In 2004 I was homeless in the streets of New York. I had my laptop, a suitcase of cloths, and the Torah. For the first week I just stayed in Grand Central Station the entire day and read. That's all I had to keep sane. I didn't know what else to do or who to ask for help. By Friday the cops came and told me to move along. The point was, during that week I was connected to stories in ways I had never experienced. Over the next decade, I began the process of converting to Judaism. I learned from some amazing rabbis who were making extraordinary sacrifices to share what until then was only reserved for Orthodox Jewish men, over 40, and married. I studied Kabbalah. And for a while that made my life worse. I struggled to find a balance for meaning and purpose while retaining sensibility for life's basic needs. I'm still observant. I learn, study and practice with Chabad rabbis and congregants. Which too had its lessons of crossing cultural boundaries. But those didn't cause much concern in me. I rebounded. I think it's due to an innate nature of being Black in America - resilience. There are a lot of other attributes to being Black which is what's led me, and you to listen, here today. I've got something to say and you are interested to hear what about.
So why choose? What's so central about that? It's kinda implied that you made one. I mean, that's how you got here. Why does that, or what I'm asserting, need to be explained? The choice is love. End of happy story. Ghetto.
Nature smells crap to evaluate health and ovulation to procreate. The ghetto lacks resources. Providing them assimilates esthetics. Those who live in inner-city ghettos learn be smelling each other's crap. Closer to nature with just barely the experience to reflect upon self awareness. Meaning, I grew up in Black churches with porcelain White Jesus. No one valued me reading well. There wasn't any accountability for doing so. In the inner city, I wasn't expected to think for myself. I was raised by generations just barely free from slavery and sharecropping - nothing to be proud of.
Was there resilience, perseverance or generic luck, nature's survival of the fittest? I couldn't tell and didn't care. All I knew for myself was that my life wasn't going to change unless I figured out how to change it.
Mommas and aunties kept us safe and loved regardless. There was no doubt about that. U failed to learn. I failed to learn the process of choosing for myself.
So when I popped on the scene in New York to study becoming a Jew, I was in search with a plead for salvation of a change I could not fathom within myself that would be necessary for me to love myself. I struggled for at least a decade. I remained obligated in servitude, buying time to do nothing with. I had to show myself. That, unfortunately, included reaching bottom, that wouldn't be my last.
We don't learn to care for ourselves, especially in the ghetto. Resources lack but worse is knowing what to do with them besides ignoring them because there isn't a valued necessity, a proven validation, or even allowance to consider, what to do with the resources even if attained.
We achieve success, battle against others in war and games, simply because we don't learn how and so our achievements overextend anyone's necessity as validation for who we are. Which, if popular enough, can achieve complete avoidance of our reasons not to assimilate.
It's because we don't know enough to value ourselves.
And that's the work we need today, that we are free to achieve today, to make our lives better and ultimately achieve a better world.
I've always wanted to study the weekly Parsha to be observant of regulating myself weekly, not presume some reluctance of avoiding randomness, as if keeping to myself, and doing what I'm told without reflecting on the value of my own choices, enduring work for a paycheck, tempering time for random occasion friend’s get together, living in need of what I fail learning to ask.
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