Cantor Vera's Corner
Cantor Vera's Message
April 2021
Dear Temple family,
This April, we dig deep into the softened, ready earth of spring with both hands. With one hand, we grasp the steady, grounding potential of our journey through the weeks of the Omer, from the second night of Pesach till Shavuot. Day by numbered day, spring possibilities push up through the dirt and unfurl, green and live. With the other, we touch the grave-dust of memories of the Sho’ah and the whirlwind devastation of Jewish life as the world knew it in the Holocaust, eighty-odd years ago. Through our Yom HaSho’ah service, Bernice Lerner’s author talk with us, and our God and Suffering class, we offer different entry points to the same hard topic.
The Sho’ah is heavy stuff. Why do we return, each year, to “all the horrors of war”? Are we retraumatizing ourselves? I don’t think so. I think that in naming, and not flinching from, the specificity of the hate visited on Jews by the Third Reich, we affirm that Jewish life matters enormously. We cannot be erased, our history cannot be denied. We are here and we are strong. Our sense of what was lost galvanizes us. When our interfaith clergy neighbors and their congregants attend our Yom HaSho’ah services, they learn about our Shabbat service, the tunes we like to use, the prayers we say—and they learn the history of the European Jewish world, the names of the camps and of our dead, and they honor them with us. Our youth lead us in prayer and our hearts well up with pride in them, the next generation.
Observing Yom HaSho’ah, in all its solemnity, also whets our own appetite to fight bias where we see it, for our communities and for all communities. The Sho’ah was a massive wound in the world dealt by the white supremacy that still stalks dignity and claims lives in modern society. “Never again” means never again, for anyone. In mid-March, a gunman shot eight people, six of them Asian American women, at massage parlors in Atlanta, escalating a year of rising anti-Asian bias that tracks with the coronavirus but also predates it. At a candlelit vigil I attended the next evening in Lowell, organized by the Cambodian Mutual Aid Association, several speakers described being discriminated against based on their Asian American identity. At the end of the vigil, Lowell City Councillor Sokhary Chau shared with me that his father had been killed by the Khmer Rouge. When Councillor Chau had arrived in the Merrimack Valley with literally just the clothes on his back, both Cambodian and Jewish groups welcomed his family. He drew a parallel between the antisemitic slur used recently by a Lowell School Committee member (since resigned) and racial slurs that are used against Asian Americans, saying that “we both know, it’s never just the words—it’s always more, there’s always a history of violence, even of genocide.” He said that this mutual recognition felt supportive, and it did to me too. To be seen and understood by folks who share similar experiences is a gift. It also brings mutual obligations into sharper focus. These include recognizing and affirming the experiences of Jews of Color, an integral part of the Jewish tapestry who may experience both racism and antisemitism. In the same way that we ask the wider world to speak and act against antisemitism, white Jews must also speak and act against anti-Asian hate—and every other form of white supremacy—when we see and hear it. That’s the path that gets humanity up and out of the confines of a world bounded by prejudice. That’s part of what lets us stand at Sinai, in covenant with the Divine and each other. As Massachusetts State Representative Rady Mom said, “That's how you stay alive: you care for one another.”
I heard strong love and pride in Asian American culture expressed at the vigil. One nineteen-year-old Cambodian American spoke of the power of growing up surrounded by people who looked like him, ate like him, lived like him: “Our identity stays through us throughout our entire lives. And our identity stays with us in the confrontations we have with people, and in the classes we take in college and post college, and in the food we eat, and in the media we consume.” This resonated deeply with me. My mind went straight back to my own college years, filled with Jewish musical and historical explorations—though I practiced little of formal religion at that point—and how it felt to be the first Jewish person my best friend had ever met, an involuntary representative of our people, explaining and demonstrating and inviting her to learn about my customs. My Jewish identity defines me in ways that I might never have consciously chosen, and yet feel so proud to carry.
Each year at Yom HaSho’ah, we are present to the full weight of our Jewish identity. We come bearing our candles and our stories and our songs, knowing that heartbreak lives in those stories but that vigor and vitality live there too. We gather so that our young people can hear our history and bring their own experiences of living as a new generation of Jews into the story, so that it keeps growing. We gather to see our allies and to be allies, knowing that our collective existence is resistance to white supremacy. And each year, we take stock of the work yet to do to root out deadly bias—antisemitic, racial, gender-based—from the social and structural systems and interactions that shape our lives.
L’chayyim—to our Jewish lives, in all their fullness, and to the lives and dignity of each one of our neighbors,
Cantor Vera
This April, we dig deep into the softened, ready earth of spring with both hands. With one hand, we grasp the steady, grounding potential of our journey through the weeks of the Omer, from the second night of Pesach till Shavuot. Day by numbered day, spring possibilities push up through the dirt and unfurl, green and live. With the other, we touch the grave-dust of memories of the Sho’ah and the whirlwind devastation of Jewish life as the world knew it in the Holocaust, eighty-odd years ago. Through our Yom HaSho’ah service, Bernice Lerner’s author talk with us, and our God and Suffering class, we offer different entry points to the same hard topic.
