Thursday, July 16, 2020 | 24 Tammuz 5780 Dear All, Wave upon wave of change and challenge. For the Jewish community, as for the world, there have been overlapping responses since early March. Understanding what this thing was. Changes in behavior, in what you could do, where you could go. A focus on kids, and on parents. A whole series of organizational pivots. Health and human services, people in need. Schools, and what should they do? Summer camps, and could they open? Funding challenges and choices and decisions. Then Black Lives Matter. (Just as the coronavirus didn’t come out of thin air, “BLM” is short-hand for four centuries’ of inequity that needs to be addressed.) I start with this because I want to reiterate a stark omission in this list of priorities. “The climate crisis,” which very few people, and very few institutions, have any bandwidth to think about right now, remains the defining – chronic, life-threatening – issue of our time. We care about the coronavirus because it threatens life and health, and because it challenges our normal life. And we care about BLM because we want to live in a world of equity and justice, and BLM makes clear that […]
