Jeffrey Blutinger (Facebook post)

A public letter I just distributed to the community:
We are truly living in extraordinary times. The last few months have tested our communities like none other in my memory. First the COVID-19 pandemic, then the quarantine and the protests over it. This was followed by a series of violent and potentially violent racist incidents, in which African Americans and people of color in particular, were killed and beaten by members of law enforcement or killed or threatened by members of the general public. Not surprisingly, these killings sparked a wave of protests that have led to further violence, deaths, and injuries. Separate from these protests have been a wave of mostly property-based crimes, such as vandalism and lootings, and now our community is under a mandatory curfew.
These killings, protests, and lootings did not spring out of the blue; they have been going on and building for decades. I still remember CSULB student Ron Settles, who died in police custody in Signal Hill in June 1981, as a result of being placed in a chokehold. The following year, Los Angeles Chief of Police Daryl Gates, strongly opposed the successful effort to ban the use of the chokehold in LA. For years, I couldn’t drive past Signal Hill without thinking of his death.
We need to understand that the problem is neither “a few bad apples,” nor is it due to the growing use and acceptance of violent rhetoric in our politics (though both do share a portion of the blame). We need to address the deep-seated structural inequalities in our economic, political, education, social, healthcare, and judicial systems. 
While we all bear the pain of the current epidemic and economic depression, not all of us share that pain equally. Last week, researchers found that if everyone in the U.S. were dying of COVID-19 at the same rates as White Americans, “about 13,000 Black Americans, 1,300 Latino Americans, and 300 Asian Americans would still be alive.” The general unemployment rate is now 25%, roughly what it was in American during the Great Depression. But for African Americans and Hispanic Americans, that unemployment rate is closer to 35%, roughly what it was in Weimar Germany during the the early 1930s.
We Jews need to stand in solidarity with our fellow citizens who have been and continue to experience abuse and violence, discrimination and neglect, prejudice and hate speech. These include Jews of color who must cope not just with the growing anti-Semitism in the U.S., but always with continuing violence directed against them for not being white.
The last few months have created an atmosphere of tension and anxiety in America that I have not seen since the late 1960s. Fear for our health, fear for our jobs and businesses, and fear generated by violent rhetoric are eroding our shared sense of common values. 
We have taken refuge in our homes and constructed social-distancing moats around them, coming to see ourselves as threatened on all sides. But more than ever, this is the time for us to come together and embrace all the members of our community. When others are suffering, we cannot look away. We should not be like the residents of Sodom, who declared “what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is yours,” barring all charity in favor of personal greed and selfishness. 
Instead, we must stand with the poor and the oppressed. Let us take the words of Isaiah to heart:
No, this is the fast that I desire: to unlock the fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free; to break off every yoke.
It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your house. When you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to ignore your own kin.
Isaiah 58: 6-7
Allow me to end with a mi sheberach prayer, modified to fit our times: 
May the One who blessed our ancestors bless and heal us. 
May we be sent a complete healing, a healing of the soul and a healing of the body, a healing for our physical illnesses and a healing for our social and political illnesses. 
May the Source of all blessing remove these plagues from our midst: the plague of COVID-19 and the plague of unemployment, the plague of fear and the plague of isolation, the plague of violence and the plague of prejudice, the plague of poverty and the plague of racism, the plague of greed and the plague of hate; 

Soon, speedily, and without delay, and let us all say: Amen!