Fifty-seven years ago, one of my spiritual mentors, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, preached at the National Conference on Religion and Race, held at Chicago’s Edgewater Beach Hotel: “It is time for the White man to repent.

Fifty-seven years later I am but another White man—a rabbi—finally repenting, I hope.

This is a charge to uproot hate from our own heart and the hearts of humanity in general, for the verse continues “reason with your neighbor, and not allow sin on his account.”

I have not helped my brothers and sisters to stop even the unconscious hate in their heart.

I have regularly invoked the great rabbi Hillel’s 2,000-year-old teaching, summarizing the full corpus of Jewish learning: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the commentary; go and learn.”