Black lives matter.

Isn't it reasonable?

Recently, Martin O’Malley, candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, was confronted by demonstrators while giving a speech.  They chanted, “Black lives matter.”  O’Malley agreed that black lives matter, but added that “white lives matter, all lives matter.”  He was criticized for this statement, and is planning an apology.

Some of you may be thinking, as Jeb Bush did, “Why are we apologizing for saying that all lives matter?”  Isn’t that an obvious and reasonable statement?

Not if you are Jewish

But if you are Jewish, you should understand how important it is to not fall into this easy trap.  More people die in any given month around the world than died in the Holocaust.  Of course, Jewish lives matter, but put in context, isn’t it only one set of deaths among many? 

If you are Armenian, more people around the world die in a week than perished in the Genocide of 1915.  Why should those Armenian lives matter more than the lives of others?

If you are Irish or Italian, why still give any special attention to the discrimination that your people were met with when they came to American?  Everybody has troubles.

Do lives in Darfur matter?  Of course, but there are an order of magnitude more people all over the world who died in poverty at the same time as the Darfurians were being massacred.  Let’s not pay inordinate attention to the part and lose sight of the whole.

You get the idea.  The argument that “all lives matter” misses the point.  It misses the special attention that needs to be paid to the systematic racism that has resulted in the many killings of unarmed black people and has caused the failure of our justice system to respond accordingly.  And it misses that this is merely a symptom of a much, much larger pathology in our country.

We shouldn't forget

As a Jew, I don’t ever want the rest of you to forget the monstrous impact of anti-Semitism, particularly as it continues to make itself heard loudly in Europe and elsewhere.  And in the crazed comments of America's recent homicidal maniacs.  The Holocaust was a special, unspeakably monumental moment in our history, and it must not be softened by questionable comparisons.  Beyond the tragedy of the deaths is the real, traumatic pain that the Holocaust caused on a generation of Jews, my parents’ generation.  If you try to “put it into perspective,” you will, inevitably, diminish the specialness of the evil and the loss.

To say in response to “black lives matter” that all lives matter is to similarly diminish the lived experiences, in pain and fear and anger, of African-Americans, diluting it into a larger whole.  But the black experience in America, like the Holocaust, is special, too, and must be respected.  “Attention must be paid.”

My heart and soul ache at the knowledge that three of my great-uncles perished in the Holocaust, severing their limbs from my family tree.  And a fourth, with a number tattooed on his arm, barely survived the camps.  Every year I say a yahrzeit blessing to keep their memory, and, to some extent, that pain alive.

So, too, my heart and soul ache for the 400 years of injustice of the black experience in American, which has not ended.  I know I don’t do enough to address that injustice.  But, at the very least, I can acknowledge it and show solidarity to those who are doing something about it, by affirming that black lives matter.  To all of us.  And very much to me.