Parashat Beha'alotechah and George Floyd's murder
Yesterday, on the Shabbat when Progressive Jewish communities read parashat Beha'alotechah, I was giving the sermon. There was really only one thing I could have spoken about this week. Several congregants have asked me to share what I said for them to reread, so here it is, flawed, no doubt, and in need of more, as so much is at the moment. Until last November, if you had asked me what the most powerful museum I have visited was I would have unfalteringly replied Yad Vashem, the National Holocaust Museum in Israel. A place I have wept, learnt, and memorialised. But last year, I was attending a conference in Atlanta, the home town of Martin Luther King Junior, and visited The Centre for Civil and Human Rights. It didn’t tell a story I have been directly impacted by, as Yad Vashem does, yet it had a similar impact. Growing up in the UK I was of course aware of some of the history of slavery and civil rights in the US, but the Centre in Atlanta was so beautifully curated th
