But wait – don’t Chinese lives matter?

So, my fridge stopped working a few days ago and a repair guy came from Eilat to Yahel to fix it.

I made space for him to work ahead of time and while I was at it, I took all the family photos and mementos off the front of the fridge, the inside of which was already emptied, cleaned, and airing out.

The biggest item from my memento collection was a large bright poster from May of 2019 featuring Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza speaking on “Many Stories, Shared Liberation” at the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley, California.

The event was cosponsored by Kehilla Community Synagogue of Oakland where my daughter Maya, who was working in the synagogue administration at the time, was responsible for logistics for the evening’s program. I was on a month-long visit and was having fun meeting her friends and colleagues, seeing her workplace, and getting a sense of her life in the Bay area. The day of the event I went to work with her and hung out. But since she was really busy with last-minute arrangements online and by phone, we decided I’d go back to my B&B and have some down time before the evening’s program.

Maya ordered an Uber and went outside with me to make sure the driver showed up and looked reliable.

Outside the synagogue, flapping in the wind, was a huge banner hanging from the top of the building, advertising the Black Lives Matter event with speaker Alicia Garza.

When the Uber pulled up across the street, the driver rolled down the window and waved at us. He looked Chinese, but who knows – the Bay area has a cornucopia of cultures and languages. As I approached the car, he gestured broadly at the giant banner hanging from the synagogue building and queried, in heavily accented English: “What for? Don’t Chinese lives matter?” I can see that arm waving and hear that aggrieved voice as vividly as if the encounter had happened only yesterday.

Given that we were in Oakland and the event was taking place next door in Berkeley, both hotbeds of progressive organizing with no shortage of political upheaval all the time, everyone was going to have a passionate opinion about the politics of the BLM movement and about the keynote speaker and why the synagogue was cosponsoring the event in the first place and so forth. Not wanting to get into it with the Uber guy, I mumbled something noncommittal and since forgotten, got in the car, and we drove off.

So I was reliving all this in a leisurely way this week while the repair guy from Eilat was replacing the compressor on my fridge, which takes quite a long time to accomplish. What I see from here is never gonna be exactly what someone else sees from there, is what I was thinking. Not in Oakland or Berkeley, and not in the Arava or Gaza, or Jerusalem or Ramallah, or Teheran or Qatar. Not ever.

The important question is whether anyone is wise enough to craft solutions that serve all the stakeholders in some reasonably fair way – or whether we humans are doomed to go on furiously waving our arms and demanding to know, “Never mind them – what about us? What about us?”