Core Ideas that Undergird Spill the Honey’s Work: Excerpts from Rabbi Judy’s Panel at the Miami Summit

First: Sharing the Sweetness.

The name Spill the Honey is inspired by Holocaust survivor Eliezer Ayalon, whose mother gave him a cup of honey on the last day he saw her before he was deported to five concentration camps. That cup of honey symbolized love, family, and hope in the darkest imaginable moment.

In the same spirit, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. poured hope and dignity into the conscience of our nation.

Our work asks: What is the honey we can share with one another?

We focus on highlighting the sweetness — the love, partnership, and solidarity shared between Black and Jewish communities throughout American history.

The journey toward justice is long and difficult. But friendships must ground it. Social change cannot survive without relationships. Our work must be rooted not only in protest, but in human connection.

Our curriculum highlights the partnership between Black and Jewish communities with interactive activities as students learn about the founding of the NAACP, the Rosenwald Schools, Jewish professors at HBCUs, Black liberators of Buchenwald, and of course the Jewish presence in the Civil Rights Movement.

The second philosophy that grounds our work is the power of personal story.

I once heard it said that the closest distance between two people is a story.

Our archives preserve those stories. What began in 2013 as an effort to document eyewitness accounts has grown into a living repository of nearly 100 hours of interviews with leaders and changemakers — including Congressman John Lewis, Reverend C.T. Vivian, Harry Belafonte, Reverend Jesse Jackson, and Rabbi Everett Gendler.

Many of these voices are no longer with us.

Their testimonies do more than recount the past. They speak urgently to the present, exploring the evolving relationship between Black and Jewish communities in the twenty-first century.

Third: Empathy is essential.

There is a Hasidic teaching I often return to.

Two drunken peasants sat together at an inn. One asked the other, “Do you love me?”

“Of course I love you,” the other replied.

“Do you know what hurts me?” asked the first.

“How can I know that?” said the second.

“If you truly loved me,” the first answered, “you would know what causes me pain.”

Our education is about learning the pain of the other.

It is about listening deeply enough that another person’s suffering becomes real to us.

Fourth: As Reggie Hubbard said yesterday, “If you are not comfortable with friction, you are not ready for this work.”

Real dialogue is difficult. Real education means addressing the issues that arise.

Our facilitator guides make space for hard conversations, including conversations about Israel and Palestine if that is where participants desire to go. We do not believe education means avoiding tension. We believe education should help people move through tension with honesty, compassion, and accountability.

Our programming is also intentionally rooted in partnership. Community screenings are co-sponsored by Black and Jewish organizations because we must model the very relationships we hope to inspire.

And we know one-off programs are not enough to build our movement.

That is why we offer microgrants to educators using our curriculum — supporting family engagement, community dialogue, and sustained local work.

Fifth: We are part of an ecosystem.

Our screenings do not simply present a film. We help seed coalitions where none existed before. They nourish relationships and strengthen communities already doing the work.

And we aim to do this work creatively and joyfully.

Through music.Through hip-hop pedagogy.Through mural-making and storytelling.

Our Bars & Bridges initiative, led by our Hip-Hop Education Director Antar Davidson, helps students connect civil rights history to their own writing, music, and lived experiences. Because young people do not only want history explained to them.They want to see themselves inside the story.

And ultimately, that is what Spill the Honey means.

It means: I have a sweetness to share with you.