Portland – On
Sunday, Rabbi Brian Zachary Mayer posted on Facebook, “I’m sitting in my
garage. I’m shaken. Anti-Semitic and hate was written on the ground outside my
door this morning.”
Mayer
wrote that on Sunday, he found racist graffiti in chalk outside his Portland
home. He said he was talking on the phone to his sister when, “‘Oh, look,’
I said to her off-handedly. ‘Antisemitic chalk outside my house. And some
backwards swastikas.'”
After
spending the morning thinking about how to deal with the graffiti, Mayer wrote,
“We go outside. Annie ‘calls’ using the hose first. She erases half.
Emmett does the other half. Neighbors join us. We adorn the wet pavement with
hearts. Solidarity is felt.”
His post on Facebook has now been shared
over 780 times. “It’s gone cray cray,” Mayer said over the phone
Monday.
“I could see how people get addicted to this because
it’s exhilarating,” he said, “but I’m going to go back to life.”
According to Mayer, his house was not the only one in the
neighborhood that was tagged with racist chalk graffiti. He said another house
down the street also had a racial slur written in front of it.
“I think it was random,” said Mayer. “We
live on a diverse block.”
Mayer said he reported the hate speech to the police but,
“I said no this should not escalate.”
We reached out to police but they have not yet been able
to confirm this interaction.
“This was a random act of hatred,” said Mayer,
“that can be combated only with random acts of love.”
Mayer is a rabbi who is unaffiliated with a synagogue but
runs “Religion-Outside-The-Box,” an online congregation. On his website
he writes: “I work for God in a ‘Blues Brothers’ meets ‘John Lennon as an
ordained rabbi’ kind of way – nothing dogmatic, nothing too woo-woo.”
Though he said he’s “worried for the world”
after the incident, he’s sticking with his “message of love.”
“We have to believe love always wins,” he
added.
You can see the whole Facebook post here:
