First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Remembering Toward Freedom

The oldest synagogue in continuous use in the United States stands on Hasell Street in Charleston, South Carolina. Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim was established in 1749, by Spanish and Portuguese immigrants, drawn to Carolina’s liberal charter of religious freedom. By 1800, there were approximately 2,000 Jews in South Carolina; more than any other state in the young nation. The original colonial-era building burned, along with much of the rest of Charleston, in a massive fire in 1838. By 1841, the congregation had designed and built an impressive new house of worship, the dedication of which was attended by the lieutenant governor and other civil, military, and religious dignitaries of the city. The Beth Elohim congregation is known as the place where Reform Judaism originated in the United States. Its members were well integrated, well accepted, and successful in the surrounding culture; South Carolina was the first state to grant voting rights to Jews, and the first to elect a Jewish person to state office. So it can be no surprise that in 1830, when 87 percent of all Charleston’s white families owned at least one African slave, so did 83 percent of its Jewish households. This awareness raises an interesting image. In the soft southern springtime in those years, there must have been prosperous, pious Jewish families who gathered to celebrate the Passover holiday, remembering the liberation story of their people, whose dinners were cooked and served by their own black slaves.

What does it mean to remember slavery?

My colleague, David Pettee, who works for the UUA as Director of Ministerial Credentialing, found himself asking that same question in a very personal context. David is at least a seventh generation Unitarian, who has traced his genealogy to colonial Newport, Rhode Island. There he learned from old court records that one of his ancestors had been a slave trader, an investor in the infamous triangle trade voyages, which brought captive Africans in chains across the Atlantic, to be sold as property for labor in the ‘new world’. Others of his forbears had owned slaves, before the practice was abolished in New England. David was distressed by this discovery. As a committed anti-racism activist, he took it personally. Struggling to put his historical identity into context, he and his wife traveled to Ghana, on a pilgrimage to Cape Coast Castle, the slave fortress where white traders bartered rum for living cargoes of men and women to sell into endless, brutal servitude, to the extent that they survived the horrific conditions of the Middle Passage.

David writes:

What does it mean to remember slavery?

David Pettee’s odyssey continued when he was challenged to trace a living descendant of one of the slaves owned by his family, and make contact with that person. After some genealogical sleuthing, and with some hesitation, he wrote to the 87 year old widow whose husband had been the great, great, great grandson of Cuff Simmons, a colored man once owned by David’s ancestor. His reaching out was cordially received, and both families were enriched in their knowledge by the encounter. David later reflected:

I myself am not much of a genealogist; I have never made an effort to trace my progenitors, and I don’t feel any great responsibility for their actions as opposed to anyone else’s, but there is one uncomfortable fact that I do know. My maiden name, Rauen, is German, and so I suppose it is safe to assume that I have distant relatives in Germany, and there is no reason I know of to think that any of them were Jewish. Thus if I have any family connection at all to the concentration camps of the Nazi era, it is more likely to be through the guards than through the inmates. If this is so, their shame is their own; I do not embrace it. But I do embrace, perhaps with greater urgency for their sake than I otherwise might, the need to understand how that particular dark chapter of history happened; what forces of fear, deception, latent violence, intellectual corruption, historical oppression, mob psychology, and popular passivity came together to create what David calls "the apocalyptic conditions that allow for the dehumanization and genocide of other people." For I agree with Santayana, and I would remember the past, so that perhaps we need not repeat it.

What does it mean to remember slavery?

This is the question that lies unspoken beneath the ritual questions of the seder; questions that will be recited again tonight as the observance of Passover calls upon our Jewish neighbors, and by extension all of us, to remember that if it were not for the historical forces of liberation, we might have been born into slavery as our ancestors were. The tradition teaches that we are to think of ourselves as those who were brought forth into freedom, delivered by god’s mighty hand and outstretched arm, by the courage and resourcefulness of those who came away into the desert, so determined to be free that they would not stay to let the bread rise to softness, but ate it hard and flat on the urgent journey toward liberty for themselves and their children. We know, of course, that they grumbled, after the first heady excitement was over, and the hardships of the wilderness began to set in. The story tells not of idealized heroes only, but of an all too human community, some of whom came to regret their hasty departure from the familiar constraints of a known oppression. Part of what it means to remember slavery is to harden our laziness of spirit, that we may never accept the bargain of trading our freedom for comfort, letting someone else determine our destiny so that we may be relieved of responsibility for it. No matter when or where you live, someone will always be offering that exchange, on seemingly innocent terms, but the end is the same every time; hard labor, bitterness, and sorrow. If we do not remember it, we are condemned to repeat it.

But I want to suggest this morning that Passover is a holiday precisely because it invites the participants to enter into only one side of this ethical historical spiritual equation; to attend, for one evening, only to the memory that our ancestors were slaves in Egypt, and to celebrate what it means to be slaves no longer. For that ritual moment, we need not conjure with the other side of history, the more ambiguous and difficult self-knowledge, that our ancestors have also been slave owners, buyers and traders of human lives, the sources of suffering and oppression. If it lies within us, in every generation, to become slaves again unless we are vigilant, and earnest in our commitment to our own freedom, so there lives within us also the risk of arrogance and power, that we might come to believe, again, that we are justified, by some superior wisdom, or strength, or need, to hold the lives of others in our own hands, and drain their strength for the sake of our greed.

What it means to remember slavery, it seems to me, is to keep before us both halves of this equation, so that we may learn to repeat neither the one, nor the other. Only in that double awareness is our freedom safe.

An-amnesis, the scholars of religion call it; the deliberate process of not forgetting, the ritual recollection which, like the seder, recalls to mind from generation to generation the shaping memories of the human cultural heritage. Anamnesis is particularly important regarding the difficult realities, the things we would rather not remember about our ancestors and ourselves, the shame, the defeats, the less than admirable things we have done to one another.

As I read history, it seems to me that there was a time when people tended to be ashamed of ancestors who were weak or oppressed, and proud of those who were powerful. Time was when it called for an act of moral courage to admit that ‘I am descended from slaves.’ Today, we no longer think less of ourselves or each other based on such a statement. Like David Pettee, we are more likely to feel ashamed of our connections to those who had power and used it oppressively – who traded slaves, or ran the concentration camps, or helped exterminate indigenous people, or dropped bombs on villages. To remember slavery is to remember all the exploitation and suffering that has gone on among human beings over the millennia of history, and the probability that in some form or another, each of us has ancestors who were active or complicit participants in those events. The more sophisticated our technology becomes in tracing the astonishing paths of DNA that wind around the globe, the less possible it becomes for almost anyone to claim some kind of historical innocence; that they have no genetic connection to anyone who ever engaged in the cruelties of the human past. And indeed, if someone could make such a claim, what would that prove? Would that individual somehow have less of a responsibility to the work of justice making than the rest of us? We build this world together, and the only righteousness that matters is that in which we are all included.

The story of the Hebrew slaves shows that it was not enough for Moses alone to escape the clutches of Pharaoh; the only liberation that matters is that which makes all the people free, and a new life possible. We are all the descendants of slaves; we are all the descendants of slave owners, whether from the 1800s, or the 800s, or the mists of archaic history. That is the point of the story – do not take your freedom for granted, for it was not always thus. And beneath that story lies the invitation to see the world through the eyes of those whose hands are clean; for the duration of one meal, to imagine history as if we had only the liberation side of the equation to deal with. That is the fundamental reason why this night is different from all other nights, for that in itself is a liberation, to remember only the part about how we were slaves, and how our ancestors aligned themselves with the arc of history, that bends over the long years toward justice. On all other nights, we remember that we also were masters in Egypt, that Pharaoh lives within our own hearts if they become hardened, that we must resist not only our own enslavement, but the impulse make slaves of others.