Caring

Though we are empty nesters, Bruce and I still include our four children in decisions about our family’s philanthropy. We continue to talk about how we can make a difference in our Atlanta community and farther afield in ways that are relevant to all of us. Our kids know they were born “on third base,” with many advantages, yet they refuse to close their eyes to injustice and social inequities.

Even before the Black Lives Matter movement intensified this spring, we have been focused on empowering high poverty communities in Atlanta. The murder of George Floyd and the anger and frustration felt by so many of us accelerated our interest in supporting an organization called Westside Future Fund that’s doing community development in the neighborhoods of Vine City, English Avenue, University Center, and Ashview Heights. It resonated with us for many reasons including the inclusion of local residents to create their own safe, economically strong neighborhoods.

We all tend to live in silos, and it’s not unusual that local organizations who are doing wonderful work fall off the radar. If social justice is your priority, your vision can be limited to who you know and where you live. Atlanta Jewish Foundation (AJF) opens a wide window on giving opportunities that align with your interests.

Say you’re interested in organizations that focus on reading and early childhood development — AJF can point you to so many meaningful opportunities. Atlanta, with its civil rights heritage, is a hub for changemakers and innovators who are using policy and practice effectively to revitalize their communities. No matter what your philanthropic passion, lean into it! Atlanta Jewish Foundation is an awesome resource that can lead you, as it has led us, to social justice and Jewish opportunities you didn’t even know existed.

With our focus on empowerment, we’ve made other philanthropic investments that are exciting, innovative, and effective. One was JOIN for Justice, a Jewish organizing initiative in Boston. Our son Jonathon went through the program and we liked how it develops social organizational leadership capacity for young people. Another is Amplify Decatur, inspired by our son Michael, a musician. It uses music as a catalyst to raise funds for community organizations fighting poverty and homelessness. We looked at it as an investment and told the founder that he had to match at least 50 percent of what we gave in outside grants. It’s now one of the most successful poverty relief organizations in the Southeast.

We were recently introduced to the CEO of the Russell Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, (RCIE) located in Atlanta’s HBCU center. It was started by the widow and children of the late African American businessman Herman J. Russell to develop opportunities for aspiring African Americans who don’t have the network of family, business, or fraternity connections. RCIE helps them network, and provides ways to support, teach, and lift people up so they can develop their own businesses. Each of these organizations approaches inequity differently; our hope is that our investment in them will continue to bring social justice change to our community.

Bruce and I are grateful that Atlanta Jewish Foundation has made our philanthropic giving even more meaningful, impactful, and personal.

How do LGBTQ+ and allies celebrate gender and sexual diversity in a pandemic, without a parade? This year we still danced, sang, laughed, dressed up, and communed. And we offered a robust calendar of virtual speakers and discussions for Pride.

LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, plus additional identities) people have been reclaiming negative and inflammatory images and terms for centuries. With determination and defiance, we have turned what has been intended to harm into a badge of pride. For example, the pink triangle that identified gay men in concentration camps and even using the word queer have been reclaimed to demonstrate being “out and proud.”

Do you know who the #ProudBoys are? No, not the white supremacist group that the ADL has described as misogynistic, Islamophobic, transphobic, and anti-immigration with some members having anti-Semitic ideologies. Recently, LGBTQ+ Twitter users and their allies have claimed hashtag #ProudBoys to reframe the Twitter handle as proud gay men loving each other — sharing pictures of men loving each other in response to hateful rhetoric.

Did you know that there are six genders cited hundreds of times in Jewish oral commentaries? One variation is tum tum, a person whose sex is unknown because their genitalia is either covered or hidden. In modern Hebrew, tum tum means “stupid idiot.” SOJOURN has formed a teen group that intentionally chose the name Tum Tum. These youth weren’t going to allow language to tarnish a sacred identity.

Though Pride weekend is over, Pride month continues in Atlanta with lots of ways to celebrate gender and sexual diversity. Visit Atlanta Pride and SOJOURN to more about ongoing activities for the LGBTQ community and its allies.

Sukkot inTime of Distance
By Edward Queen

It was not supposed to be like this. While every year our sukkah is filled with people and joy, this year was to be even greater. My wife Hallie had retired, and we simply were going to throw our space open for dinners, for lunches, for sleeping. (Yes, we sleep in the sukkah.) Here just two miles from Emory, we sleep. On cots. On air mattresses. Regular mattresses. We join our nocturnal neighbors, the animals with which we share our space. Owls, locusts, raccoons, opossums. We look up through the schach (leafy roof of a sukkah) and see the stars and the moon as it moves from full through its last quarter.

It is that sharing, the togetherness with others, the shared meals, that we will miss most. Twenty or so people at dinner, 60-70 at the open house (the open sukkah?). The pleasure of sharing a space with friends and acquaintances. Making our sukkah available to those who do not have one and introducing the sukkah to those who have not yet had that pleasure. If in the movie Ushpizin, (ushpizin means guests in Aramaic) the family must confront the meaning of having guests that are unwanted, this year my family must struggle with the meaning of guests wanted but un-haveable.

The joy of building and living in the sukkah still will be there. It is, after all, Z’man Simchateinu, the time of our rejoicing. One must wonder, however, will the table seem a bit forlorn? Will the effort seem “worth it?” Will remembrances of Sukkot past, pull us away from Sukkot present? Will what we cannot have, detract from what we do have?

And the Ushpizin and Ushpizot — the seven shepherds of Israel, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph, and David and the seven prophetesses of Israel, Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, Abigail, Hulda, and Esther, will they join us? Will they fill the empty seats and fill our empty hearts?

Tradition holds that they refuse to visit a sukkah that lacks guests, where one has failed to show hospitality. But how will they respond to a sukkah, where to be hospitable means not to bring someone in? Where one foregoes one’s own pleasure in bringing people around the table in order to protect them? Or suppresses one’s ego at hearing the compliments on one’s sukkah, one’s decorations, one’s efforts to glorify, to adorn the mitzvah?

Perhaps it is then that they will come. For the key to hospitality may lie not in having guests, but in how one treats them, in one’s concern for them. This year that concern may perhaps lie, not in the invitation, but in the separation.

Edward L. Queen, Ph.D., J.D. is director of the D. Abbott Turner Program in Ethics and Servant Leadership, and Coordinator of Undergraduate Studies at Emory University’s Center for Ethics