The leader of Congregation Shir Tikvah convened the Portland Interfaith Clergy Resistance after Trump's election
Rabbi Ariel Stone felt something ominous in the air. Across the sidewalk from protesters dressed in black and waving banners stood a blockade of Portland police heavily outfitted in riot gear.
Behind the officers, an “alt-right” rally was underway at Terry Schrunk Plaza. It was June 4 – just nine days after two men were killed and another was injured on a Portland MAX train after they defended two young black girls against the suspect’s racist attacks. More than 1,000 protesters had come downtown to decry the rally’s display of white nationalism in a city still mourning.
As Stone surveyed the scene, she said, riot police appeared to be waiting for the antifa or the Black Bloc to give them a reason to forcefully crack down.
The rabbi placed herself between the two opposing forces, slowly walking up and down the sidewalk that borders Chapman Square several times.
She wore a colorfully embroidered white kippah on her head and a purple vest inscribed with the words “Clergy Witness.”
Inspired by the ACLU’s Legal Observers, Portland’s Clergy Witnesses attend rallies and demonstrations to serve as a religious presence.
“We’re here because we are faith leaders, and we are a moral witness,” Stone said.
Stone and her fellow Clergy Witnesses are all members of Portland Interfaith Clergy Resistance, a group of local clergy that Stone convened immediately following the election of Donald Trump.
They attended rallies and protests all year, including the march to counter the Patriot Prayer events on Sept. 10.
Leading an interfaith group of clergy is merely the most recent extension of Stone’s commitment to fighting for social justice. She’s been leading the members of her synagogue, Congregation Shir Tikvah, in fighting the good fight for years.
On June 4, Stone had to leave mid-rally to perform a wedding two blocks away at the University Club of Portland. When she returned to the protest, she said, “all hell had broken loose.”
She discovered police had shot and badly bruised a man from her synagogue with rubber bullets while she was gone.
“I know him. I know he did nothing that deserved being shot,” she said. “I know that the police started shooting indiscriminately and using tear gas indiscriminately.”
Incidents such as this are an example of why Portland Interfaith Clergy Resistance decided to focus its efforts on police and criminal justice reform. It wasn’t the first time Stone and fellow clergy saw police use excessive force against peaceful protesters at a demonstration in downtown Portland, she said.
“There is something wrong with the way we’re training our police,” Stone said. “Our police deserve more support and better training. They must be freaked out if they keep shooting.”
Earlier this year, the interfaith clergy group sent a letter to Mayor Ted Wheeler expressing their alarm with their own firsthand accounts and video footage showing “disproportionately aggressive police response to the constitutionally protected gatherings of Portland residents.”
Among other demands, they called upon Wheeler to ban the use of certain crowd control weapons and to hand the duties of police commissioner over to another member of City Council to avoid potential conflicts of interest. You can read their letter in full at news.streetroots.org/clergyletter.
Stone deployed the Clergy Witnesses after hearing from local activists who wanted to see their leaders of faith out there with them in the streets.
On Aug. 28, the group’s Clergy March for Justice drew representatives from roughly 20 faith-based organizations, all marching in solidarity with the 1,000 Ministers March for Justice in Washington, D.C.
“She feels like we need to be present and we need to be visible – and her enthusiasm is infectious,” said the Rev. Tara Wilkens, an interfaith group member and friend.
Wilkens said she appreciates how Stone has been able to get clergy of different faiths organized and meeting on a monthly basis, a task much like “herding cats.”
“She doesn’t need the limelight; she just wants to get everybody together,” Wilkens said.
For Stone, her faith and practice always bring her back to the focus of her Jewish study: community.
“I believe that at the root of who I am in the world is this essential teaching that all of us belong to community, all of us need to find our place in community, and that nobody is meant to be alone, or independent or individual,” she said. “That is a lie that we’ve been taught by modern philosophy. There are necessary swings of the philosophical pendulum. Once upon a time maybe we were too enmeshed, and now I think we’re a little too alone.”
Her synagogue in Outer Northeast Portland is nondenominational Jewish, meaning it welcomes all sects of Judaism. It also shares a building with Wilkens’ Bridgeport United Church of Christ. On the front door hangs a Black Lives Matter sign; inside, a rainbow LGBTQ pride flag.
Stone said being an independent rabbi allows her to explore and share a greater diversity of Jewish teachings from the Torah, the first five books of the Bible.
“I know that there are many different ways to experience truth,” she said.
She said that during the past couple of years, for the first time, she has been approached by Jews who never thought they would be part of a congregation but who are seeking the community because they no longer feel safe by themselves given the current political climate.
“Part of what is so unsettling for us in this country is that we thought we had left that behind,” she said.
Originally from Orlando, Stone studied in Jerusalem, New York, Atlanta and Chicago, earning her doctorate in Jewish studies and specializing in mysticism.
She’s been a practicing rabbi for more than 25 years, serving as a rabbi in Ukraine and as an associate rabbi at Congregation Beth Israel in Portland before going to Shir Tikvah in 2003.
