My Skin is the Color of Chocolate-Covered Matzah — Heather Miller
“To be honest, when I first saw you, I thought, ‘what is this Black woman going to be telling this room full of Jews? But then in your intro, you mentioned that you’re Jewish so I thought, ‘okay, I’ll listen,” a participant of my Race Consciousness series said during the post-session debrief. Though I had been hired by a Jewish organization to facilitate the series that he’d signed up for, his first thought was that my skin color precluded him from having to listen to me in a conversation about race. I believe that his perspective is shifting, but it’s not hard to figure out why he doesn’t see 12-15% of us in his community.
As I’ve been teaching this series, I have been reflecting on my own experiences of race as I have been writing my Racial Autobiography. I started living my Jewish life at 17, and it would be over a decade until I met my first JOC. I hadn’t even realized how lost I had been. Coming into my Jewish identity in White Ashkenazi spaces, I hadn’t realized that I had neglected to explore where my blackness fit within my Jewish identity. As a result, I see that that was why I felt so disconnected. I was literally keeping those two parts of my identity separate. When I stopped to consider this, I realized that after 16 years in my current community, there were very few who I identified with as ‘my people’ and, further, that the disconnect I felt in my present was connected to race. After the events of this past Spring, it became very apparent that I was the person people conjured when they used the “..but I have a Black friend” line but they were not people whom I counted among my friends. People began realizing that I was a Black woman and I no longer hid that they regularly acted on a hierarchy that (in their minds) placed them above me. I found myself in a deeply defeated place where I questioned whether the vision I had for our community was one that was truly shared by everyone. I decided to have a difficult conversation and I made it clear that things had to change or I would step down as President and out of our community. Seeing people like us in the front of the room matters. It sends a signal to the entire Jewish community and they needed to stop tokenizing me and be willing to stand with me and stand up for me. And they were.
A couple of weeks ago, I went way out of my comfort zone and got a birth chart reading. I went into the experience with an open mind but with a high degree of skepticism. As the Astrologer interpreted the lines, dashes, symbols and numbers in my chart, I became emotional when she said, “you have the power of nurturing and the power to remind everyone you meet that they have, and that we all have, a place that we come from and that we have to respect that place.” She continued, “you have the power to create hope, community and family not just for your family but for your communal family.” After the initial weight of those words sunk in, I felt validated in my decision to join the work of elevating race consciousness in other communities. I have embraced the idea that my purpose might just be to become a leader for not just my ‘family’ but for our ‘communal family’ because I need to hold on to the hope that things will change. The reading ended with the Astrologer saying that I was born with a message that needs to be shared with the world. She said that not everyone will be ready for the message now, but that in time, it will be the norm. In my moment of doubt, my matriarchs spoke through this woman to give me that message. My name is Elisheva and my skin is the color of chocolate-covered matzah and that identity matters. Our history matters. Our existence and the stories of each and every one of us matter.
I am so grateful for this community. You are my people. You inspire me to add my hands to the Sissophysian boulder that is determined to hold us back from making progress. You inspire me to keep them there no matter how heavy the work gets. With every request I get from synagogues who want me to help them on their journey to do better, I am more and more hopeful that the Spring was not just a moment and all of this isn’t just virtue signalling. I have to believe that one day, we can enter a room of White Jews and not only will no one question why we are there but that as our eyes scan, we will see many more of each other in the crowd. I have to believe that one day, we will be embraced in all of our beautiful melanin.
Heather Miller is a JOC Member at Ammud: The Jews of Color Torah Academy.
