My congregation’s book group read an interesting book this month. The Color of Water by James McBride is his tribute to his “light-skinned mother” and her raising of 12 black children. It is touching, sometimes funny, and thought provoking. Ruth McBride Jordan got pregnant, escaped her abusive birth family, married a black man, started a church in her living room. She raised all of her children with the belief that God is the Color of Water. She raised her children to believe in the power of an education and the power of Jesus’s love. She, however, was the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi. She escaped pogroms in Poland. She moved to New York, New Jersey and eventually Suffolk Virginia where anti-semitism and racism were alive and well. Her father, the rabbi was cruel and sexually exploitive. Her mother was fragile and handicapped. Her aunts in New York were no real help and her sister thought Ruth had abandoned her.
While I cannot condone the kind of life her father created for her, nor would I want her to go back to them, the book made me sad. I wish someone in the Jewish community could have seen the pain Ruth (nee Ruchel Dwara Zlyska) had been in. I wish someone could have made Judaism come alive for her; that she could have found the beauty that I see in it, that I can find. I wish she could have known that Judaism offers a God of love (See Exodus 34:6-7). I am glad that she was a strong woman with a strength of character and a will to survive. I am glad that she was such a good mother to her 12 children helping them to excel and to reach high expectations, no matter what the obstacles were. I am glad she found comfort in the black community. The Jewish community failed her. That failure makes me sad.