BRYAN SCHWARTZMAN: From the recording studios of Reconstructing Judaism, welcome to Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish conversations. RABBI TOBA SPITZER: We know as Jews when people deny the holocaust, how upset we get. We should have sympathy when this crime, which is vaster in scale, in time, in numbers, is denied on so many levels. BRYAN SCHWARTZMAN: I'm your host, Bryan Schwarzman. We have a great show for you today. We have a special treat in that sitting in with me is our executive producer, Rabbi Jacob Staub – a longtime professor at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College who runs the Evolve project. Welcome, Jacob. I'm excited to tag team with you today. RABBI JACOB STAUB: Thanks, Bryan. I'm really thrilled to be here. BRYAN SCHWARTZMAN: Jacob, you're the boss. So what do we have on deck for today? RABBI JACOB STAUB: Our guest today, Bryan, is my rabbinic colleague and friend, Rabbi Toba Spitzer. And we'll be discussing her essay, Slavery and Its Atonement. The essay is a nuanced, moving piece, and I'm eager to get into our discussion. BRYAN SCHWARTZMAN: So like you said, it's a pretty nuanced, detailed essay and we really get into the nitty-gritty of some of Rabbi Spitzer's arguments. So Jacob, can you give us a sense of the broad outlines what this essay is about? I think it'll really help our listeners. RABBI JACOB STAUB: Sure, Bryan. Rabbi Spitzer is interested in what our collective responsibility might be for slavery. We often think that that's something that happened a long time ago. We feel sympathetic to the terrible suffering of the victims of chattel slavery, but if our grandparents arrived at the end of the 19th century and we haven't ourselves been slave owners, what is our responsibility? That's the question that she is raising. And her approach is to go to the text of the Torah, specifically to Deuteronomy 21, which tells the story of a dead person found between cities and how the responsibility for that death lies corporately with the nearest city. Even if none of the people did it, there still needs to be atonement for it. So the first point that she makes is that there's communal responsibility for what happens even if you were not personally involved, and the second point is that sin is not private. If I do something wrong, it affects everyone. So if one person kills someone, we all are responsible, and the third point is that we don't have to be conscious about it and that the sinner isn't necessarily bad. In the case of killing someone, it's bad, but sin needs to be atoned for, not to be punished. So her point is that atoning for slavery is something that we all must do and – BRYAN SCHWARTZMAN: Jews, non-Jews – humans. RABBI JACOB STAUB: Everyone. Everyone because the entire Industrial Revolution was powered by slave labor, if for no other reason, but also because of our common humanity and that the way to atone is first of all to acknowledge responsibility and not to feel terrible like, "Wait, did I do something terrible? I wasn't a slave owner"; rather, "As a member of this nation, of this community, I am responsible to acknowledge the terror and evil and cruelty on which my society is based. I can't ignore it." BRYAN SCHWARTZMAN: So the beginning of the essay differentiates between prophetic and priestly literature, and I gather that that is getting into the scholarly theories that different groups of authors wrote different parts of the Torah and part of the Torah was written by what we know is the priest. What about that do we need to know in order to really grasp the rabbi's larger point, or is it not that key? RABBI JACOB STAUB: Great question. It is important because we may not know or we may forget that the Bible, the Torah, the Five Books of Moses and beyond is not written by a single hand and does not have a single point of view on many issues. So we may think that the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel rail against evil and demand justice whereas another segment of Israelite society, the kohanim, the priests, understood sin as not as a moral offense but rather as metaphysical, concrete stain on the community that needs to be repaired. This is important because if we take that point of view, I don't have to think I'm bad in order to need to atone. I need everybody's sins. Everybody does wrong, and what do you do when you atone? You go on Yom Kippur at the synagogue. (I'm retrojecting.) When you do something wrong, you offer a sacrifice or you beat your chest or you express your regret and you have atoned. You are free of the stain of the sin. BRYAN SCHWARTZMAN: And I think it makes sense what you're talking about atonement that this essay actually began life as a Yom Kippur sermon, correct? RABBI JACOB STAUB: Correct. It does. In addition to the whole issue of slavery and atoning for slavery, I think it's a brilliant invocation of what Yom Kippur could mean. I beat my breast in synagogue on Yom Kippur for all these things that I didn't do, but I'm still responsible for them and I need to atone for the communal errors and mistakes because I'm part of the