Saul Farber is one of the founders of PeopleGIS, a local tech company. He is also a lifelong member of Tacoma’s Jewish Community. When Marguerite asked how Tacomans of different faiths could show support for our Jewish neighbors, Saul shared these ideas:
- Invite Jewish leaders in to speak to your organizations and involve them in community conversations.
- Remember that Jewish folks are not a monolith. “If you get two jews in a room you have three opinions.”
- “What does it feel like to me to see people in my community that don’t look like me?” Saul suggests noticing and acknowledging how we react to people expressing their faiths in a way that is different than we do. We should all be doing work on our own internal reactions to people wearing kippahs, headscarves, etc. Let that guide some kind of engagement. Does that reaction mean you want to know more?
- Be authentically aware of people that are not like you in your community. Learn about other faith’s holy days.
- This is not normal. “There was a community gathering at Temple Beth-El… in that meeting Rabbi Kadden said, ‘This is not normal.’ I’ve been hanging on that. This isn’t normal and we can’t normalize this.” It is not normal what our public discourse looks like and how our public discourse feeds into this violence and hate.