Below are remarks I made at the DC Jewish Community Center (DCJCC) on May 21, 2006. The event that evening was a bringing together of African American and Jewish musicians. "Windows and Mirrors'' was a popular cultural series I helped start with Miriam Nathan and Ken Sherman. Today there is still more work to do.
Several years ago I met Miriam Nathan and Ken Sherman, who at that time worked for the DC Jewish Community Center. Windows & Mirrors was simply an outgrowth of our friendship.
Whenever we came together there was always a lot of laughter and what the poet Lucille Clifton calls "good times."
Too often we look around our world and we wish we could find the good times; they seem too often to evade the headlines of our newspapers. As a poet I keep struggling to write love poems, to embrace a vision that will guarantee a better tomorrow.
Windows & Mirrors is simply built around the idea that one looks into a mirror and celebrates one's own identity; one turns from the mirror and then looks out the window. Outside is the world. Outside is one's neighbors.
African Americans and Jewish Americans share traditions as well as social and political interests. In the past Windows & Mirrors has looked at everything from sports to humor to music.
Culture is like lace, it gives a human being a style of grace. But it's not simply decorative, in fact it defines who we are. At times culture is that bridge which connects people. We walk across and dance across the bridge, suspended in our awe of one another.
If we were to stop for just one moment, maybe we would hear music and we would realize that life is one note. One note we can all hear, if only we listen to our hearts, or maybe just the musicians who on this evening will remind us how to love. Their new sounds nothing but a tapestry of beauty.
E. Ethelbert Miller
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