community. And even if I am responsible, even if I have violated, transgressed commandments, or moral imperatives, so I transgressed and now I can get beyond it, I can cleanse myself and proceed ahead. BRYAN SCHWARTZMAN: All right. So, as a reminder, all of the essays discussed on this show are available to read for free on the Evolve website, which is Evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org. And if you like what you hear, please take a moment to give us a five-star rating or leave a review. The ratings and reviews really help other people find out about this show. All right. Without further ado, let's get to our guest. Rabbi Toba Spitzer is spiritual leader of Dorshei Tzedek in Newton, Massachusetts. From 2007 to 2009, she served as president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association. In 2008, Newsweek named Rabbi Spitzer to its list of the top 50 rabbis in America, and she's the immediate past president of the Massachusetts Board of rabbis. In her Evolve essay, Slavery and Its Atonement, Rabbi Toba Spitzer explores the impact of slavery and the white Jewish obligation to respond. Rabbi Spitzer, welcome to the show. We're thrilled to have you. RABBI TOBA SPITZER: Great to be here. RABBI JACOB STAUB: So I want to start with your wonderful description of your visit to the plantation outside of New Orleans. You seem to say that the motivation or the beginning of you really thinking about reparations was that trip. Can you narrate for us a bit about what was at the plantation, what you experienced and what conclusions you derived? RABBI TOBA SPITZER: Sure. So the setting was the spring of 2017. So our president had taken office that January and the rise in white nationalist and white supremacist rhetoric and violence against people of color and Jews and LGBT people, it was in the mix of all that. I think many of us was thinking about how did our country get to this place? What's going on? I was visiting a friend who's from New Orleans, and she invited me to go with her to the Whitney plantation. Just getting this very powerful experience of slave narratives, of being in the spot where slaves have been killed for rebellion, I think in the context of this new world it felt like we were in, realizing there really wasn't a new world at all and that these issues had really been with us since slavery. It just became very clear to me that we have to deal with this. This is foundational to who we are as a nation, really, along with the genocide of Native Americans. I don't want to obscure that, but in this case, it was this particular experience, and it just hit me in this way that until we really deal with this legacy of slavery, that's why we're at where we're at. Our president is a symptom, not a cause, and it was really from there that I started thinking about how was I going to wrestle with this. What precedes reparations, which is wrestling with this as a society, communally, and at some point, realizing that I wanted to look at the rituals available to us in the priestly literature that we read from the Torah, or part of, on Yom Kippur. BRYAN SCHWARTZMAN: So I think we're really interested in this concept of looking at slavery through the prism of priestly and biblical concept[s] of sin. And I think in our society, in our culture, if we think of sin at all, we think of sin as something that's intentional, and you really delve into the concept of the unintentional sin and how that was understood through the biblical lens. So can you expand on or explain that? How Judaism thinks of sin as unintentional and how that really relates to our reckoning with slavery? RABBI TOBA SPITZER: I think this whole wrestling with sin and getting back to the priestly concept of it, I don't know whose quote this is, but as I was talking about this idea before I wrote the talk, someone famous said the worst thing that ever happened to sin was Christianity and psychotherapy. On the one hand, on the Christian side, the idea of original sin as a stain, that if we sin, we are irreparably damaged or perverted in some way, and then on the psychological side, that sin is a psychological intentional aspect of doing wrong. Whereas, I think, for the priests, there were two aspects of it that they talked about that, I think, are really important. One is it's not private. It's not about personal failing. It's about actions that an individual or society take that have repercussions throughout the society. The Hebrew Bible is so communal in its orientation. The individual is not that important qua individual. And so when we look at systematic oppression like slavery, to think about sin in the context of a society, to think of a model of sin, like the priestly model that thinks of sin as an aberration in a society that affects everyone, I think is very powerful. And that's related, I think, to the notion for this idea of a kheit bishgaga [sinning unknowingly], something done in error or inadvertently, and it's so weird for us to think of. So when you realize you've done a sin, then you have to go do something about it. So, first of all, how do you