As Shir Tikvah has come to understand itself, she said, it’s become involved in East Portland community-building. Her congregation has grown to include 180 families today.
She has also carved out a place for her congregation to openly participate in progressive activities openly as Jews.
For synagogue member Thea Lavin, this was an important development in her activism.
“Sometimes on the left, in progressive circles, Jewish people feel a little bit uncomfortable making their Judaism very visible, and so we kind of try to assimilate to social justice circles and to the left. That’s just not something that felt good or right to me,” Lavin said. “And (Stone has) made it really safe for Jews to come together as Jewish people and participate in all areas of social justice.”
Lavin, her husband and her twin daughters have been members of Stone’s congregation for three years. Lavin said many of her fellow congregants have become involved in the community in ways they never had before as a result of Stone’s leadership.
“I believe the larger resistance movement will be stronger if it doesn’t leave Jews out,” Stone said. “This is where you come up against a difficult issue, which is the anti-Semitism, which is also part of the left.”
This anti-Semitism can be traced to Israel’s occupation of Palestine, which many on the left see as an egregious human rights violation.
“When it comes to Israel, I think there is a sense among many Jews that Israel is embattled and is unfairly singled out for behaviors that anybody else gets a pass for,” she said. “I’m not in the mood to give anybody a pass for anything. I want to strive for a world where we treat each other with dignity everywhere.”
Stone said she, like certain factions of the Israeli public, wants the occupation to end. She recently hosted a visit from Palestinian peace activist Manar Vosgueritchian at her synagogue, along with a screening of “My Neighborhood,” a documentary about a Palestinian teenager whose family was forced to give up part of their home to Israeli settlers.
But what Stone can’t contend with are organizations that demonize all of Israel for the decisions of its political leaders. She points out there are many organizations in Israel working to bring peace, such as schools that instruct Jewish and Arab children together.
“There’s lots of incredible stuff. All we get are the headlines that aren’t so incredible,” she said.
As the Jewish community finds itself at the intersection of being oppressed while also being seen as the oppressor, many are struggling to find their role in the resistance.
“We have used this new sense of vulnerability to try to understand more clearly, where our common path lies with other targeted groups,” the rabbi explained. “We can compare ourselves to communities of color, but that’s a problematic comparison. We are able to pass sometimes. It may be more true to say that Jews are like the LGBTQ community, that some members of the LGBTQ community can pass for straight, unless they choose to come out.”
Just as she says the left should not demonize all Jews because of the Israeli occupation, she in turn does not demonize neo-Nazis – not even after the recent events in Charlottesville, Va., in which anti-Semitism was front and center.
“White supremacists are sometimes, if not often, people who feel personally insecure about their own lives,” she said. “Try to look at them as human beings. We are all part of the human race. That’s an important exercise. That’s a form of activism.
“The Jewish community of Portland, I think, is characterized as being fairly conservative. It’s weird because Jewish ethics are not conservative. Jewish ethics are love your neighbor as yourself; if you see your enemy’s donkey fallen by the way, you must help your enemy lift it,” she said. “It says 36 times in the Torah, thou shalt not oppress the stranger!”
Locally, aside from the more conventional faith-based charity work – taking collections for the Oregon Food Bank and feeding street kids at New Avenues for Youth at Christmas – Stone’s congregants have zoned in on racial justice.
Tisha B’Av is a holy day in the summer when Jews examine the social evils of the world today and how they might play a part in healing them, Stone explained.
On Tisha B’Av in July 2015 – in response to the previous year’s police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and all the shootings of unarmed black men that followed – Stone’s congregation formed a “Racial Justice Task Force.”
Ever since, this group has attended vigils for African-American victims of police shootings and has worked to educate itself on racial inequities in the United States and problems facing people of color in Portland.
They have connected with Don’t Shoot PDX and Showing Up for Racial Justice and invited a representative from Portland’s Office of Equity and Human Rights and the local NAACP president, JoAnn Hardesty, to speak to their members.
“We follow the Portland Mercury’s activist calendar, and when we can, we go and we take part in other things,” she said. Recently they accompanied the bus riders advocacy group OPAL to a TriMet board meeting where additional police presence on public transportation was being considered.
“I am very proud of the fact that we are solidly and clearly behind the idea that everyone deserves to be a part of a healthy community and everybody deserves equal respect and dignity,” Stone said. “And that means that black lives matter and that Israel has to end the occupation. And that means all people deserve a home, and deserve to be at home in a community somewhere and everybody deserves get care for what ails them, and that we need to be out there with our bodies as well as our voices.”
For Lavin, Stone has served not only as her rabbi, but as her guide to scholarly learning and in social justice direction.
“It’s not just for demonstrations that are easier to attend,” Lavin said. “She is showing up for immigrants at risk for deportations, showing up at the courts, providing a real practical advocacy for people who are more at risk. I’m seeing her really on the front lines, not just in symbolic gestures, but in her role as a rabbi and clergy to advocate for people that need help and need support.”
Email staff reporter Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org . Follow her on Twitter @greenwrites .
