In one of the most spiritual moments of my life, I received a text message on July 4, 2023, from a Black pastor in Denver, Colo.
The Pastor and I have become friends over the last decade and text fairly frequently. He regularly asks about my kids and I about his two college-aged sons. We talk spirituality. He reads my essays. We discuss world affairs. Sneakers. Family. And Denver Nuggets basketball.
But this text was different. Here it is verbatim.
“Hey, my brother! Thinking of you today. Today my sons and I are traveling from Prague to Berlin and we just visited a concentration camp in Terezin. God bless you my brother. #NeverAgain #StandUpToJewishHate.”
Terezin was the camp the Nazis set up as a waystation before Jews were shipped off to the extermination camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Over 150,000 Jews passed through Terezin before being sent to their deaths. Some 15,000 were children. Over 33,000 Jews died of hunger and malnutrition in Terezin. My own family lost four cousins under the age of 6 to the Nazi murder machine.
The Pastor’s text message touched my soul.
Here was a Black American Christian Pastor sharing unwavering love and care for me as his Jewish brother. Not only was he taking time out to educate his young adult children on the dangers of Jew hatred, he was letting me know he stands with me and my people. He was expressing his empathy.
Dr. King was for sure smiling down on the Pastor, as MLK always encouraged every one of us to stand up not just for ourselves, but for others. It’s a tall task, as we sadly know, but for this Pastor, it was a moral imperative, just like it was for King.
My Pastor friend then sent me his location and several photographs from the camp.
If that were the end of the exchange, it would’ve been heartwarming enough. But the timing of his text messages sent chills down my body.
When I received his text message from the concentration camp, I was literally walking on the rocky floors of Cape Coast Castle in Ghana. It’s the castle on the coast of West Africa where kidnapped Black Africans were put in dungeons, some killed, some raped and many shipped off to the Americas to be sold into slavery.
Yes, as a white-looking, olive-skinned Jewish man of European and Middle Eastern ancestry, I was in Africa to learn about the tragic history of our Black American brothers and sisters’ ancestors. I was there to learn about the hate that put into motion so many problems we still confront today.
I texted him back to tell him where I was and he got the same chills I did.
There I was walking on ground stained with African blood 6,140 miles away from home at the same moment the Pastor was walking on ground stained with Jewish blood 5,113 miles from home.
It wasn’t lost on me that the timing of our simultaneous visits wasn’t coincidental.
Beyond the magical connection I shared with my friend, there’s an important lesson in it for all of us.
That if we’re ever going to solve racial, ethnic and religious discord, we’re going to have to take time to learn from and listen to each other. How can we ever know another’s trauma or pain, or where they’re coming from, if we aren’t taking the time to study it on a deeper level? To learn about each other’s experiences.
That means Black and white listening and learning. It means Jewish and Arab. Gay and straight. It means all of us.
We won’t ever solve the most pressing human issues of our day if we’re not doing our best to reach a place of true empathy.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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Photo credit: Annie Spratt on Unsplash