realize? All of a sudden, you're realizing. In my research, there could be inadvertent ethical errors just as there could be inadvertent ritual errors. Leviticus is totally clear that a leader could commit such an error or the entire community could commit the error. and intent has nothing to do with it. I think that's so important. Actually, this part of the talk, to be honest, to me is really the heart of the piece because I feel the main or one of the main obstacles to getting white people to really be willing to deal with racism, even think about reparations, is this deep fear that if I say I engage in any racist behavior or if I benefit in any way from racism, it must mean I'm a racist which then means I'm a bad person. I really searched and nowhere did it say that a person who sins is bad. This is just not part of the priestly concept. It's about unwholesome actions. It's about failures of judgments. Reparation can be made. Right relationship can be restored and the story I tell in the article is about right before Yom Kippur this year were the events in Charlottesville and this interview I heard of the Ku Klux Klan member, this old white guy, and this Latina reporter talking to him and I don't know what he was responding to. This guy goes, "Well, I'm not a racist." I almost fell out of my chair. "You're a member of the KKK!" But I was like, all right. If to be a racist is so bad that even a member of the KKK won't admit it, then we, white people, have some work to do. I can't make him the racist so then I'm not the racist. We're both on this continuum and hopefully I'm way more woke than he is, but it's implicit in our brains. We can't help it. It's in the DNA of our society. It's in our brains, and we have to just keep working at it. It doesn't matter if it's intentional or not. If I hurt someone or if I benefit from a racist system, I have to acknowledge it. So that to me was where this whole notion of kheit bishgaga, an unintentional sin. That's where that took me and I feel it's so liberating. And I think as white people – for white people in general, and white Jews in particular, to be able to use that, and… People of color don't want to deal with our guilt. They just want to deal with making things right. So could we just get this whole guilty stuff out of the way and just talk about, "What am I doing right? What am I doing wrong? How do I act better?" I think it'll just be better for everyone involved. BRYAN SCHWARTZMAN: I'm going to jump in and go a little out of order. First off, for our listeners out there, we should acknowledge that we have three white Jews sitting around talking about an issue that's central to our nation but just I want to acknowledge that and the perspective that we bring. In your essay in describing your family and your grandparents' journey to the American dream, you really lay out the facts of what we would call white privilege but you don't actually use that term, and I'm wondering if that's conscious, especially for those who may find it uncomfortable, who may find it jarring. I'm wondering what you feel of the term and if it's helpful in thinking about these things. RABBI TOBA SPITZER: I think white privilege, for those who know what it refers to, it's not bad. I have seen people not understand it. So it deepens confusion rather than clarifying. I tend to hear and think about in the context of how does my white skin today make me safe at police stop or make my kids not have to worry about being hauled off to jail if they make a mistake. That's about white privilege. I didn't consciously use it or not use it. I think I didn't use it because I was trying to actually address something else, which is that, for me, part of the shift is -- this comes back to Jacob's earlier question, visiting the plantation -- knowing I have white privilege still didn't make me feel particularly connected to slavery per se. So yes, I have white privilege but slavery is not my history. I didn't think of early American history as my history. Like in the 1700 – 1800s, my folks were getting schmeissed over in Russia. I think, in telling the story, the immigrant trajectory of my family, was more to say even though we arrived well after the Civil War was over, well after slavery was done, we are still implicated in the image from Deuteronomy of measuring the distance to the body. It's true. My friend who lives in New Orleans, her elders would be the ones closest to the body. They own slaves. She grew up in a house built by slaves; I did not. But it doesn't mean I don't have to measure. It doesn't mean I don't have to do that measurement. When I even talked about it in the article, it's all the ways that the legacy of slavery helps create white privilege. I urge everyone to read Half Has Never Been Told. It's very long. It's very detailed. The site is the end of the article, but it's unbelievably detailed description of how foundational slavery was not just to the US but to the Industrial Revolution and really nothing we have today in our society would be there if not for the cotton -- enslaved Africans picking cotton in the South in the 19th century. So that was the piece that was new for me, I think. RABBI JACOB STAUB: So as I'm listening to you here, I'm not sure what conclusion to draw. I think I just heard you say that slavery is the main thing that we needed to face because all of the privilege that we have, in fact, the postindustrial society that we have and all the wealth that we have would not have occurred without slavery. So I'm wondering the place of my responsibility for Jim Crow or for post-World War II housing policies or the things that continue to go on today, how is it useful? Why is it useful to focus on slavery and not on what happened after 1865 and continues to happen today? RABBI TOBA SPITZER: It's not to stop with slavery. To me, the slavery piece is really the invitation to then look at the rest of history. Again, I do want to add that I think the Native American genocide is as foundational. Again, this talk is about slavery. I think another talk will be written about that, but I think these concepts could apply there as well. So yes, of course, I think we need to educate ourselves. I think that does bring us back to reparations because when I read about H.R.40 – RABBI JACOB STAUB: H.R.40 is a bill that has been introduced every year in the house of representatives in Washington that mandates the establishment of a commission to examine the causes, responsibilities and effects of slavery. RABBI TOBA SPITZER: People get all freaked out about, "oh, who's going to pay and how much are we going to pay?" That's actually not what this bill calls for. It calls for studies. So it says if a bill is passed, it will establish, "a commission to study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans to examine slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the United States from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies." So that to me is the task. It's not just to say slavery was bad. It's to say, let's really look at our history. And when I talk about the inadvertent sin, the first step, it says, you have to know it. So it's that knowing process, I think, that will then delve into everything you just mentioned, Jacob, and not to assign guilt. "Okay, now I'm guilty because my parents benefited from G.I. Bill." No. It's that we're all part of the system and if we want to be healthy and have a healthy community, a healthy democracy, we have to engage in the study and talk about it. So slavery is really the beginning. Because of a lot of the white supremacist narrative now is that "the Civil War wasn't really about slavery. Slavery is not really that important or it was going to die out anyway" – none of that is true. So really wrestling and to be going foundational is what then brings us to all those other issues. RABBI JACOB STAUB: I think the thing that has moved me the most in this direction are two things. First, the disparity between accumulated family wealth between white people and people of color and then, adding to that, the fact that my wealth as a white person is the result of wealth generated by people of color both before and since the Civil War. RABBI TOBA SPITZER: Everyone's wealth. That's why I don't think the guilt model or trying to find clean money or dirty money -- this is where it comes from. This is just the reality and I think the better we could accept that reality and just say we're all in this and we all have a shared responsibility and hopefully a shared desire to solve it, it's really for all of our benefit. That's why, to me, the priestly texts were so liberating because white liberal guilt is nowhere to be found and white liberal guilt is so annoying. So it's such an obstacle to doing… Everybody is so afraid of being tainted. We're all tainted. When we're born, it's in our brains by the time we're 3. We can't not be tainted. So let's just say yes, we're tainted. Now, let's get to work. It's not a personal failing. It can be healed. I think that's where the reparations piece comes in, the notion of kapparah, the notion that we make a conscious offering to help repair the psychological and the spiritual damage, that the actual damage can never be undone. It's impossible. The monetary figures involved are beyond calculation. The human figures are certainly beyond calculation, but a reparations process would be this process of reflection of some kind of economic adjustment which we all agreed to on some level and then even deeper than that, some kind of healing process. Even just acknowledgement… We know as Jews when people deny the Holocaust, how upset we get. We should have sympathy when this crime, which is vaster in scale, in time, in numbers, is denied on so many levels. Just the acknowledgement is so powerful. BRYAN SCHWARTZMAN: So if you had to make a grand policy prescription or you were in charge, you would start with this House resolution you reference that calls for a government commission to study the issue of reparations on a society level, that's where you think we should start? RABBI TOBA SPITZER: I think it would be a great place to start. It feels culturally, the New York Times has just published something