, it was the Jews. At the time, I told my people to get out of that kind of neighborhood with your stores because your presence taunts and aggravates the people there. Jews could do that then, but I’m not sure that Koreans can do the same. Where are they going to go to make a living?

But I also fully understand the tremendous resentments of the black community. Out of this comes a dream that the Jews could somehow be the mediating force here. Perhaps Jews understand the heart of the Korean and, I think, we understand the heart of the black man.

Perhaps Jews are in that strange and familiar position of understanding the heart of the stranger. It is not an accident that 36 times in the Bible there is one imperative-- you shall remember the stranger, the heart of the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

Looking back over the past few days, as a Jew, I suddenly understood better than ever before the great fear of anarchy that runs throughout our tradition.

You know, at the first Passover, they took the blood of the Passover lamb and put it over the doorpost, so that the angel of destruction, the angel of God, should pass over the Jewish homes and not kill them. So the rabbis ask, “You mean to tell me the angel of God, the angel of destruction, does not know the difference between a Jewish home and a Egyptian home?” And the rabbis answer, “When the angel of destruction is released, it loses its ability to distinguish between the righteous and the wicked.” And that came to mind, not just as a little homily, but when you saw the vast, indiscriminate destruction, of black-owned stores and Latino-owned stores and white stores and Korean stores, and the fact that these people were saying, “My God, you’re burning up your own neighborhood!”

That’s what happens when the angel of destruction, the angel of anarchy, is released. It loses its capacity to discriminate. And that’s folly.