We need to learn the right lessons from Black Lives Matter - opinion

We seem to have learned lessons from the Black Lives Matter movement in the US. Unfortunately, they are all the wrong lessons.

The murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in 2020 generated revulsion that shook the ground from coast to coast. Those shocks produced aftershocks. They included what seemed like a genuine determination of Americans to do something about injustices that Black Americans have suffered. 

The election of Barack Obama in 2008 did little to help inner-city Blacks, but it “proved” to many Americans that prejudice and injustice had been erased. The Floyd murder proved otherwise.

Black Lives Matter signs were everywhere. For a while, the sentiment seemed genuine. Americans were willing to listen to Black narratives, including taking a hard look at how Jim Crow laws and Lyndon Johnson’s well-meaning Great Society had disadvantaged African-Americans and destroyed the Black family. Floyd had not died in vain. 

My haredi (ultra-Orthodox) grandchildren in Detroit marched together with their fellow citizens in support of a new reckoning and healing of the racial divide.

I am not sure if they would march today. The Black Lives Matter slogan was wrested away from the people and usurped by dangerous extremists with an agenda of their own. The riots and looting that followed destroyed large swaths of urban cities.

It made absolutely no difference that the majority of rioters were not Black. People made the association nonetheless. Black Lives Matter morphed from an idea with great appeal to a dangerous enemy in the popular mind, an organization that wanted to defund the police. 

The news feeds showed mobs destroying neighborhoods, and police were instructed to stand down. The violence killed people and did two billion dollars’ worth of damage – all linked to George Floyd, a Black man. The goodwill that enveloped much of the United States vanished. It was replaced, in many cases, by a reversion to the status quo ante: “What do those people want? Whatever it is, we want no part of it.”

Who lost? The Black people. I recall listening to a recording of a meeting of alderpersons in Chicago during the riots; a Black representative was almost in tears. All pharmacies in his district had been gutted, and there was literally no place where residents could get needed prescriptions if they did not own cars. Murder rates soared in Chicago and have not come down. The typical victims were other Black people. 

Every Black pastor I spoke to at the time – people who were working tirelessly to build families and communities - was dejected. They had stood on the cusp of making real progress in race relations, and then the “activists” came along and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

A similar situation in Israel 

THAT’S BASICALLY where we are in Israel today. There have been shocks, followed by aftershocks, that created real promise, and then the actions by both extremists and politicians destroyed the nascent goodwill that was generated.

One shock was the specter of judicial reform coupled with the realization that demographics were pushing the country – probably irreversibly – away from the values of the Founding Families of the nation. Another was the crudity of the anti-religious behavior that was captured on camera and seen around the world.

The sight of Jew battling Jew in the Jewish state was ugly. It was difficult to behold and even more difficult to explain to philo-Semitic Christian visitors, who often paint us with halos. But for a while, it looked like something positive could emerge from the acrimony. Supporters of reform began to realize that it was not only uber-leftist extremists who were protesting week after week at Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv.

As much as they disagreed with the people who cried, “coup, shame,” supporters of the reform began to understand the fears of those who had spent their lives and given their blood in full expectation that the state would develop according to their vision. 

Somehow, their investment in the Jewish State had to be accommodated, their fears placated. Perhaps the process of reform should be slowed down a bit.

The rude, arrogant woman in Tel Aviv who tried to disrupt Chabad’s helping passersby to don tefillin (phylacteries) led to denunciations from celebrities. 

The backlash against those seeking to ban the public observance of commandments that their ancestors had lived and died for was formidable. Droves of self-identified secular Jews were moved to begin wearing tefillin as a protest against the haters. This, too, was a positive development that could have been the beginning of reconciliation.

As was the case with Black Lives Matter, the fragile goodwill that was generated here in Israel was stolen from the masses. American olim (immigrants) will never understand how the Tel Aviv Municipality could ban public prayer by anyone, let alone Jews, because it offends their sensibilities.

It is unthinkable that a group of Muslims would be denied the right to hold public prayer a block away from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, even on Easter. And if devotees of the Flying Spaghetti Monster wanted to worship their deity across the street from Lincoln Square Synagogue, no one would dare deny them the privilege. Even on Passover. No one would be threatened by upholding the constitutional rights of worship and assembly.

IN THE other direction, it is hard to conceive of a reaction more insensitive or contemptuous of others than the reaction of one haredi MK, commenting – before Knesset override was removed from the reform agenda – on a proposal that such override should require more than a simple majority.

The majority won the election, he said. Why should we need anything more than a majority?

One of his colleagues emerged from a meeting with economists, who apparently presented bleak figures about the haredi economic situation. Rather than recognize any problem and speak of solutions, he dismissed their findings as “war on religion.” This was hardly a confidence builder to the many Israelis who, in recent weeks, were beginning to regard haredim as brothers and fellow travelers.

Many decades ago, an anonymous pundit quipped, “The situation in Germany is serious, but not hopeless; the situation in Austria is hopeless, but not serious.” The divide between liberal and conservative, between blue and red states, appears hopeless in the US, with no serious proposals for beginning to heal the divisions.

That’s the difference between America and Israel. Filter out the politicians, the government officials, and overwrought media, and we still have a common language, a devotion to Jewish past, present and future. 

That has all but disappeared in the US. Here, the situation is serious, but by no means hopeless. All we need to do is take back those bits of understanding and empathy that emerged in recent months and turn them into mutual respect.

The writer is the director of interfaith affairs at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and host of the Two Rabbis, Three Opinions podcast.