recently about 1619. The conversation has started. So all of it. At the government level, it seems very important. It's not going to happen in this administration but at some point, but I think a national conversation would be very, very powerful. We have something that we haven't done perfectly but, I think, Germany has had some of that national conversation. I think my very small offering in this article is to try to see if our tradition, which taught a lot about sin, had anything to offer. I didn't know, to be honest, when I started, if it did. I didn't know what the answer to that question was and I was really pleased to say, "Actually, I think we do have something here to offer." Maybe these texts that we share with our Christian cousins, maybe these models can be helpful in trying to talk about this. I think that what you said before, earlier Bryan acknowledged that it's three white Jewish people talking about this. It's important. I think white people would need to have this conversation. We're the ones that have the obstacles to talking about it in this way. So this is really for us in a lot of ways to get over our internal obstacles to having this conversation. BRYAN SCHWARTZMAN: So we don't have time today in this episode to get into Germany and West Germany reparations, monuments, education about the Holocaust, but if you'd to learn more and how and why it might relate to the issue of slavery in the United States, we've got a couple of resources you can check out within the show notes on our website. So where can individuals start? Where can Jewish communities start? Are you recommending study groups? Can you point to anything that's happened at your congregation? RABBI TOBA SPITZER: So it was interesting -- before Ferguson happened in summer 2014, we were already doing some work on criminal justice reform with a local coalition. Then the events of Ferguson in the summer of 2014 happened and it was interesting. For some folks, it goes the other way. People do the study first then go to action. We were doing the criminal justice work and then out of that work, some people doing that inthe coalition said, "We, predominantly the white community, we should be actually talking about the underlying issues which are race and racism." So a study group formed on our website, dorsheitzedek.org, is a link to a reading list that that group has developed. This is both a group of people getting together to educate themselves but also have periodic discussions with the community. So we continue to do the tikkun olam work, but I think that personal reflection has been powerful. So that's, I think, one way as a community we are trying to do a better job of being more representative in terms of our school staff, in terms of people of color, so there's a ton that Jewish communities can be doing. The Reform movement has done some great work around this. I know we have resources on the Evolve website. As with everything, awareness and some study maybe le-maaseh, hopefully brings us to action and then the action leads back to more reflection. RABBI JACOB STAUB: I wonder whether you have something to say about what role Jews of color have in this process. I think I've slid in this conversation and often slide into thinking of Jews as white, things that Jews need to do to people of color, forgetting that between 12 and 20% of the Jewish community is constituted of people of color. You have some thoughts about where people of color might fit into the work of the Jewish community here? RABBI TOBA SPITZER: I can just observe where I think Jews of color are fitting in. I think they're teachers and trainers. I've certainly learned from listening to colleagues of color and their experiences and learning from the experiences of black folks in my community and not because they're trying to teach me but just because they're relaying their lives to me and I'm listening. So just existing and being in our communities, maybe it's just one thing to learn. People of color, especially African Americans on this issue, are the teachers. Not everybody but almost everybody at least on my reading list, is black. So to me, that's been my stance as learner. People of color should take whatever the role they want to take in terms of being part of this conversation, but I can't imagine having a society wide conversation without the active leadership of the African American community on this,which I think this congressional bill is an example of that. I want to just read the James Baldwin quote I have because ultimately, it's about - my self-interest in this is not wanting to live in an America that's as crazy as it is right now, it's hurting me and I think that's the other piece about sin being social. Ultimately, we're all really hurt. So my hurt is obviously different than the hurt of a person of color. So I think, collectively, we need to be thinking about what's each of our piece of this work? We all of have a piece of it. A person of color would have to tell you what piece they want to be for them. I can't say that, but Baldwin wrote, "What I'm concerned about is what white Americans have