Sanctuary: When the Lights Go Out

Between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur this year, Matthew, Hurricane Matthew, visited us for a weekend.  On Saturday, the lights went out at Ninth Street Bakery.  Panic-stricken, I called around desperately trying to find refrigeration space for the thousands of dollars of refrigerated ingredients and finished products stored in our coolers and freezers.  In a time that turned out to be much shorter than I feared (about four hours), I was unnerved by the Bakery without it's usual humming mechanical sounds, illuminated only by cell-phone light.  The Bakery has become my second home, and a character with its own personality.  To see it go down in electrical failure, even temporarily, was like seeing a family member struggling to breathe.

During Yom Kippur service yesterday, fasting, I reflected on all that as I put the past year in some kind of context.  At the Judea Reform Yizkor (healing, or memorial) service, a row of Jewish lesbians of all ages and their partners sat in front of me, some with arms around each other.  I wondered what their life has been like this past year, where they have called home, and where they have gone for sanctuary.  For a state that has made itself unfriendly to the LGBT community, I wished to atone for the slings and arrows they must have felt, as a Jew must atone not only for his/her sins, but those of the entire community.

If you are LGBT, we support you, however we can. Come to the Bakery, and ask for me, Ari. We will feed you and give you whatever support is humanly possible.

When the lights go out, if we should ever stop baking bread, we will still be here, North Carolina.  We will fight until the HB2 and all the bigots go home.  It is not the transgender community that has been outed, it is the Republicans in State Legislature who have just showed their hand and how few cards they hold.  If their only hold on the State is underpinned by their capacity to legislate bigotry, we will fight them, and it will be easy to fight them, because their arguments are so vacuous and their platitudes so hypocritical.  This may be a low-water mark in the history of the State, but we will not stop until they are ousted, and North Carolina can become a sanctuary for all.