Rabbi Friedman’s Words in Response to the
Murders of Nine People at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, SC
June 19, 2015, Qabbalat Shabbat at Temple Israel
Let me begin with excerpts from a column in the Atlanta Constitution by Editor Eugene Patterson, after
the bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church, September 16 1963:
“A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist Church in Birmingham. In her
hand she held a shoe, one shoe, from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her.
Every one of us in the white South holds that small shoe in his hand….
We watched the stage set without staying it. We listened to the prologue unbestirred. We saw the
curtain opening with disinterest. We have heard the play….
We — who stand aside in imagined rectitude and let the mad dogs that run in every society slide their
leashes from our hand, and spring….
Let us not lay the blame on some brutal fool who didn’t know any better.
We know better. We created the day. We bear the judgment. May God have mercy on the poor South
that has so been led. May what has happened hasten the day when the good South, which does live and
has great being, will rise to this challenge of racial understanding and common humanity, and in the full
power of its unasserted courage, assert itself.
The Sunday school play at Birmingham is ended. With a weeping Negro mother, we stand in the bitter
smoke and hold a shoe. If our South is ever to be what we wish it to be, we will plant a flower of nobler
resolve for the South now upon these four small graves that we dug.”
And I ask tonight, what do we hold in our hands?
Nine well-worn Bibles, with favorite passages tabbed or underlined or highlighted, spattered now with
the blood of nine martyrs, people of faith, young and old, hearts that opened to fellowship and prayer,
faces that welcomed the stranger with kindness and warm embrace.
In the memorable spirit of Gene Patterson, let us not lay the blame on the “brutal fool who didn’t know
any better.” Let us not imagine that the legacy of hate that spawned him is simply of the South. Let us
instead recognize that “the flower of nobler resolve,” that Patterson sought to plant must be nurtured
and sustained by waters that flow from here in the North and from every corner of this country. Fifty
years later, we have not overcome. To imagine that we have is simply unbecoming…tonight is a night to
add our anguished prayers to those of a devastated nation…tomorrow we must translate those prayers
into renewed resolve.
Living Judaism through discovery, dynamic spirituality, and righteous impact.