done to themselves. What has been done to me is irrelevant simply because there is nothing more you can do to it. But in doing it, you've done something to yourself, and evading my humanity, you've done something to your own humanity." So there's this compassion that is quite remarkable. Then he goes on in another place to talk about the promise of this country because this is James Baldwin, someone who was very, very honest about the feelings of this society and he talks about, "Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of the standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself for the greatest achievements must begin somewhere and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations." That was written a long time ago. I feel like it's speaking to this moment, but he uses the word "love", whoever loves this country. He does it because he wants to rescue America from itself and we have to take a hard look. To me, this is in the service of taking a hard look to be better, but we have to look at those truths. I do tend to believe that truth will set you free. If we really understand this history, it will make us want to know more and it will make us better able to figure out the way forward. That's my belief. I'm with Baldwin on that one. BRYAN SCHWARTZMAN: There's another Evolve piece maybe where a rabbi in the movement discusses this overpowering urge to go up to the first African American he sees and profusely apologize. Obviously, that would be uncomfortable and inappropriate. So what do we do if we get overpowered by these feelings? Are there positive ways to channel that? RABBI JACOB STAUB: Well, I think… RABBI TOBA SPITZER: Yes. I think in activism and I think in being an ally, and you can always ask someone like, "How can I be an ally to you?" I think, again, coming to the Yom Kippur rituals, the fact that our ancient ancestors ritualized this to say, we know that humans have a need to ask forgiveness. Maybe what would come out of this reparation study are public displays of forgiveness. Again, it's not just white people. The first atonement for slavery I ever saw was, I think, at least 10 years ago. I was in Ghana with American Jewish World Service. As part of that trip, they took us to a fort that had been the center of slave trading. In 1998, there was a plaque on the wall. In 1998, the elders from the local community - these are Africans who were descended from people who had worked in the slave trade - they put up a plaque and they did a whole ritual asking for forgiveness from their ancestors. That was very moving to me that that community was -- even though our community was targeted, we were also complicit, some of us were complicit and those of us who are the descendants of those leaders need to take responsibility. So there's so many ways that I think collectively, we white people can start. We don't need to apologize to individual black people -- those black people don't really want to hear that from us – but can certainly start. There's the Equal Justice Initiative museum and trying to get these towns throughout the South to put up markers where lynching has happened. There's so much public atonement, and anger isn't really talking about. We're talking about public atonement. Not me going up to random black person saying I'm really sorry that white people did terrible things. It's how do we work for public atonement. I think that is where we can learn from the case of Germany, and the very early beginnings here in the States, I think, doing this work and white people should be doing that work. BRYAN SCHWARTZMAN: Our tradition has descriptions and a lot of literature about slavery certainly in the Tanakh. It's a very different kind of slavery, but is going to those sources at all useful or helpful as Jewish communities wrestle with this or is it somehow misleading or misdirecting? RABBI JACOB STAUB: Let me step in. So first, we know that there were a small but substantial number of Jewish slave traders in the US. But also, Jews were slave traders in the Middle Ages. We went to Slavic countries and took Slavs out and traded them in North Africa. So there's no dearth of information about our complicity worldwide and throughout history. I think… RABBI TOBA SPITZER: And I'll just add, that canard has been used against Jews in an antisemitic way. Everybody was involved in slavery and everybody were slave traders. Arabs were slave traders. Africans were slave traders. Jews were. Slavery has always existed. Is it in the Torah? Of course, it's in the Torah. The Torah tried to imagine a different world. Our narrative is a band of slaves who were liberated and two chapters later, the Torah couldn't even imagine a world without slavery, but (a) it wasn't chattel slavery and (b) the fact that slavery is in the Torah is because the Torah was written like 2500 years ago or older and slaves are everywhere. So I'm not sure that that's relevan,t to be honest. I think if we go the direction of like, "Oh, we can only talk about this if our people were never involved" and that's crazy. It's like everyone's involved in it, but