The Sho’ah is heavy stuff. Why do we return, each year, to “all the horrors of war”? Are we retraumatizing ourselves? I don’t think so. I think that in naming, and not flinching from, the specificity of the hate visited on Jews by the Third Reich, we affirm that Jewish life matters enormously. We cannot be erased, our history cannot be denied. We are here and we are strong. Our sense of what was lost galvanizes us. When our interfaith clergy neighbors and their congregants attend our Yom HaSho’ah services, they learn about our Shabbat service, the tunes we like to use, the prayers we say—and they learn the history of the European Jewish world, the names of the camps and of our dead, and they honor them with us. Our youth lead us in prayer and our hearts well up with pride in them, the next generation.
Observing Yom HaSho’ah, in all its solemnity, also whets our own appetite to fight bias where we see it, for our communities and for all communities. The Sho’ah was a massive wound in the world dealt by the white supremacy that still stalks dignity and claims lives in modern society. “Never again” means never again, for anyone. In mid-March, a gunman shot eight people, six of them Asian American women, at massage parlors in Atlanta, escalating a year of rising anti-Asian bias that tracks with the coronavirus but also predates it. At a candlelit vigil I attended the next evening in Lowell, organized by the Cambodian Mutual Aid Association, several speakers described being discriminated against based on their Asian American identity. At the end of the vigil, Lowell City Councillor Sokhary Chau shared with me that his father had been killed by the Khmer Rouge. When Councillor Chau had arrived in the Merrimack Valley with literally just the clothes on his back, both Cambodian and Jewish groups welcomed his family. He drew a parallel between the antisemitic slur used recently by a Lowell School Committee member (since resigned) and racial slurs that are used against Asian Americans, saying that “we both know, it’s never just the words—it’s always more, there’s always a history of violence, even of genocide.” He said that this mutual recognition felt supportive, and it did to me too. To be seen and understood by folks who share similar experiences is a gift. It also brings mutual obligations into sharper focus. These include recognizing and affirming the experiences of Jews of Color, an integral part of the Jewish tapestry who may experience both racism and antisemitism. In the same way that we ask the wider world to speak and act against antisemitism, white Jews must also speak and act against anti-Asian hate—and every other form of white supremacy—when we see and hear it. That’s the path that gets humanity up and out of the confines of a world bounded by prejudice. That’s part of what lets us stand at Sinai, in covenant with the Divine and each other. As Massachusetts State Representative Rady Mom said, “That's how you stay alive: you care for one another.”
I heard strong love and pride in Asian American culture expressed at the vigil. One nineteen-year-old Cambodian American spoke of the power of growing up surrounded by people who looked like him, ate like him, lived like him: “Our identity stays through us throughout our entire lives. And our identity stays with us in the confrontations we have with people, and in the classes we take in college and post college, and in the food we eat, and in the media we consume.” This resonated deeply with me. My mind went straight back to my own college years, filled with Jewish musical and historical explorations—though I practiced little of formal religion at that point—and how it felt to be the first Jewish person my best friend had ever met, an involuntary representative of our people, explaining and demonstrating and inviting her to learn about my customs. My Jewish identity defines me in ways that I might never have consciously chosen, and yet feel so proud to carry.
Each year at Yom HaSho’ah, we are present to the full weight of our Jewish identity. We come bearing our candles and our stories and our songs, knowing that heartbreak lives in those stories but that vigor and vitality live there too. We gather so that our young people can hear our history and bring their own experiences of living as a new generation of Jews into the story, so that it keeps growing. We gather to see our allies and to be allies, knowing that our collective existence is resistance to white supremacy. And each year, we take stock of the work yet to do to root out deadly bias—antisemitic, racial, gender-based—from the social and structural systems and interactions that shape our lives.
L’chayyim—to our Jewish lives, in all their fullness, and to the lives and dignity of each one of our neighbors,
Cantor Vera
Cantor Vera's Video Teachings
Cantor Vera's Writings
D'var for Pesach 5780/2020 (video)
"Practicing Failure, Cultivating Resilience," d'var for Yom Kippur 5780/2019
D'var for Kol Nidrei 5780/2019
"Israeli and American Jewish Identity," d'var for 1st Day of Rosh Hashanah 5780/2019
"The Geir Without and Within," d'var for 1st Day of Rosh Hashanah 5779/2018
"Ki Hinei Kachomeir: Desiring our Yeitzer," for Kol Nidrei 5779/2018
Cantor Vera's Report on Trip to San Diego and Tijuana with T'ruah in July 2018
"Practicing Failure, Cultivating Resilience," d'var for Yom Kippur 5780/2019
D'var for Kol Nidrei 5780/2019
"Israeli and American Jewish Identity," d'var for 1st Day of Rosh Hashanah 5780/2019
"The Geir Without and Within," d'var for 1st Day of Rosh Hashanah 5779/2018
"Ki Hinei Kachomeir: Desiring our Yeitzer," for Kol Nidrei 5779/2018
Cantor Vera's Report on Trip to San Diego and Tijuana with T'ruah in July 2018