repenting, and, hopefully, repair

Hi, friends.

Apologies that this post is a bit later today; I wanted to take some time to respond to an email I received yesterday about the last Zoom Salon. If you weren't there, what happened was this:

I began with an activity using the Whiteboard feature on Zoom. It's a collaborative writing feature, which has the pro of giving people a way to write more anonymously than sharing in the chat does– which was important for the purposes of the exercise.

I failed in several ways.

My first fail was that I did not think through the ways that this then created an access barrier for those for whom reading/sighted access was a challenge.

(This is in part due to my newness with the whiteboard feature– Sunday was my first time using it. And in part due to my ignorance about what screen readers do and don't access. So despite the fact that I talk about – and deeply believe in – access for everyone as a major value, this time I didn't think things through, and I didn't do my homework. That is on me.)

This was particularly relevant given that the exercise that we were doing was particularly sensitive: I asked people during our first whiteboard round to share a time that they were bystanders to harm– and people then helpfully pointed out the access issue, so I read everyone's contributions aloud.

I then asked people to share a time that they were harmed and, once again, those with access needs asked that I read those posts aloud as well. This was my second fail. Transparently: I was holding two tensions as a facilitator at that moment. I knew that people were going to be sharing some deep, personal, really painful things at this time, and, in fact, they did.

I had planned for this exercise to be one in which people read the responses to themselves, and, coming from a trauma-informed perspective, I was concerned that reading all of these stories of pain out loud (knowing that how things are processed orally is not always the same as how they are processed visually – which is why I always try to insist, not only for access reasons, that texts are read out loud at the beginning of hevruta study) might in fact be triggering for some folks.

So as a facilitator, in that moment, I felt stuck between a rock and a hard place, and tried to handle it by saying to those asking that I support their access needs, "Just know that there are a lot of stories of pain, here," and to move on– to my mind as an educator, the point of the exercise was to have people be reflective on their own pain more than to hear each other's.

AND. The reality is, I made a choice to use a modality that was inaccessible to some participants, and then to blow off their request to include them when directly requested. In direct violation of my own stated values.

Hevre, I failed you in that moment, and I'm so sorry.

I'm grateful to Emet for emailing me with tochecha, rebuke, calling in– showing me how I marginalized some of our community in my carelessness, dismissiveness and miscalculation.

I don't know who was personally impacted, but if it was you:

I am so, so sorry.

I want us to be a place where everyone not only feels included, but celebrated, as they are, in their fullness, always, and I missed the mark in a big way on Sunday.

I'd love to hear from you all about what would feel Correct with regards to making things right.

Obviously I can't promise that I will never, ever screw up again (I can pretty much guarantee that I will, being a human being and all), but I can commit to learning from this and to doing a much better job of homework and preparation around access issues the next time I introduce a new modality into our learning and conversations.

And I can tell you that, a number of weeks ago, I tried to install an audio feature into these posts, so that they would automagically play with the ability to hear them instead of reading. It didn't work for some reason (hi, just another rabbi trying to make plugin code do my bidding over here) but another reason this post is so late is that I spent – uh, a bunch of time this morning trying to figure out why it didn't go, whether there was an alternative, what the fix might be, etc. Perhaps when this sends it'll work? And if not, I'll keep tinkering with it until it does. So in terms of general accessibility specifically to those who I marginalized on Sunday– that's an even greater priority now.

If there are other aspects of this that I haven't sufficiently covered, I welcome folks' comments, and I certainly welcome a conversation about amends as well.

What else am I missing, folks?

Please let's make this a conversation.

And if this becomes a more expansive conversation about how this community can be more accessible in more ways, I welcome that, too.

And once again, to those of you I failed:

I'm so, so sorry.

You matter to me.

I am listening.