Intro (singing) Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I am one of under 100 Black American women to earn a Ph.D. From a department of physics. The number of Ph.D.'s granted in physics in the United States every year is 2000. So under 100 of those across all of US history have been granted to Black women. Intro/Outtro: (singing) Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman. I'm so happy to welcome you to Hashivenu, a podcast about Jewish teachings on resilience. I'm joined by my cohost, Rabbi Sandra Lawson. Hi Sandra, how are you? Rabbi Sandra Lawson: Hi, Deborah. I'm really glad that we're doing this, and this is our second time having a conversation together and we get to invite someone that I have admired for a very long time. I'm just excited about this conversation. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Me too, me too. So happy to be in partnership with you on so many things, including this, and especially for this conversation. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Let me introduce to everyone today: our guest is Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. She is an Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy and a Core Faculty Member in Women's and Gender Studies at the University of New Hampshire. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: She writes a lot. She's a columnist for New Scientist and Physics World, and she has just published an amazing book called The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: There's more to say about her bio. Her scientific research focuses on particles and cosmology, and she also conducts research in Black feminist science, technology and society studies. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Chanda, welcome, welcome. We're so happy to have you. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Thank you for having me. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: Now one of the first questions I have is how are you doing? We're all in this pandemic, the trial of Derek Chauvin, the person who killed George Floyd, is happening right now and causing many of us to sort of replay all of this in our minds. How are you holding up? Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I'm struggling along with everybody else. And I also feel lucky about the ways in which I'm not struggling, and I'm trying to be mindful of - there's two truths simultaneously existing. And it's also, I think, in addition to just pain of reliving what happened to George Floyd and the way that we all experienced that last year, also being the spouse of a Taiwanese-American Jew means dealing with what happened in Atlanta. And we have Taiwanese-American Jewish family and friends who live in Atlanta, and so we're trying to keep an eye out. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I don't know. It's like a weird thing. It's been a tough month, year, decade, century, millennium. I don't know exactly where that cutoff is, but I'm doing the best that I can. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: Yeah. Thank you. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Thank you for sharing so forthrightly. I think one of the things I want to ask you to reflect on is in reading your biography and starting to read your work, holding those two truths, that's something that you do so well. Holding multiple realities alongside each other is something that it seems that you -- you've lived it out, and that that's what some of your work is seeking after. Does that seem right? Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah. I almost think in some ways navigating multiple paths that seem like they're set up to run in different directions is something that I was born into as someone who was born Black and Ashkenazi Jewish. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I grew up... My mom would say poor, I've always said working class. And I think probably the difference there is that my mom did a really good job of hiding things from me sometimes. I was raised primarily by a single parent, by Margaret Prescod. I always just say her name. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Going from that to training to become a scientist where people like me typically haven't trained to become scientists in a professional setting, I went to Harvard for college and found myself navigating an environment that felt completely foreign socioeconomically and culturally; and also for the first time there, really trying to contend with my Jewishness outside of my household and outside of my high school, which was really the first place that I was sort of challenged to think through who am I as a Jew? Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: So I think it's always been a feature of my experience and my life, that I'm trying to navigate at least two, if not more things that don't necessarily always go together, to try and literally physically embody all of those things at the same time. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: So I think it's maybe not particularly surprising that that in some ways has come out in the way I've conducted myself as a scientist in terms of drawing links with social issues and with Black feminist thought. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: I just want to highlight lke how awesome it is that you're a physicist and in our pre-conversation -- can you just talk about how the rarity of being a Black physicist, astrophysicist, theoretical physicist and all of that...? Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Right. So to situate things in context, I am one of under, as of this moment -- although I think that number might be changing this year -- under 100 Black American women to earn a Ph.D. from a department of physics. That's a small number, especially I just want to remind people that the population of the United States is like over 350 million now, right? Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: But to make it a little more specific, the number of Ph.D.'s granted in physics in the United States every year is 2,000. So under 100 of those across all of U.S. History have been granted to Black women. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Someone might say, "Well, why mention gender? The numbers for Black people in general are very low." So it's worth saying that the first Ph.D. Granted to an African American in the United States was to Edward Bouchet at Yale University in the early 1870s in physics. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: So the first Black man to earn a Ph.D. In physics was actually in the 19th century. And the first Black woman to earn a Ph.D. In physics was about a hundred years later in 1972. So even within the Black community, there are gender disparities and, yeah, I'm unfortunately more unusual than I should be. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I wish the listeners could see Sandra and I. because we're recording this on Zoom, and Sandra and I are both lie either shaking our heads no or nodding vigorously, just in awe of your work as a pioneer. And even as you're trying to bring others along with you, I want to ask about the nature of that work. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: It seems to me, it's a combination of necessary, like you have to make this space for yourself; joyful but liberatory... so with an edge of joyful -- and utterly exhausting. Does that seem... Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah. One of the interesting things, now that I'm coming into the last year of my thirties and people are starting to think of me as like an auntie as opposed to one of the young folks, I guess, I think if there was one thing that I could communicate to young people about the experience of taking a path that is not particularly well-trodden by people who are like you, is that it is better to go in groups than to go alone. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: We certainly, particularly in an American context, have a tendency to celebrate barrier breakers as if it was all fun and games along the way; when actually being a barrier breaker is a pretty crappy experience in a lot of ways, because you're on your own. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: You have people ahead of you who can mentor you in some ways, like people who've done what you've done before, but maybe not from your perspective or with your particular needs or with your particular challenges who will support you hopefully and cheer you on along the way. But there will be limits to their ability to give you very specific guidance that's rooted in the very specific experience that you're having. It is better to have a group of people who are confused with you than to be confused by yourself. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: So the way that we talk about Black women in science now, particularly in the post-Hidden Figures era is... Hidden Figures put all of the bad stuff that happens in montage. That is mostly the film. We're not talking about the book. But in montages that are set to music, things are happening. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: They Disneyfied it. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: They Disneyfied it. The white guy comes and beats the crap out of the bathroom sign, which didn't actually happen in real life. That moment never happened. But those moments can be set to music, but you have to make the playlist, right? Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I literally made a playlist for the book, which people can find on Spotify, if you look for Disordered Cosmos. And I actually listen to that playlist a lot. I spent a lot of time preparing it, so don't say anything bad about it. It's awesome. (laughs) Rabbi Deborah Waxman: We haven't heard it yet and we love it. (laughs) Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Yes. So I really want to encourage people to be less focused on being a first, even though I'm the first Black woman to hold a tenure track faculty position in theoretical physics and also the first in particle theory. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: There's a certain cachet, I guess, in saying that; but also I would have been fine if I was like the first, second and third with like two other people. Right? So I think I want people to think collectively and more in communal terms. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah. Yeah. Chanda, I feel like I want to pause and just talk a little bit about like, across the Reconstructionist movement, that's something that I think we're really attentive to. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I want to talk just for a second about the importance of being an ally, That one of the things that I feel is... I think, Chanda, you name it really clearly. There's only so much that allies can do, and I think it's incumbent on all of us to be the best possible allies. And that's what I feel like part of my work is in supporting Sandra in her work and in helping to transform the Reconstructionist movement and the broader Jewish community as being the best possible door-opener, champion, got-your-back kind of person. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I think that we, see like, when Sandra started in rabbinical school, you were the only person of color and when you graduated, there were a handful others. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: But I think the isolation that you just described in science, Chanda, I think we see it in the Jewish community too often as well, and that's one of the things that we're really working to alter. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: I also think that like racism feeds off of isolation. And so if you are the only one, you're not processing your experiences with other people. And then as soon as I started talking with other rabbis of color, it's a collective route. It's healing. I have no words for it, but it's definitely better to be in a collective than to be alone. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: At the same time, I'm sitting in awe listening to you talk about physics and being a barrier breaker, and I also at the same time, understand how challenging and difficult and lonely and horrible that can be. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah. I guess I will actually say, just to give a little bit of context to this conversation, that I paid... I pay a lot of attention. I shouldn't just say in the past. I pay a lot of attention to people who are barrier breakers in their respective environments. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: For example, Rabbi Sandra, like you, I mean, first of all, as like a Black, queer, woman, Reconstructionist Jew, when I first learned about you when you were a rabbinical student, I was like, "Wait, okay. I'm not alone in this giant Reconstructionist community." Right? Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: In the intervening time period, I have met other Black Jews, but I actually think that you were one of the first that I was aware of. And I was interested in your story and in your journey, partly because I saw parallels between what you were doing and what I was doing. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: And I was telling Jen Shahade... She's a Women's Grandmaster in chess and a professional poker player and also Jewish. Yesterday, she did me a favor and did a demonstration of poker for the end of this conference on dark matter that just finished yesterday that I helped organize. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I was telling her that I first started paying attention to the chess world because I was interested in the ways that the chess world had these parallel issues with how women were treated, with the lack of visibility of women of color entirely. So there are all of these like little bubbles where I think that you see the same dynamics unfolding. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: So you might think, "Oh, but this is religion and what you do is science." For me, being Jewish and being a scientist are not necessarily super separate. The dynamics... You can take the technical words out and the dynamics are very similar. And I think you're right, that racism feeds off isolation. I appreciate you saying that. I'm going to use that. I'll quote you. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: That's fine. You know, it's interesting though. People often ask me if Judaism shapes my activism; if I'm an activist because I'm Jewish. And I say, "I'm an activist because I have to be." I have no choice in our society, but I'm Black, I'm queer, I'm an activist, but Judaism sort of gives me a value system to operate under. So I'm just sort of curious about how does Judaism infuse your work or how does Judaism shape the things that you do, or does it at all? Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah. So I guess the first thing to say here is that I thought that being Jewish meant you were a labor activist until I was about 10 years old, finally got disabused of that notion. So for a long time, I actually literally didn't understand that there was a difference between the two. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I knew that there were activists who were not Jewish, but I thought that if you were Jewish, it meant that you were an activist. I think in some sense it was like being a Cohen. I just thought that like being a Jew meant that you had been assigned the role of activist in life, and that was like part of your task. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Now that I'm 38 years old, maybe that is not such an off-base way of thinking about things, because I do think that there are... One of my middle names, is Sojourner, after Sojourner Truth, and people often assume that I got this name through the Black side of my family, but actually it was my white Jewish grandmother, Selma James, who was insisting that I be named Sojourner Truth. So actually, my first name Chanda is a compromise, and I'm Chanda Rosalind Sojourner to make the grandparents happy. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I think so much about that word "sojourner" and the ways that it comes up in the Torah that "you were once a sojourner in a strange land", that we must be welcoming to the sojourner. These are like these very fundamental messages that I think are driving the activism of groups like IfNotNow, that are saying that we must rethink how we build community, who we consider to be part of our community. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I think one of the hard things that I had to kind of sit with was realizing at some point, and this is really like a relatively recent, like in the last 10 years, that as a Black Jew, I was interpreting all of this stuff completely differently from my white peers and not realizing it. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: So I thought I was having conversations with white Jews with a certain mindset that was shared. And then I realized that when I talked about slavery... Slavery, for me, it was like a very present... My mom was born in a chattel house in Barbados. My mom grew up next to sugarcane fields that ostensibly her ancestors been forced to work like a century before. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: When I'm going through, "we were once slaves in Egypt..." For me, what was coming up was, "We were once slaves in Barbados. We were once slaves in Trinidad. We were once slaves in South Carolina." Like all of these places that members of my family got shipped off to, and particularly for my ancestors in Barbados, very specifically... It's not a metaphor for me. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: It's not like the archeologists say it probably didn't happen. But we also know we went through pogroms because also my family survived pogroms, right? So I think my activism is very much shaped by a Black Jewish interpretation of the Torah and Jewish tradition, but it took me a while to realize it was a Black Jewish interpretation. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: One that I think only amplifies and educates and activates in the best possible way, if and as we make space and bring it to bear on the broader Jewish story. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Yes, I would agree. And I think that it's the true reminder that we have to always be expansive in how we think about "Jew". I think that's what I would say. Who is a Jew is in some sense, a building of that story. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: That's exactly right. I think that's it. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: What's interesting is that I think many Jews are starting to understand that the "universal shared experience" for many Jews is really an Eastern European experience. And as at least the American Jewish community becomes more diverse, we have to ask ourselves what is universal, what is actually our shared experiences? Many of them probably won't be shared. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: I think for many Jews who have benefited from white privilege, that challenge of.. actually, I'm not sure where I'm going with this. There was some point, but I'm just, yeah. (laughter) Rabbi Sandra Lawson: I just liked what you said about this sort of Black Jewish experience because that is definitely how... Like, when I give talks, I will say something like, "I am seeing this through a Black, queer, Jewish lens and I can't separate all of that out." That's just how I see the world. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I think that part of it is also recognizing that the Black Jewish community is really diverse, right? Like even on this podcast... I'm an Ashkenazi Jew, Sandra, you are not right? Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: That was something growing up in Los Angeles, I actually wasn't even the only Black Jew in my high school class. That's how Jewish and how Black my high school was. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: But it took me a while to realize that there were actually Black Jews out there who were not from biracial families... Who were not from biracial Ashkenazi-Black families, and that there were Black Jews who were Jews by choice, that there were Black Jews who were Mizrahi and Sephardi, but there were a lot of different ways that people were Black and Jewish. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I do think the moment we find ourselves in now has lots of opportunity and danger in it, which is that people are starting to be aware of the idea of Jew of color. They're starting to be aware of the idea of Black Jew. We have to be really careful in our efforts to bring awareness, not to simplify the story of those identities because they are a collection of identities. I'm very curious to see what Reconstructing Judaism is going to do in this moment with that, I guess. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Well, I'll make one comment and it emerged very much out of conversation with Shahanna McKinney Baldwin. I think her biography is a little bit more like yours than it is like Sandra's and she'll God-willing, be a guest on the show at some point and folks will get to meet her. She's the co-chair of our Tikkun Olam Commission and a member of our board and a member of the Reconstructionist Congregation in Madison, Wisconsin. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: We just adopted a new strategic plan and we put racial justice efforts and diversity equity and inclusion as a central goal of the strategic plan, and we were struggling with language. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Shahanna helped to originate the term Jews of Color, and also is really keenly aware of how it can be universalized, as you just said, and how it can efface even as it can also raise up. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: She was pushing in the most constructive ways about, "Well, what's the language we should use? We have an opportunity here to help maybe solidify the language because it's murky, the language is murky and language helps to describe realities and how we interact with those realities. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: And where we landed in the strategic plan is this acronym of BIPOC, of Black, Indigenous and People of Color, rather than Jews of Color to kind of highlight that diversity you were just talking about. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I don't know if it's going to stick. I think it's very powerful. I remember the first time I saw it, I had to Google it. It's not intuitive but it raises up different things, and I think it certainly, it invites questions, and hopefully at the end of the day, we're relationship-centered, hopefully with a stance of welcome and curiosity toward the service of transformation... Connection and liberation and transformation. I think that's so much more generative than boundary-keeping and limiting. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah. I think it seems like there are lots of different ways to think about what is Judaism supposed to be doing; like Judaism as a practice, Judaism as a community. And it's interesting to me that actually there are all these different ways in which Judaism is defined as community, verb, all of these things. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Actually we have some of the same challenges in the scientific community, like when you say science, you can mean a group of people. You can mean the practice of science. You can mean the collection of ideas that come out of the practice by the community. I think Judaism actually is very similar. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I don't necessarily... The part of me that does science, technology and society studies. It's like, this is not a coincidence because science is built out of the academy and the academy is built out of the Christian church, which in many ways is... Well, I don't know if this is maybe controversial, but I will say there's a lot of borrowing from Judaism, to be generous. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: So I think that one of the things that we have to think about is what do we want all of these different things to be, and to be doing in the world. And this comes in some sense to the question of awe in connection with the universe, with Olam, which my spouse has been happily pointing out to people can mean space and time, eternal space, eternal time at the same time. It's a really... His comment about this is that Jews knew that space-time were unified the entire time, and Einstein was just making that manifest. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I just want to pause for our listeners in case you don't know. So Olam, which is like, we use it all the time, like in the blessing formula. Whether we'd say melekh haolam, like King of the World, or ruakh [Spirit] or however you want to say it, Olam is almost always there. It's really, really central. And it is often very simply just translated as "world". All translations are acts of interpretation and it it's often very flatly interpreted as just "world". Rabbi Deborah Waxman: And so Chanda, you're talking about, in fact, it's much more expansive. It's much more full of potential than just that little flat translation. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Well, I think it's interesting that it also means world, right? And I think the decisions that we make, for example, in Kol Haneshamah, when there's a transliteration and then an interpretation in English, which words do we use for that interpretation? Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I think to make a very Reconstructionist, maybe, comment about it, it's is a social choice. We're always making that decision of in our time, what iteration of this word speaks to us and speaks to our sensibilities in our time? What does awe mean to us in 2021? It probably means something different than it did in 1921. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I think to tie this into the work that I do, a lot of what I'm thinking about is that the universe is a pretty amazing thing. The universe, what we see in the sky is a very small fraction of what the universe is made of. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: The universe is mostly what we can't see. So most of the matter in the universe is dark matter. It shouldn't be called dark matter, it should be called invisible matter because light goes right through it, or transparent or clear matter. Anything like that. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Most of the energy matter content in the universe is something that's called dark energy. Dark is also, it's a terrible word for that, too. The point is that physicists put the word dark in front of things that they don't understand. And that is also a social question. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Totally. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Just to bring it back to like Black interpretations versus how other people read things, when Black people hear the word dark, it sounds different than I think when other people hear the word dark. And I think it's probably not just to Black people because they know discussions about colorism and skin color that, for example, our South Asian families are having these conversations as well. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: But to call something dark matter, when what you mean is matter that we can't find is in some sense a real statement about what you think the word dark means. Right? Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: But I just want to say like the universe is mostly what we can't see. It's this incredible thing. And so when we talk about what are the words that we want to invoke, what spirit and what feeling do we want people to have? What are we asking people to feel? Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Claudia Rankine writes so powerfully about exactly that kind of use of black and dark in ways that are even as they're supposed to be neutral, descriptive terms are overlaid with racial connotations. I think it's so important for us to pay attention to it because the language helps us both to describe the world we're living in and also to create the world we want to live into. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Yes, and I think just to come back to Black Jewish experiences are diverse, I just want to mention that one of the things that we are really going to have to reckon with, and it's going to be hard because I don't think anybody's figured out how to have good conversations about colorism, to be honest. We talk about racism, but we don't talk about colorism. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: And the specific way that unfolds in the Jewish community, which can be different, then we're not really talking about racism in its entirety, because colorism is part of the structure that upholds white supremacy, which is really the thing that we need to be tackling. Right? Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: The reason I say it comes up in a very particular way in the Jewish community is because I'm lighter-skinned, I experience less racism than people who are darker than me, but it is also the case that being light brown means that I don't have the same kind of Ashkenazi experience, even within Ashkenazi-centric spaces. That people are more likely to be like, "Oh, so is your family like Mizrahi or Sephardi?" Like just out of the blue. So that's why I say there's a unique version within the Jewish community. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: So I wanted to pivot for just a second, maybe more than a second. But we've had this conversation at the beginning before we started recording. We're in the middle of the Passover right now. By the time this airs, we'll be hopefully closer to liberation as a people. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: But we were talking about Haggadah, the Passover book. So I recently did a tweet about how using songs for Passover that uniquely speak to the American slave experience -- many of these songs were written by slaves and there's a whole rich history... American slaves or American slave people. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: There's a whole rich history related to these songs and singing these songs during Passover, out of context, is problematic. I hope our audience can hear some of the things that you had said before we started talking. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah. So the first thing to say about Passover is that it's like this incredibly rich holiday. The Haggadah always has more things in it than you can possibly do without making everyone miserable, unless you serve sake during the dinner like we do to make people a little bit more drunk. That's how we get past like no wine during the dinner is that we serve sake or soju, actually. This is one way that we bring like Asian American tradition, as a Black and Asian American household, into our Seders. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: It's such a rich holiday that you don't need to appropriate. So this is, I guess, like one of the first comments that I want to make. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: But I think the other thing is that your algorithm should be, would this be awkward if there was a Black Jew at my table? Would I feel funky doing this in front of a Black Jew? Could I sit and look in the eye of a Black person, not even Black Jew, but Black person and sing Go Down Moses to them and not feel silly? If the answer is I would feel silly, then you probably shouldn't be doing it, even when there isn't a Black person in the room. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I think it's really important to recognize Jewish experiences with oppression, which are real. I was just reading an essay by someone from the Pittsburgh synagogue. So we're not talking like ancient past, that there are Jewish ways of telling these stories and you should reach into the tradition that is your Jewish tradition. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: So if you're a Black Jew, your Black Jewish tradition. If you're not a Black Jew, reach into your Jewish tradition, as an Ashkenazi, as a Sephardi who had to reclaim Judaism after the expulsion from Spain? Right? Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: So I think I just want to encourage people not to try and map European Jewish experiences onto Black experiences, simply because it's hard to come up with the vocabulary for your own experience. And this one is so accessible. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I think the other comment I want to make about this is there's a story that I think white Jews tell themselves sometimes about the legacy of white Jewish relations with Black Americans. I think that this can sometimes serve to reify a mythology that is unhelpful as we try to make the Jewish community a better place for people of color. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: So I want people to ask themselves: when I do this, what am I doing, and what work does that do in service of making the Jewish community the place it should be for all Jews? Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I think that's exactly right. We started off by talking about paradox and holding multiple truths at once. The invitation of Passover, the great pedagogical experience of Seder, it is looking backward, but it's in the service of looking forward and to only focus the energies on what was, misses the point about really unleashing all the potential of that radical act of empathy and transformation toward the future. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: If somehow we're asked through identification and imagination to think, "I was once enslaved," one way or another, that the implication is, "So what do we do about it? If I am now liberated, now what? What does that mean for me? What does that mean for others alongside me? What does that mean for others far away from me? What is the just world that I need to be working toward? Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Yeah. Maybe I can give an example of ways to have these conversations about communities that you might not be a part of during your Seder. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Please, that'd be great. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Which I'm not Beta Israel. I'm not an Ethiopian Jew. I haven't had the experience of moving to Israel and having that entire experience. So one year, I actually had everyone get up from the table and go watch, I think a 15-minute video that was interviews with members of Beta Israel about their experiences. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: So instead of having people voice the experiences of others, I actually said like, let's listen to the experiences of a community... And I should say that my Seders are often very like Gentile heavy. And so this is my opportunity to educate people who are not Jewish as well about the breadth of the issues that the Jewish community faces. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: So I'm learning, other people are learning, we're all learning together. But I think, I don't know, maybe someone will write in and say, "Chanda, you did that wrong." But from my point of view, that was the way to do it was rather than printing something out and saying, "Read this." Actually take advantage of the fact that we live in this technological era and that you can turn on the TV, you can turn on YouTube and actually listen to people in their own voices. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I think that I'll borrow the hashtag #OwnVoices that people talk about in the literary community, listening to people on their own terms rather than constructing the terms on which you will listen to them. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I think we have to wind down. It's been so rich. I think at the risk of asking too big a question at the end, can we go back to that conversation about awe and just... Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I do think that there's that point of intersection in science and in religion about asking questions of the ultimate in a way. I think you talk about staring up at the night sky and I always think about like that vastness and how small and inconsequential I am. I feel my own limitations and I also always try to feel my own agency at that moment. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: So can we ask you to close us out with some reflections on how you define awe, how you evoke awe? Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Yes. So part of what I wanted to do in The Disordered Cosmos, in my book, was make the case for particle physics and cosmology outside of the context of why they've traditionally been funded, which is because of the legacy of the Manhattan Project. And that's really particle physics. It grows up as a field because of the Manhattan Project. That's where the money for it came from. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I really wanted to make the case that we as a species have evolved under this night sky and every single community has somehow told a story about the night sky. And so this is one of the reasons that the Ma'ariv appears at the end of my introduction, that that is part of the Jewish story of the night sky, and of the moon as the night star, right? Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: And we, I believe have a really intimate, emotional, psychosocial connection to the night sky that is precious, and it's something that links us across communities, across geographies, across community cosmologies. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: So I wanted to call people's attention to that and say that it is something that is precious, and it is also something that is under threat as more of these satellite constellations get launched by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, that actually the night sky does not look the way... Even if you can have access to a dark night sky, it does not look the way that it used to. Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: As we're thinking about making changes to the moon, we really need to think about what does it mean for a few people to make a decision on behalf of the entire planet? What the sky will look like forever, given this powerful, emotional relationship we have with it? Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: In relation to that, how can we get Black and Indigenous and other children access of being under the stars and feeling their relationship with the universe? So for me, that's awe, feeling the relationship with the universe, I think. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: Wow. Thank you. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Thank you so much. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: We'd like to thank our guest, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein for our wonderful discussion, this amazing discussion. I'm just really honored to have had this opportunity to be in conversation with you. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: For more information on this topic, you can look on Hashivenu's website, which is Hashivenu.Fireside.fm. You can also find more resources on ReconstructingJudaism.org and on Ritualwell.org. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: You'll also find more about Chanda on her website, profcpw.com. Rabbi Sandra Lawson: Please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Oodcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Rabbi Sandra Lawson. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman, and you've been listening to Hashivenu, Jewish teachings on resilience. Outro (singing)