that's the whole the point. The whole point is to get away from this, "Well, you guys were slave traders too." It's to say these are social sins, these are societal sins. That's number one. Number two is the scale of both the enslavement and the brutality is really unparalleled in history. It began in the Caribbean with the sugar plantations and it was a systematic system of torture in order to produce the highest return on the cotton crop. I think there was nothing in the ancient world or the medieval world that could begin to compare, so it's a little bit apples and oranges. It's about what we today consider a sin and how we understand that and how we atone for it and our notion of sin. What I got from the priestly literature was mechanisms for atoning for sin, not what our ancestors thought was sin. If we go in that, we're in a totally different ballpark. They do not think slavery was a sin unless it was done to us. They had other ideas of things that were sinful that we don't consider sinful. But, again, I think their mechanisms for dealing with communal sin, as opposed to what the sins were, are brilliant and that we should learn from them. RABBI JACOB STAUB: I want to emphasize this point. We've already touched on it, but the idea that sin is corporate and need not be intentional and is shared universally, whatever sin we're talking about, is very moving to me and it reminds me also of the essay you wrote on Evolve about antisemitism and about how antisemitism is baked into the last 2000 years of Western civilization. So, of course, everybody is antisemitic to some extent, including Jews. It's an opportunity for relaxing and forgiveness and healing. I think you're really onto something important. RABBI TOBA SPITZER: Thank you. I think that feels to me like one of the central points. I think it is important. I think until we can be in that place, we will be defensive and if we're defensive, we can't do the work we need to do collectively. So thank you. I'm glad you got that from it. That is what I really wanted to emphasize. BRYAN SCHWARTZMAN: I guess I just want to go back to this idea of what you referred to with the book Half Has Never Been Told. I'll definitely take the recommendation. I think this idea is really out there now. In the August issue of the Atlantic, Drew Gilpin Faust, the historian and former president of Harvard, tackled the complicated history of race in Virginia and by extension, the United States, writing that, "It was the unfreedom of 40% of Virginia's population that made the liberty of the rest imaginable as well as materially possible. The economic viability of both the colony and the new nation depended on slave labor." So this idea, at least for us as Americans, that slavery is just fundamentally woven into the DNA of our history, how do American Jews integrate that with our relationship to American society, the idea of the American dream? It really feels powerful, wrenching. It's hard to know what to do with that. RABBI TOBA SPITZER: I agree. As you were talking, I was thinking about what happens when someone finds out something foundational about their family they didn't know. They're like 40 years old and they find out their father is not their biological father. It's not like they didn't have the life they had. Their father is their father, but all of a sudden they're like, "Oh my God. There's something about myself I didn't know." So one hand it changes the picture, but it also doesn't erase the experience they had. To me, this is like that. We should change the picture. We should want to know the real picture. I think if we bring anything as Jews, it's like we like to study, we're not afraid to look at the hard stuff, and that doesn't negate the fact that for the Jewish people, America has been actually a pretty good homeland. At least for white Jewish immigrants, it's been a good homeland. RABBI JACOB STAUB: Toba, it's just really wonderful to listen to you and I think that's a really appropriate conclusion to this whole conversation. You start on this topic and you don't know where it's going to go and the promise that it can be redemptive is really important and promising and hope-filled and I thank you for that. RABBI TOBA SPITZER: Amen. May it be so. BRYAN SCHWARTZMAN: Thanks so much for listening to our interview with Rabbi Toba Spitzer. If you enjoyed our conversation, please be sure to read her essay Slavery and It's Atonements on the above website. RABBI JACOB STAUB: What did you think about today's episode? We want to hear from you. Evolve is about curating meaningful conversations and that includes you. So send us your questions, your comments, your feedback, whatever you got. You can reach Bryan at BSchwartzman@ReconstructingJudaism.org. BRYAN SCHWARTZMAN: Evolve - Groundbreaking Jewish conversations is executive produced by Rabbi Jacob Staub and edited by Sam Wachs. Our theme song Ilu Finu was composed by Rabbi Miriam Margles. This show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism. I'm Bryan Schwartzman. RABBI JACOB STAUB: And I'm Jacob Staub. BRYAN SCHWARTZMAN: And we'll see you next time.