A Covenant Journey: Ted’s Relationship with Jews and Israel (know me)
My relationship with the Jewish people didn’t begin as a political position. It began as a quiet awareness that grew over time — through history, faith, civil-rights experience, and personal friendships.
As a young man coming into my own civil-rights consciousness, especially around the time of the 1967 Six-Day War, I watched a small nation struggle for survival while I was wrestling with America’s unfinished racial story.
Something about that parallel touched me deeply. I recognized resilience when I saw it.
Being an American African descendant of chattel slavery, raised in a tradition where the Exodus story gave strength to our ancestors, I naturally felt a connection to the Jewish historical narrative.
Faith, survival, and hope under pressure were not abstract ideas — they were lived realities for both communities.
Over the years, friendships with Jewish individuals, time spent in Israel, and living in Los Angeles — home to one of the world’s largest Jewish communities outside Israel — strengthened that connection.
I saw firsthand the richness of Jewish intellectual life, cultural continuity, and commitment to education and memory.
I also became increasingly aware of the complicated history between Christians and Jews.
As someone who loves Yeshua yet respects his Jewish roots, I felt a calling to encourage honesty, repentance where appropriate, and forward-looking partnership rather than inherited resentment.
My life in civil-rights advocacy, homelessness work, and interfaith dialogue reinforced a simple truth: reconciliation requires both memory and relationship. Without memory, we repeat mistakes. Without a relationship, memory becomes bitterness. “NEVER FORGET”
That realization eventually fed into what I now call Sacred Tech — the idea that as humanity develops powerful technologies like artificial intelligence, we must carry forward the moral lessons of history, especially from communities that have endured hardship.
Technology moves fast. Wisdom moves more slowly. We need both.
Today, I see Jews, Black Americans, Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and people of all nations as participants in an unfolding story of reconciliation.
None of us is perfect. All of us carry history. But together, we can help guide the future.
That conviction continues to shape my journey.