Rabbi Sandra Lawson: We're a religion of doing, and so if we create policies around equity and give the tools for how to be anti-racist in your community or to] to hire an executive director, then by doing that, you will learn what's racist behavior and what's not. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman, and I'm so happy to welcome you to the fourth season of Hashivenu, a podcast about Jewish teachings on resilience. We've had a little bit of a hiatus. We've missed folks. We're so happy to be with you again today. And I am especially thrilled to introduce a co-host for this season. We are going to focus in on Judaism and resilience and racial justice as the focus for our conversations this season. And I have invited, and she has so graciously accepted, Rabbi Sandra Lawson, who is the inaugural director of Racial Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for Reconstructing Judaism to serve as co-host. So Sandra, welcome, welcome. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: Thank you. I'm really excited to be here and I'm really looking forward to this season of Hashivenu. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Me too. I think it's going to be rich and I hope brave and I hope transformative. We thought to kick off the season, we would just have a conversation with Sandra and me to kind of talk about some of our aspirations and some of the things that we're thinking about when we think about these topics separately, and when we think about these topics together. And then in the future, that we look forward to welcoming other voices in as guests in the conversation. So can we start there? Sandra, when you think about Jewish approaches on resilience and racial justice, what rises up for you? What are you thinking about? Rabbi Sandra Lawson: That's a really good question. And right now, we are in the book in the Torah that, for me, is all about resilience. When I think about our ancestors who left Mitzrayim, the narrow place, the place of pain, and made their way to the sea, crossed the sea led by Miriam in song. And then we get to Mount Sinai and we receive revelation and then we receive laws. It's really interesting because we go from slavery and then another set of laws right behind that are when you get a Hebrew slave, and I'm not going to comment on that. But when I think about all the struggles of people, especially marginalized people in our society, I lean heavily on the Book of Exodus. And I also know our Christian brothers and sisters do because, or Black Christians brothers and sisters do, when it comes to liberation theology, and it is a book of resilience and pain and the struggles of people of creating a society. And so that's kind of what comes to mind when you ask that. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: So beautiful. I gave my inauguration talk back in 2014 on redemption. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: Oh, that's right. Yeah. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Because I just, I think it's so incredibly powerful that embedded into the Jewish liturgy is that twice a day, we're praying for redemption, and remember that moment in history so that we can create it in the present, and we build the entire holiday of Passover around it. And I think that's such a powerful framing, both hard, looking at what is so hard and also what could be hopeful about it. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: I also want to say too, that we brought up Passover and I often find, even I struggled with Hebrew in rabbinical school, that often Hebrew comes much more naturally to me when I'm trying to explain things. And so the sort of avadim hayinu beMitzrayim that remember that we were slaves, and we're commanded to remember that during Passover. And we are told to reenact what we read in the Haggada, the book ,as if we were present at that time. And what I think is interesting is that I think we do that as Jews very well, but what I think has gotten lost is sort of the compassion piece. I started my own version of middot practice, my own sort of practice of looking at our ethics and ways of being, and I'm reading this book that has daily practices, and yesterday was compassion. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: And one of the things that the author says is that in order to have compassion, he brings the example of Moses. When Moses left his palace and he saw what was happening with the Israelite, and then he didn't like the fact that the Israelite was being beaten and then basically killed the Egyptian soldier. But Moses had compassion for his brother and he had compassion because he witnessed the lived experience of the Israelites. And so I think that for many Jews, compassion today is lost because many Jews who have white privilege don't actually go out and have relationships with people of color, don't actually go out and witness and understand the lived experiences of marginalized people. And if you don't do that, it's really hard for you to do this work around social justice and equity. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I think that that's such an important question about -- if the Haggadah commands us to tell the story as if we were slaves, in the present tense, obviously what that's trying to do is to cultivate empathy. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: Right. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: It's really hard to have empathy when you're shut down. It's really hard to have empathy when you're closed off. It's really hard to have empathy when you're not willing to look. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: Yeah. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: So oddly, the act of storytelling is one way to cultivate empathy. And as you're suggesting, the act of being in relationship, the act of witnessing, is another way to cultivate empathy. I think it's really, really essential. I think the thing is - one of the things that I so value... I mean, there's a lot that I want to tease out from what you were talking about. One of the things that I most value about Judaism, we're going to release this before Passover, I know, even though Passover's early this year, but, like, the four questions that are embedded in the Passover Seder, the Judaism is oriented toward questions more than answers. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: And that Reconstructionism sees evolution, the evolution of the Jewish civilization of the Jewish people is such an essential way of understanding what we're doing. So at the end of the day for me, it's about transformation. It is like, that I am in the world, not to be affirmed with what I know, but to be cracked open and changed by what my encounters with other people, Jews and non-Jews, people who are like me and people who are really different from me are. And that's hard. That means I have to get off the couch and that means I have to go out of my comfort zone, but I feel like that's one of the reasons why I remain engaged in Judaism is because that's what it pushes me to do. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: Yeah. We are a tradition of doing. We're supposed to do. In the Torah portion Mishpatim, it's like we do and then we understand. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: We receive them and we have to do them first. And some people were like, "Shouldn't it be the other way around?" That may be true for some things, but to really understand Judaism, Judaism is about experiences, and experiencing Judaism, all the awesomeness of Judaism, whether it's food, ritual, or whatever. And then once you do those things and then you can understand them, but you can understand them individually because also, and this is the Torah portion this week, because last week, God basically says that God speaks to each and every person as an individual and in ways that that person can understand. And so we have these experiences as a group. We may do these things together, but we interpret them as individuals because we all have our own sort of individual relationship with God and we can all hear the divine voice of God in ways that we can understand. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I love that, because I feel like that's the essential challenge of modernity, or an essential challenge of modernity is that tension between individual and collective. In the pre-modern times, Jews understood ourselves as a collective people. And that's why so much of our liturgy is all on the "we", and so much of the Torah, especially like at this point, Mishpatim, at this chapter, at this parsha you were just talking about, the shift is from these individual stories of the patriarchs and the matriarchs and Moses. And it goes into the children of Israel, the people of Israel, however you translate B'nei Israel. And since modern times, we understand ourselves much more as individuals and that tension, that back and forth between individual and community and individual and community. And another reason why I really remain deeply rooted in Judaism is because of that collective sensibility, that I have a real mistrust of radical individualism. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I want my right, certainly, as a woman and as a lesbian, my world is so much bigger and freer and I'm able to offer up because of individual rights. But at the end of the day, I also want limits on them and I want some part of the collective that A, holds me accountable and B, pushes me to subordinate my own individual interests to something larger. I feel like that's always been true for me, like part of the appeal of Judaism, and then to think about it with trying to really undo the effects of a majority culture that is so oppressive to minorities. Certainly Jews have experienced that for antisemitism, and I think that is both interrelated and completely distinct from the racism that is embedded into American society. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: And our society is built on this idea of individualism as part of the Protestantism and so much so that it's really hard for people, for many people, I think, to understand and see systemic racism because you are individually responsible, but leaving out the fact that an entire system is designed to privilege one group of people over another group of people and that even the definition of racism for the longest time, maybe even still for many today, it's about individual prejudice or individual bias and not a system. And then having collective responsibility. There's also something that we learned in this week, in the book of Exodus in this week's Torah portion because these laws that show up, starting with when you have a Hebrew slave, are supposed to be, to help us collectively have a better society, so we're compassionate and have mercy and fairness and justice. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Well, I think that's exactly one of the major point I always make about Exodus is the Israelites were not free from slavery to go and have a good time. It was not... I think about this, especially in the context of American society and what the philosopher Isaiah Berlin talks about is negative liberty and positive liberty and so "freedom from" versus "freedom to". And that they were not free to go and have a good time and to do whatever they wanted. As you said, they marched directly from the sea to Sinai. They were freed to enter into service and covenantal relationship with Y-H-V-H, with the Divine. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: So when I think about what that means for us in our day and as their heirs, I am most interested in the "freedom from"s, like the freedom from hunger, the freedom from oppression, the freedom from homelessness, housing insecurity and the "freedom to" is secondary compared to all those, like making certain that everybody, or as many people as possible, have the "freedom from"s. That totally informs how I think about those people who are saying, "I don't want to wear a mask," in the middle of a pandemic, or those people are saying, "I want to carry a gun." Like those are "freedoms to" that actually infringe on me and on other collectives and the "freedom from" is what we should be prioritizing. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: On that note, I actually had a conversation with a classmate of mine, who's now a rabbi, a wonderful rabbi. And we were talking about this people who don't want to wear a mask, and we both don't think that it's about them caring about themselves. They just really don't care about other people. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I think it goes back to our conversation about empathy. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: Yeah. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: If we are all interconnected, if everything is all interdependent, and the air that I breathe and the air that you breathe is exchanged, I mean the paradigm just doesn't work. That's probably flawed. Part of what I think is always... The moments I often focus in on in the Exodus story are the moments of the unknown, the moments of deep emunah, deep faithfulness, deep belief. And we see like at the beginning of Exodus, Moses is like, "Not me, I'm not the right person. I don't have the skills." It took a while for him to build... And he needed... He couldn't do it by himself. He needed Aaron for the confrontations with Pharaoh, and then he needed Miriam [inaudible] that moment and Ruth Sohn has a beautiful poem, we can post it in the show notes, about what it's like to step into the sea. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: We have the midrash about the Israelites not really being willing to step into the sea. It was a couple of brave souls who jumped in and only then did the sea start to split. We're telling the Exodus story retrospectively. We know it has a quote unquote, good ending. When they were living it out, whether or not they were real people or it's just a mythical story, they don't know what's coming next. They're in that moment of uncertainty. So I think that that's part of a resilience framework is acting even when you don't know, being brave, taking the leap. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: Yeah. Or taking the struggle of not being successful or taking the struggle of failure even, and picking yourself up or things didn't go right and what am I going to do about it? What am I going to do going forward to try to make the world better for myself and for my family or for all of us? Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah. I think that's right. And it's getting up the next day and doing it all over again, if necessary. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: Yeah. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: So I think the ge'ulah, the redemption paradigm is so incredibly important in this work. I want to pivot us to another, I think, paradigm, another really metaphor, deeply mined in the Jewish tradition that I think is really essential to this work, which is teshuvah, the idea of repentance. That's something, obviously we talk about a lot at the High Holiday season, but there's a prayer for teshuvah every single day if you follow the liturgy and it's not a one-off and it's not confined to one season. Ideally - there's a midrash that suggests that before creation happened, God created... Before the creation of the universe happened, God created teshuvah, like it's embedded into the very fabric of the universe. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: I like that. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: I like that. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: It's so hopeful. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: We were talking about stories earlier. So I had a conversation with a colleague who is a white Jewish woman, not a rabbi, but a leader in the Jewish community. They started a new racial equity group or justice group. And she was just checking in with me because... I hope I'm getting this right. People on her committee didn't want to reach out to people of color in the synagogue for this group because they didn't want to tokenize. And she's like, "That doesn't sound right." So she's like, "I'm just checking in. If you don't want to answer." I said, "You need to reach out to the community." But what we talked about was teshuvah and tochecha [rebuke]. We talked about that whoever is running this group should reach out to individuals, sort of organizing strategy, do one-on-one, and then explain that, "We messed up. We didn't think this through and my own understanding of racism or my own internalized racism interfered and made me frozen to ask you for help, because I didn't want to give you that option." Rabbi Sandra Lawson: I was telling my colleague that that's hard. It's easier to just say, "Well, we don't want to talk to them," and it's harder to do that internal work, but you need to own it. And when you reach out and need to be honest about why you made the choices and then you make the ask, and then of course they have the right to say no, but just sort of thinking about that, when you said that, that in order to seek forgiveness, we have to go to the people that we've harmed or hurt and do our best to try to make it right. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah. It goes back and then there's that relationship piece again, that this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum. On a related point, a huge piece of learning for me was discerning that it's different work helping white Jews come to terms with white privilege and even more, as white privilege and sometimes enacting racist behavior, than it is centering and appropriately valuing the experiences and the wellbeing of Jews of color. Those are intertwined and part of our work and they are overlapping, but they're not identical. So one of the things that... And I learned it because in a project that you and I were working on together with a whole bunch of other people, we were inadvertently privileging the anxieties of white Jews over the aspirations of Black Jews. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: That was like, "Oh, got that totally wrong." Just to be able to say, in a convening of about 18, 20 people, "Yep. This is wrong. This is wrong." And then the commitment is to take every step we possibly can. Not only to not do it again, but to lean into both things, so yeah. I think the thing about teshuvah, I think there are two things that are so important to me. One is just that possibility of trying again, that encouragement toward that, that mandate even toward it, but the other is also the justice piece of it. Like even when someone has done wholehearted teshuvah, that doesn't mean that there's not accountability and the things go back to the way they were. Teshuvah is absolutely necessary, but it's not erasure, it's actually an impetus toward change. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: But it's also hard when our society, by design, was designed to separate Black people from white people, white people from people of color, especially white people from Black people. It's hard to have any empathy if you don't even understand the experiences of another person. It's easier for white people to have empathy for other white people. Enough studies have shown that white people just don't have the same for people of color, or particularly Black people because of how our society was designed from the very beginning. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: So if you don't have empathy, it's even harder to do teshuvah, and if you don't have compassion, if you don't understand why someone may be hurt by what you said or what you did. That's a growing edge that many in our community need to have. We need to lean into those relationships or develop relationships so that people can have empathy ,so they can understand why someone is in pain. So like one example so I'm making sense here, is if I tell you that what you said is racist, if I tell you that I had racist experience, many white people will say, "Well, are you sure that was racist?" Rabbi Deborah Waxman: "I didn't mean it." Rabbi Sandra Lawson: Right. Right. And so that doesn't help. So in order to do teshuvah, in order to make amends, you have to try to lean into an understanding of what the other person's experience, instead of saying that that experience didn't happen. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I think that's so right. And I think that, for me, a very helpful tool that I learned a long time ago, a while ago in anti-racism training is like understanding the difference between intention and impact and whatever I meant, whatever I meant, if you're telling me that the impact was, "That really hurt," or, "That really reinforced," or even if it didn't hurt, this is how it's landing, to have to take that incredibly seriously and again, to prioritize the relationship. "Okay. So what's the repair that you and I need to do because I've behaved in this way?" And then I think, it's in me to...so how did I get to that place? What am I going to do to make certain I leave this place? Rabbi Sandra Lawson: I'll give you a really cool example. During that bygone era, when President Obama was the president, many white people proclaim racism is over because we have a Black president. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Post-racial moment. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: The thing is, is white people don't have the right in our society to say that racism is over and that the gall, but that's sort of like that you can just say that and believe it to be true without checking in with the people who actually suffer from that. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's [inaudible] Rabbi Sandra Lawson: Ego, maybe that's [inaudible]. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah, maybe. As I was saying, I think it's both some intersection of aspiration and arrogance. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: Arrogance, that's another good one. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah. You definitely want it to be true, like for the best possible reasons, because boy, is it more convenient if it's true. We haven't gone through a racial reckoning, we haven't dismantled all the ways that this is internalized, but look, there's a Black president. I mean, I think... Well, hopefully that's one of the learnings from it. And boy, what a hard way to learn. I think this is probably where we should wind down, but like with a conversation, and this is maybe I think this is a conversation for white Jews, is about a stance of humility, about anavah, and a stance of humility, so much to learn, so much to undo. Mistakes will happen because we're in a majority culture that's setting us up to make those mistakes and taking responsibility, prioritizing relationships, and committing to learning from them. I think that's a really important path forward. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: Also, to acknowledge that many in our society, our larger American society, are fearful of, I don't remember the date, 2035 ,when supposedly the white people will be the minority. They'll still be the largest [inaudible] people, but you know the people are afraid, white people are afraid of having more minorities, racial minorities, and white people feeling like they're disappearing, or that they'll be the minority. Many in the Jewish community are afraid of diversity. They're afraid of the diversity in our Jewish community and seeing more Black and brown and queer people in our Jewish spaces makes them feel like their traditions are being lost, but the traditions aren't being lost. It's just that they're just not the majority anymore. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: The fact of the matter is one of the things that I think that our study as Reconstructionist rabbis that we learned when we were in rabbinical school is like, there's a huge breadth of diversity across the Jewish people and across the Jewish experience. So it's about displaying that and embracing that rather than privileging one particular expression. I mean, I think there is a space for small subsets who want to nurture it, but for that to be the only expression... So if you want to nurture Iraqi melodies or something, but to acknowledge that it's... and to erase, even, that there are a lot of disparate expressions. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: We are recording this in early February, right near the Chinese New Year. And a student of color who identifies as Asian-American led a beautiful service integrating in different Chinese poems and melodies inspired - I mean, it was such a rich tapestry and [she] said, there are not that many Asian Jews composing. It's a small subset that she had to draw from. Some of them were pieces of her own compositions. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: Wow, that's great. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah. It was thrilling. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: I find that exciting. You find that exciting and sadly, there are other people who don't. They're terrified by that. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Right, right. I think I mean, I want to wind us down as to invite you to actually talk about your vision and what you're hoping to accomplish in your new position. But I think first and foremost, our work is with folks who are -- certainly to work with the folks who are thrilled, and to work with the folks who are curious and work with the folks who are anxious, but willing, and to really kind of move them along as far as possible. I think modeling it and bringing it to life and moving it on is one of the most powerful ways I think of really maybe trying to change... That's my thinking, I don't know. I don't know how you feel about it, but we haven't had that conversation yet. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: Yeah. Yeah. Did you want me to talk about my vision? Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I would love for us to wind down with you, if you're comfortable? Rabbi Sandra Lawson: I am. This is a living working document of how I see this because these kinds of positions are new. This is a new position for our movement, as is a new position for many other organizations in our society. One of my hopes, I was talking to a mentor of mine, Rabbi Mordechai Liebling the other day. And one of my hopes and my dreams for us, and this may be hard for some people to hear, but I do mean it in a hopeful way, is that I want our Jewish communities to move away from, "We welcome everyone and we're not racist." What I want to see happen is because I do believe, first of all, I believe all Jewish communities want to welcome everyone. I don't believe there's any Jewish community, maybe there is, like, "We don't want you here." Rabbi Sandra Lawson: I don't think that's the message that Jewish communities are trying to send, but I want many in a Jewish community, and so we're talking about Jewish communities that are overwhelmingly white, to acknowledge first and foremost that racism exists, which means racism exists in our Jewish communities. So if you acknowledge that racism exists, then when it shows up, you can acknowledge that it's showing up, because what happens right now is people push it away and they call it something else. They are not recognizing that racism has showed up in this moment. If we can get to a point where we can at least acknowledge that I am asking you questions because you're Black, or I'm not hiring you because, I'm thinking you're unfit for this job because you're Black, then we can start to do the work of how to unpack that and recognize it, and then move forward so we don't make those mistakes. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: And we can understand which decisions are we making racially and which ones we are not. And that's why I think this role is really cool, because as we mentioned earlier, we are a religion of doing. And so if we create policies around equity and give the tools for how to be anti-racist in your community, or how the tools for how to hire a rabbi or how to hire an executive director, then by doing that, you will learn what's racist behavior and what's not. And so that is one of the things that I'm really focused on. Don't know how to do it yet [laughs] but I'm asking our communities to acknowledge, at least, that racism is in their communities because there's no way it's not. It's in our entire system. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I think that part of the richness of being part of the Reconstructionist movement, even as I know there are listeners from beyond the Reconstructionist movement, is we're going to figure it out together. We're going to co-create because that's what we like to do. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: I'm very grateful to have partners in this thinking and that I have people that will be on this journey with me and willing to walk with me on this journey and support our entire movement on this journey. I've already had a ton of colleagues reach out to me who don't work for Reconstructing Judaism. They work outside in congregations or somewhere else, who have offered a tremendous amount of support for me. If I can be a listening ear, because I think people understand that this is the direction that we need to go. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Right. Right. So I'll just wind us down with two reflections on resilience, which is, I think, on the individual and communal level, on the local level, adopting a stance of an orientation toward resilience is really helpful because this is... I mean, it may not be difficult work, but it could be difficult work. And to just not get disempowered or to get discouraged. This is work that to quote from Pirkei Avot, "lo alekha hamelakha ligmor," it's not up to us to finish the work, but we are not free to desist. That was the call from a big call out for the leaders of the Jewish community, organizations in the Jewish community to commit to racial justice work. We cannot look away. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: So resilience individually. And then I think about, I often say that I think that Judaism is about resilience at large, and that tendency toward resilience is one of the reasons why we have, as a people and as a civilization, survived over millennia is because we recreate ourselves. And so this is one of the moral calls of our time. We have this opportunity, we have this obligation to respond to it. Judaism and Jewish communities and Jews will look different on the far side of this and that's good. That's good. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: Yeah. I had a conversation with Rabbi Susan Talve. with my new status these days, I've been having some... I feel like what rabbi do you want to talk to? So I'm teaching a class, an upcoming class with Rabbi Susan Talve, who I've always just admired from afar. She's a rabbi of a synagogue in St. Louis. We're teaching a class with musician Billy Jonas, which is kind of cool. So I think one of us, I think he may have asked, "What do you want white people to understand when it comes to anti-racist work?" Rabbi Sandra Lawson: She sort of... We're all on Zoom and she leans into the camera and she just sort of nods in that wise way, and we're all waiting for her answer. "This is hard. This is hard work. It is the day in and day out work of unlearning and unpacking. It's not, 'I read a book, I'm done.' It's not, 'I took a class. I'm done.' It is hard." And I could feel how tired from that work, the work that she's been doing. I'm trying to describe it to you because even across Zoom, I could feel what she was saying. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah. I think it's really true. I think it's really important. This is why I go back to resilience, where it's really important to have practices and communities that nourish and sustain us when it's hard, when it's hard about this, when it's hard about personal things or the pandemic. If we're going to do this work, we have to set ourselves up so that we have ways to renew when it's hard. Also, there are celebrations and joys along the way. And it's a really important thing to take in and to take seriously. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Sandra, such a blessing, always, always to be with you. The last time I saw you -- I don't know if we'll keep this in it's be at the discretion of wonderful editor and producer, Sam. But the last time I saw you was unexpectedly at a conference. I had no expectation of seeing you. It was early March last year. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: Oh, AIPAC! [laughs] Rabbi Deborah Waxman: We were in AIPAC together. I had no idea you would be there. I saw your haircut from behind. And I was like, "That has got to be Rabbi Sandra Lawson." So so happy to be with you in this Zoom space. So excited that you are coming on board in this incredibly important position and so honored to support and celebrate and advance you. And I'm so grateful, like excited to be hosting this season of Hashivenu with you. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: Yeah. This is going to be fun. I've done a lot of podcasts, mostly interviews, but hosting is going to be a new thing. So getting into the hosting mode, but it's going to be fun. And I'm glad I get to do it with you, who I have... You're a friend, a mentor, a teacher. I have a lot of respect for you that I just... And you're fun. [laughs] Rabbi Deborah Waxman: We have fun together. [laughs] We laugh a lot and even more so when we're with our wives, then it's really rockin', but we do pretty good just you and me. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: Yeah. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: So hopefully all of you who are listening will laugh with us and learn with us and go on this journey with us. I am so happy to thank my co-host, Rabbi Sandra Lawson, for this conversation on Judaism and resilience and on racial justice. I also really want to thank our editor and our producer, Sam Wachs, for all of his incredible support in making this podcast as beautiful and accessible as it is. I would urge you to look at the show notes from this episode. If you want to learn more about Sandra's journey and her background, we'll post links to amazing articles into her incredible social media presence, and also to some of the work that we're doing on racial justice, and also links to other discussions about teshuvah and about redemption. Please, please subscribe and rate and review us in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman. Sandra, do you want to say your name? Rabbi Sandra Lawson: Yeah, I'm Rabbi Sandra Lawson, and this is going to be a lot of fun, and exciting. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: It is. You've been listening to Hashivenu Jewish Teachings on Resilience.