Reflections on Black and Jewish dialogue, identity, belonging, and the time it takes to truly know one another.
I’ve been sitting with my 27 hours in Project Understanding. It was a weekend of listening and learning, but also talking, laughing, sharing meals, asking questions, and spending time with people I probably would not otherwise have had the opportunity to know. Not because we live so far apart, but because our paths and circles rarely cross. They should.
I came in without many expectations. I knew very few people, and those I did know were from the community I was already connected to. Mostly, I was curious about everyone else. Who were they? What had shaped them? What might we have in common?
As we moved between our shared Black and Jewish history and the more complicated realities, pain, and fears our communities carry today, I kept thinking about how we come to know what we know. Where we grew up, who taught us, what we read, the communities around us, what we witnessed and what we didn’t all shape our understanding. Social media can amplify this, but even books, courses, scholars, and sources we trust can offer only part of the picture. We may share many of the same values and still reach very different conclusions.
When It Became Personal
As things became more personal, I listened to people speak about their community, history, fears, and experiences. Some of it I could never know from the inside, and I was glad to listen without assuming that what I had previously learned was enough.
Then I had to decide how much of myself to bring into the room.
That is a conflict I already know well. There are times when I hesitate to reveal all sides of myself because certain parts of who I am, my identity, my history, where I belong, the people I come from, can arrive with assumptions already attached. Sharing can quickly become explaining, correcting, or defending.
“How much of myself do I bring into the room when sharing who I am can so quickly become explaining or defending who I am?”
These are not things I know from an article, a course, a degree, or a headline. They are what I have inherited, lived, witnessed, and understood through family, collective memory, and a lifetime of context.
And sharing them carries another risk. I want to be honest about who I am without becoming only the complicated part of my story. I don’t want speaking about something fundamental to me to make me harder to approach, less interesting to know, or somehow defined by the very thing I felt I needed to explain.
“I wanted to speak when something mattered to me without losing the possibility of everything else that might exist between us.”
I wanted to remain open to what others knew that I did not, while hoping there was room for the same openness toward what I carried. And I also wanted something much simpler: I wanted to make friends.
We were parents talking about our children, people juggling work, family, leadership, city life, and ordinary problems. We laughed, ate together, and found common ground that needed no historical explanation. I wanted more of that, not instead of the harder questions, but before some of them, between them, and after them.
That is when 27 hours began to feel very short. We were being asked to know one another and also not leave the difficult questions on the table. I believe in both, but relationships need their own kind of time. A difficult question feels different once the person asking it is no longer a stranger.
What I’m Still Sitting With
I left with things I had learned, others I understood differently, and plenty I am still turning over in my mind. More than anything, I left wanting more time with the people I met, not only to continue the conversations we started, but to have all the other conversations we never got to.
27 hours wasn’t enough. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be.
Maybe that is what I am still sitting with: how much we all carry into a room before we have even introduced ourselves, and how different it can be when we give one another enough time to become people before becoming positions.
Learn more about Project Understanding on Instagram or Facebook.
Leave a Reply