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A THREAD, about grief and bereavement:
Like many of you, I’ve been doing a lot of reading about racism and the history of slavery in America. One of the best resources I have come across is the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the @UofMaryland.
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Like many of you, I’ve been doing a lot of reading about racism and the history of slavery in America. One of the best resources I have come across is the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the @UofMaryland.
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The project is a collection of about 50k primary sources, collected mainly from the #NationalArchives, that document the history of slavery, emancipation and reconstruction. It is a staggering and incredible moving project, filled with stories that deserve a modern audience.
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I want to share one with you today.
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This is a letter written from a formerly enslaved man in Maryland named John Q A Dennis. He is writing to Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War, on July 26th, 1864. (I have preserved the spelling as it appears in the original.)
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Dear Sir I am Glad that I have the Honour to Write you afew line I have been in troble for about four yars my Dear wife was taken from me Nov 19th 1859 and left me with three Children and I being a Slave At the time Could Not do Anny thing for the poor little Children
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for my master it was took me Carry me some forty mile from them So I Could Not do for them and the man that they live with half feed them and half Cloth them & beat them like dogs & when I was admited to go to see them it use to brake my heart
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& Now I say agian I am Glad to have the honour to write to you to see if you Can Do Anny thing for me or for my poor little Children I was keap in Slavy untell last Novr 1863. then the Good lord sent the Cornel borne [Birney?] Down their in Marland in worsester Co
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So as I have been recently freed I have but letle to live on but I am Striveing Dear Sir but what I went too know of you Sir is is it possible for me to go & take my Children from those men that keep them in Savery
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if it is possible will you pleas give me a permit from your hand then I think they would let them go I Do Not know what better to Do but I am sure that you know what is best for me to Do
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my two son I left with Mr Josep Ennese & my litle daughter I left with Mr Iven Spence in worsister Co [...] of Snow hill
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Hon sir will you please excuse my Miserable writeing & answer me as soon as you can
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I want get the little Children out of Slavery, I being Criple would like to know of you also if I Cant be permited to rase a Shool Down there & on what turm I Could be admited to Do so No more At present Dear Hon Sir
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The letter ends there.
The archives indicate that Secretary Stanton never replied.
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The archives indicate that Secretary Stanton never replied.
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What must John Q A Dennis's life have been like? Not only to have endured the extraordinary suffering of slavery, but to have been widowed and separated from his children who were "beat[en] like dogs". Can you imagine?
I can't.
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I can't.
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But reading letters like these - and, again, there are more than FIFTY THOUSAND of these in this collection (not to mention the endless correspondence that was never preserved) - can help us begin to grope around for the potential, and the failures, of human empathy.
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I think this is a vitally important exercise for all of us to undertake, as Americans.
But I'm also a rabbi, and so I also see this is a sacred obligation if we are serious about broadening the spiritual expanses inside ourselves.
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But I'm also a rabbi, and so I also see this is a sacred obligation if we are serious about broadening the spiritual expanses inside ourselves.
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In my own spiritual community, a day of somber reflection and bereavement begins tonight at sunset: the fast day of Tisha B’Av. It's a day for us to revisit our people's losses and to reenact, in a sense, our collective Jewish grief from the past two and a half millennia.
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Tisha B'Av is a Very Strange Holiday.
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The laws of this day dictate that we are to take on all of the traditional expressions of Jewish grief: fasting, abstention from physical pleasure, and the recitation of the bleak verses from the Book of Lamentations.
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But for all of us modern Jews, the losses and destruction that we are grieving are anchored far, far away from us in history. The observance of Tisha B'Av is an exercise in *imaginative* grief.
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And it's good for us. Deepening our own capacity for sadness and lament is one of the thing that widens the emotional landscape where we live.
But it also carries a specific risk.
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But it also carries a specific risk.
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If all we do is imagine what it is like to be bereaved, we are failing to use our humanity to its potential, and Tisha B'Av becomes an experience of emotional make-believe.
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We need to use this bleak and holy day to bring us into a new kind of tenderness and compassion. Its job is to do that weird alchemy that Ezekiel talks about, when he refers to transmuting one's heart of stone into a new one made of flesh.
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How can American Jews' observance of Tisha B'Av *not* lead us to a deeper commitment to racial justice?
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How can we *not* be moved to undertake real change in a nation like ours, where we are so proximal in time to the experience of enslavement, torture, violence, and the cruelest sorts of bereavement?
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