A few weeks ago we read in the Torah of Moses’ first experience of God’s presence: the much-analyzed encounter with the burning bush.
In countless Divrei Torah and midrashim, commentators have focused on the courage it took for Moses to face God’s presence in the bush, while others focus on Moses’ spiritual sensitivity to the world. Some focus on the fact that Moses must have been aware of the deeper forces at work around him, as he was able to stare at a simple bush burning in the desert long enough to notice that it was not being consumed by the fire.
The late Rabbi Marshall Meyer of Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in Manhattan, a passionate advocate for social justice and a staunch believer in political action, put a different spin on the story.
Meyer argued that there are fires burning all around us, all the time, but most of us are too busy with our own lives to take much notice. To Meyer, these fires beckon us to get involved and to take action, just as God enlisted a self-doubting Moses into service through the burning bush.
It occurred to me last summer, when the newspapers were full of stories about a string of arson attacks on African-American churches that had begun as early as 1989, that those fires were just such burning bushes. I wondered then, as I wonder now, whether America was really going to take notice.
Last summer, while public attention was focused briefly on this issue, the Justice Department increased its efforts to apprehend and prosecute the individuals responsible for these crimes, and Congress passed legislation increasing the penalties for such hate crimes.
Then, as the summer progressed, public outrage was muted by reports that many white churches had also been torched in recent years, and by the revelation that at least some of the damaged black churches had been burned for reasons other than racial hatred.
But to those black Americans whose houses of worship had been destroyed by the white-hot embers of racism, and to those Americans of all colors who think that even one act of senseless racial violence is too many, such facts provide little solace.
The fact remains that — in America in the 1990s — buildings were burned down precisely because they were houses of worship for black people. Here were fires, real fires, and still most of us didn’t turn our eyes to see.
Of course there have been a number of other similar fires burning across the American racial landscape in recent years, some with real flames, but many whose flames were figurative: the L.A. riots of 1992, the Crown Heights conflict, the O.J. Simpson trial, the tragic altercation between a Jewish store owner and black residents of Harlem — and, most recently, signs of racism at Texaco, and the Oakland school board’s adoption of a policy that will encourage teachers to use black English, aka Ebonics, to improve the performance of its black students.
Many types of Americans continue to debate these events, but what is indisputable is that each has served to widen the gulf that separates black and white America.
Each season, it seems, brings a new racially charged incident that fleetingly draws our attention to the fact that our nation’s efforts at improving relations between its many racial and ethnic constituencies are flagging and must be reinvigorated.
For all the measurable gains blacks and other minorities have made since the civil rights movement began in the 1950s, such flashpoints clearly demonstrate how far we have yet to go. As the 1996-97 Joint Program Plan of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council puts it: Thirty years after the Kerner Commission concluded that this nation was moving toward two Americas — one black and poor, one white and rich, separate and unequal — the polarity persists.
These highly publicized incidents provide us with a brief and distant glimpse of the smoldering blazes of racial tension and racial division that burn all around us. But when the press coverage ceases, can we still see those distant fires?
Texaco’s decision to settle the employment discrimination lawsuit against it didn’t end or even address the numerous other unrecorded incidents of workplace discrimination that occur each year. The use of Ebonics in Oakland schools may or may not succeed in improving the education of its black students, but the disparity in educational opportunity between white and black America will not soon disappear.
When the headlines cease, and the talk-show hosts move on to other matters, the question remains whether any of us — elected officials, community leaders, grassroots activists or anyone — will notice the myriad other flames that continue to burn all around us.