This evening of Shabbat falls on Juneteenth, a federal holiday since 2021. It relates in powerful ways to core values in our Jewish tradition, and should matter deeply to us especially given important relationships that are precious. I want to take a few extra minutes with it and connect it to our tradition and our parasha.
Slavery in this country was a moral stain. Human beings, created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, were treated as property. Stolen from their families. Oppressed, raped, murdered. Their bodies used and their humanity denied. President Abraham Lincoln understood it as the wrong it was, and on January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that enslaved people in Confederate territory “are, and henceforward shall be free.” Months earlier, defending the decision he knew he had to make, he wrote: “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free.”
But here’s the part of the story I keep coming back to: a presidential decree alone couldn’t make freedom happen. The Civil War still had to be fought and won before those words meant anything on the ground. And for two and a half years after Lincoln signed the proclamation, enslaved people in Texas were still enslaved, not because the law didn’t apply to them, but because the news hadn’t reached them. It wasn’t until June 19, 1865, two months after the Confederacy’s surrender, that Union soldiers rode into Galveston and read the proclamation aloud.
Let’s reflect on this for a moment. Imagine being free, on paper, and not knowing it. Imagine waking up morning after morning for two and a half years, still being made to work as someone else’s property, while a governmental document somewhere said otherwise. That’s not a footnote to this story. In some ways, that’s the story itself. Juneteenth doesn’t mark the day freedom was declared. It marks the day freedom actually arrived for the last people who’d been waiting for it. And even then, it wasn’t over. It took setbacks, betrayals, a century of legislation written and then gutted. It took a Civil Rights movement, and the courage of those who risked everything within it. And still, even now, there is work to be done. That is what oppression looks like: when your freedom is not yours to claim, but something you must wait, and fight, for, again and again, across generations.
Consider the timeline. It took until 1868, three years after Galveston, for the 14th Amendment to even grant Black Americans citizenship. It took until 1870, five years after Juneteenth, for the 15th Amendment to grant Black men the right to vote, at least on paper. And then, for the better part of a century, even that right was taken back in practice: poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, intimidation, violence. It would take until 1965, a full century after Galveston, for the Voting Rights Act to begin to make that promise real.
I wish I could tell you that arc simply continues upward. It doesn’t. This past April, the Supreme Court significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act, making it far harder for voters of color to challenge maps that dilute their political power. Sixty years after 1965, the law most responsible for finally making the promise of the 15th Amendment real is, once again, under serious attack. That is how easily, even after a century of progress, the gap can start to widen again.
There’s a story from our own tradition that helps me make sense of this. We sometimes tell the Exodus as if crossing the sea is the end of the freedom story. It isn’t. It’s only the beginning. The Israelites are free at the shore and still, for a generation, carrying Egypt with them, afraid, doubting, looking for someone new to follow. (Korach, whom we read about this week, is in some way exactly this: old fears reasserting themselves in people who haven’t yet learned what to do with freedom.) For some of our own community, this isn’t a parallel drawn from a distance. Rabbi Sandra Lawson, part of the first generation of female Black rabbis, has written that enslaved Americans found real comfort in this very story, “seeing themselves as the Israelite slaves and crying out to God to one day be free.” And she shared something else I haven’t been able to stop thinking about: “As a Jew and an African-American, I carry the memories of people who were once enslaved, and as a Black woman in the United States, the history of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow is much closer in my collective memory than Israelite bondage.” For Black Jews, this isn’t two stories side by side. It’s one story on repeat.
I didn’t always understand this as clearly as I do now. It is our partnership with Greater Zion Church Family, and the learning we’ve done alongside Amanda Berman of Zioness and their Zahav Fellowship, which focuses specifically on the experience of Black Jews, that has taught me to hear this not as history, but as testimony. Conversations with members of our Black Jewish community, Rabbi Isaiah Rothstein and April Powers among them, have shaped how I understand all of this. I’m committed to learning the stories of those whom I am in covenant with, those members of our extended human family who have become, in deep and powerful ways, members of our own personal family, because of the time we’ve spent together, because of the Torah we’ve shared, because of what we have experienced with one another. Juneteenth matters to me because it’s an important, painful, and necessary part of our American story. It matters to me because it’s important to members of my extended family who are Black, or who are Black Jews. It’s important to learn this story, to tell this story, and to connect to this story.
The work of righting that wrong didn’t end at Galveston. It kept going, carried by people of extraordinary courage: Rosa Parks. Dr. King. Opal Lee, who at ninety walked from Texas to Washington, D.C. to demand this day become a national holiday, and lived to see it happen. And it’s still being carried today, by friends like Bishop Michael Fisher of Greater Zion Church and April Powers and Rich Born, who joined us on our “Compton to Jerusalem” trip last November, who keep teaching the rest of us that this story belongs inside Jewish life, not beside it.
We’ve come a long way. There’s still a long way to go. Juneteenth asks us to live with this duality.
Greater Zion is family to us. And family doesn’t just feel for one another’s pain from across the room. Family learns it, carries some of its weight, and keeps showing up for the long work it still demands.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Yoshi