Chevreh,

I did it again!  I missed the 24th, but since Tali and Allie posted, I thought, "Oh wait, maybe it wasn't my day," and...whatever, the story is dumb and boring and here I am.

I leave you with this exceptional interview with Academy-Award winning documentarian Ezra Edelman, discussing his winning film, O.J.: Made In America.  It's one of the most searing, powerful, devastating portrayals of race in America, and how the background of systemic injustice impacted the lives of many individual people in a very directed way.  But it's about a lot more than that.  It's about wealth, fame, power, love, obsession, distrust, arrogance.  It's about being human in a very terrible world.  If you saw Ezra Edelman accept his Oscar last night, you heard him dedicate it to the memory of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, and then extend that dedication to the victims of police violence and brutality, and those who suffer the racism of our criminal justice system.  To understand why both dedications are so desperately important, I'd carve out 10 hours of your life and watch this thing.

But maybe wait until March?

For a jauntier and more light-hearted take-down of racism and injustice, check out this guy's flying leap.

And for the movement in our own hearts toward greater justice in our lives at its most local and intimate, I leave you with one of my favorite Khalil Gibran poems, "On Freedom," from his masterpiece, The Prophet.

On Freedom

At the city gate and by your fireside I have seen you prostrate yourself and worship your own freedom,
Even as slaves humble themselves before a tyrant and praise him though he slays them.
Ay, in the grove of the temple and in the shadow of the citadel I have seen the freest among you wear their freedom as a yoke and a handcuff.
And my heart bled within me; for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fulfilment.

You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care nor your nights without a want and a grief,
But rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound.

And how shall you rise beyond your days and nights unless you break the chains which you at the dawn of your understanding have fastened around your noon hour?
In truth that which you call freedom is the strongest of these chains, though its links glitter in the sun and dazzle your eyes.

And what is it but fragments of your own self you would discard that you may become free?
If it is an unjust law you would abolish, that law was written with your own hand upon your own forehead.
You cannot erase it by burning your law books nor by washing the foreheads of your judges, though you pour the sea upon them.
And if it is a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed.
For how can a tyrant rule the free and the proud, but for a tyranny in their own freedom and a shame in their own pride?
And if it is a care you would cast off, that care has been chosen by you rather than imposed upon you.
And if it is a fear you would dispel, the seat of that fear is in your heart and not in the hand of the feared.

Verily all things move within your being in constant half embrace, the desired and the dreaded, the repugnant and the cherished, the pursued and that which you would escape.
These things move within you as lights and shadows in pairs that cling.
And when the shadow fades and is no more, the light that lingers becomes a shadow to another light.
And thus your freedom when it loses its fetters becomes itself the fetter of a greater freedom.

Selah,
Jana