Stephen Silver
In mid-January, Rav Shai Cherry received an email from the charity known as MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger about the opportunity to visit Minneapolis amid the ICE surge and the accompanying protests. He described it as “an invitation for Jewish clergy to go to Minneapolis to stand against the tactics and the behavior of ICE.”
On the Friday night after receiving the invitation, he discussed it at services at Congregation Adath Jeshurun.
“As I was speaking about it, it became crystal clear to me that I needed to go,” Cherry said in an interview. His family and congregation responded positively, with a half-dozen congregants even stepping up to fund the trip. The following Thursday, he was on the ground in Minneapolis. He was in the Twin Cities area for about 48 hours, from Jan. 22-24.
Cherry is a former college professor who, while an ordained rabbi, told Philadelphia Jewish Exponent last year that he prefers the honorific “rav.”
“This was an organized interfaith group that sent out a call across the country. 1,200 people responded, 600 people showed up,” Cherry said. “Of the 600 clergy, 100 of us were Jewish. So there was a very strong Jewish representation.”
And this was notable, in part, because since Oct. 7, the Jewish community has not always been welcomed in protest and organizing spaces.
“We were given the ground rules of the coalition, which explicitly acknowledged that by definition, a coalition is made up of folks with whom you don’t agree on everything. But you do agree on this issue,” he said. “And there will be no derailing the coalition because of disagreements about anything else. And so that was their implicit way of welcoming Jews back into the space of civil protest.”
“Jews have not been welcome in all protest spaces unless they were willing to denounce Zionism and to completely separate themselves from Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel,” Cherry added. “And so this very much felt like a tikkun, like an acknowledgement that that has been overdone, and it has served no one’s purpose.”
Things, in that regard, mostly went smoothly, Cherry said.
He said he met a few different types of activists during the trip. One was “just normal everyday people who did not consider themselves activists in any way, shape or form, but as a result of the ham-fisted approach that ICE has taken, as well as the murder of Renee Good, they felt as though they had no choice but to step up and protect their neighbors.”
Others were more “professional activist” types, who were resisting the ICE operations more directly. Still others volunteered to get arrested at the airport, “in protest of ICE’s harassment of airport employees.”
The killing of Renee Good took place on Jan. 7, before Cherry arrived. His last day coincided with the shooting of a second Minnesotan, Alex Pretti, by an ICE agent.
When news broke the second killing had happened on a Shabbat morning, Cherry was at a synagogue, which happens to also be called Adath Jeshurun, in suburban Minneapolis.
“Because it’s a synagogue, there were doctors,” he said. “And there were doctors who worked with Pretti at the VA. And so it was quite unsettling to have somebody that the congregants knew and worked with to be the latest victim.”
Also on the trip, the group went to protest at a Target store. The big box chain is headquartered in Minneapolis and has drawn fire for cooperating with ICE.
“We went to one of the major Target stores, and we targeted them with a sing-in,” he said.
“The clergy were really interested in lowering the temperature. They still wanted to have these acts of civil disobedience, but when you compare the kind of [Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young], ‘Four Dead in Ohio,’ rallying song of the ’60s, that’s not what our songs were. Our songs were about lowering the temperature, reminding people that we’re all created in God’s image, reminding people that we need to treat each other with decency, and so it was really validating that I didn’t feel like I was getting involved in an uprising.”
Stephen Silver is a freelance writer.
“The Jewish community hasn’t always been welcomed in protest and organizing spaces since Oct. 7th”. Why not? Did those Jews invade Gaza and perform medieval murders and barbarism on innocent Palestinian citizens? Did they film their atrocities and send that film the world over? Did they promise to repeat this savagery over and over?
I have one question for the good Rabbi. When you join folks who supported the atrocities perpetrated on your fellow Jews, what message are you sending to Hamas and the rest of the world?
I’m disgusted by “rabbis” who take advantage of their positions to make political statements as if they represent something they do not. This was totally inappropriate, just as wearing tallit to a “protest” is sacreligious. Even if I agreed with the political stance, I would abhor such an action. Nor should they discuss politics on the pulpit. It is not their job. Literally. ICE is doing a necessary, vital job, if badly at times. There is nothing wrong with protesting, but interfering is not that.
When the Torah is on the pulpit, politics are on the pulpit. One needs to define the politics that are inappropriate for rabbis to discuss on the pulpit.
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When a rabbi consistently takes one side of the political debate- either always progressive or always right wing- as so many rabbis now do- the rabbi alienates a wide swath of actual or potential congregants.
Has the rabbinate considered this is a reason why synagogue attendance is so depressed ,or if this is why synagogues are closing, forced to merge, have to sell their buildings, etc? It’s not just demographic changes behind these failures. It’s also a failure of the hyper political rabbinate.
Us lay folk don’t need to hear politics from the pulpit. We can get that from any number of sources.
Ring winger Rush Limbaugh was no rebbe. The left of center NY Times editorial page is no Torah. Judaism and the rabbinate have much to offer beyond self righteous indignation over blase daily political fare.
Elevate us over the nonsense spewed by politicians, Rabbi!