As you enter Elul, I hope you remember to incorporate the beautiful Hebrew acronym from Song of Songs that characterizes this month – Ani L’dodi V’dodi Li – I am to my Beloved and my Beloved is to me. As you consider your need for deeper human connection, I hope you will engage in the practice of “cheshbon hanefesh” – deep soul searching, and arrive at a place of hope to not desist from the work to build a better world. Your life has been touched by a term you learned while traveling in Africa – Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a Nguni Bantu term meaning “humanity.” It is often translated as “I am because we are,” but it also means “we believe in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity.”
Ubuntu made you weep, upon hearing your African-American grandfather’s saying “Don’t ever let anyone steal your joy” from the mouth of an African woman you have never met. She spoke these words in another language and came from a culture quite different than your own, yet had inherited this same principle from her parents and grandparents.
Ubuntu calls for a teshuvah that inspires us to build equity through acknowledgement of transgenerational accountability – remembering who we are to ourselves and who we are to each other. Ubuntu is an assertion of value for those who have come before us and upon whose shoulders we stand.
This Elul, I hope you will continue to choose the dawn and work with as many open-hearted humans as you can to value our multi-racial, multi-ethnic, cross-classed, multi-gendered, differently observant, differently abled and intergenerational community of Jews. May your liberation continue to be tied to the liberation of all humanity and to your capacity to listen, learn, grow and take action with others. I am with you.
Yavilah McCoy is the founder of Ayecha, a nonprofit organization providing resources and advocacy for Jews of Color. www.dimensionsedc.com
