Just a few weeks ago, we sent you an essay called “Find YOUR Ferguson -- and Heal It,” by Rabbi Susan Talve. As the spiritual leader of Central Reform Congregation in St. Louis, for 30 years she has led efforts to dismantle racism in the city and its suburbs.

She joined in the prayerful protests against racial oppression in Ferguson that galvanized people around the country. And she reminded us that most of us have a “Ferguson” in or near our own home towns. See the photo of one of the protests in which she joined. To expand it, click on the title of this article.

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For me, Ferguson echoes a long personal history of my own study and action in regard to ”power racism” among  police forces. I'll explain below what I mean by "power racism" as distinct from "personal racism.")

Almost 50 years ago, in 1965,  my book From Race Riot to Sit-in, 1919 and the 1960s: A Study in the Relations between Conflict and Violence was published.

Here we are, fifty years later – and the subject of the first half of the book, a series of race riots in 1919 – was almost a century ago. What has changed?

Half of the book was based on my doctoral dissertation. On the very day in 1963 when I finished writing it, I actually experienced the racism of police. I took part in a walk-in for racial integration at an amusement park where I had grown up, in Baltimore. A mob gathered around us throwing rocks and threatening beatings. One of us was bloodied by a thrown rock. So -- the police arrested us, for interracial trespass. They did not even pause to ask themselves whether to arrest the stone-throwers for assault.

In one moment!  --  studying the past and living the present were fused into one.

And that fusion of past with present continues -- and unless we act, will burn its way into our future. The patterns of violence I discerned in the race riots of 1919 and in the Watts uprising of 1965 are still scarring America.  Chicago and Washington DC and Longview TX and more in 1919; Los Angeles in 1965 and 1992; Ferguson this year – these are the patterns:

1. Built-in institutions of racial injustice and oppression in many spheres: far higher disemployment and poverty among Blacks, far less effective schools, far higher rates of imprisonment,  far worse exposure to lead poisoning, to asthma-causing coal dust, to  disasters like Katrina and Sandy; far smaller representation in governmental leadership; on and on.

All this is social gasoline sloshing through every Black neighborhood.

2.  The spark that flares this gasoline into explosive  violence: Injustice and oppression by the police.

Our society agrees to make the police public carriers of weaponry and when necessary, users of legitimate violence --  on condition that they must therefore be utterly neutral about race, class, religion, and every other social category when they face

For the original English text of the Rainbow Haftarah and its Hebrew translation by Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, click on the title above and then on "Hafarah.pdf" to see the attached PDF file. 

Origins of the Rainbow Haftarah

:In August of 1993, I was the Resident Torah Teacher at Elat Chayyim retreat center. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi was the prayer leader of every Shabbat morning service, and had asked me to read in English the Prophetic readings every week.

During the week of August 8, I was invited to speak to speak with teen-agers at a nearby Jewish summer camp about Jewish approaches to the growing ecological dangers facing our planet. I did, and then came back to Elat Chayyim, feeling I had failed. Feeling distraught that I had not connected with the teens -- the next generation of the Jewish people -- even though they seemed to me the most important audience for what I had to say.

The next night, I slept uneasy. When I awoke, I felt unrolling in me a scroll of passionate words that seemed to me not in any ordinary way my own. I wrote them down. Then I went to Reb Zalman to say I felt and thought as if I had been channeled a Haftarah for the days of Consolation that follow after the grief of Tisha B’Av, mourning the destruction of the Temple.

I asked whether he would permit me to deliver it as the haftarah for the coming Shabbat. He agreed, and I did so on 27 Av 5753/ August 14, 1993. When I read it that Shabbat, I felt myself again not the “author” but a channel for the message. One of the participants in the service said he had accidentally brushed against me as I was reading, and felt a shock like static electricity.

A few weeks later, Reb Zalman translated the Haftarah into Hebrew. Though the words came to me for one of the Shabbats of Consolation, I have often used it since as the Haftarah for Shabbat Noach, the Torah portion when we read the story of the Rainbow, symbolizing the healing of the Earth after the Flood.

Can we make our sukkot this fall not only into symbols of peace but into actual places of joyful activism for peace? 

(To expand this Sukkat Shalom poster from 1984 into fullness, click on it.)

The last several weeks have been a time of sorrow and misery: the Gaza War, the deaths of deeply moving teachers (Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Leibel Fein), the explosion and exposure of police violence in Ferguson, Missouri. I want to address them. But first, a proposal for active hope, for hopeful activism:

Our evening prayers include a powerful line: “Spread over all of us a sukkah of Your peace.” What is a “sukkah”? It is a fragile hut, fragile in time and space. Its leafy, leaky roof must be open to the stars and the rain. It stands for only a week --– a festival week called by its name, Sukkot, to celebrate the harvest, to pray for the rain that will make the next harvest possible, and to implore God’s bounty not for Jews alone but for all the nations of the world. That week of fullness begins on the Full Moon after Yom Kippur.

This is our proposal for active hope, hopeful activism: On the Sunday and (Columbus Day holiday) Monday that fall during Sukkot this year -- October 12 and 13 --   let Jews invite into their sukkot,   the actual people and the explicit intent of celebrating peace, welcoming all peoples, and healing the Earth.

That intent calls us to merge the joy of Sukkot – which is called “The Festival,” “the season of our joy” – with determination to end the militarization of our lives and the extreme, quasi-military, exploitation of our Earth.

Examples of this militarization: