I Wrote a Blog Post From My Couch. Dave Matthews Answered From a Stage.

On June 5, my phone lit up with a text from a former sorority sister: omg. Dave Matthews just gave a speech in concert about how much he loves Jews. JACKI. IT WAS YOU. it had to be!

Within an hour I was watching a grainy video of Dave, alone at the microphone, reading from a piece of paper. And he was, it turned out, answering me. But let me back up.

Earlier this summer, one of my friends took his family to the Dave Matthews Band show in West Palm Beach – the same lawn where, for nearly 20 years, my whole world had gathered. That night, between songs, Dave delivered another of the one-sided Gaza sermons he’d been giving all tour – “free Palestine,” accusations of genocide – and the kids behind my friend responded by chanting “f*** the Jews, f*** those k*kes.” He walked his family out in the middle of the concert and texted me from the parking lot: write an article on it.

Hearing what happened gutted me. I am not religious. But I am culturally Jewish in a way so specific it comes with a uniform: summer camp, BBYO, AEPhi, spiral tie-dye, the whole ecosystem. My kind of Jew is raised on communal song, and jam-band culture is where that instinct grows up. The setlist becomes the text; the lawn becomes the beit midrash. For my corner of Florida, the annual Dave show was that reunion – you’d bump into your BBYO buddy or someone from Hebrew school and feel the scattered diaspora of your adolescence reassemble in one humid field. Dave was the soundtrack to our peoplehood. And now that same lawn had become hostile territory wearing the costume of somewhere safe.

So, I did what my friend asked. On my Times of Israel blog, from my couch in downtown Orlando, I wrote that I didn’t need Dave to agree with me about Israel. I needed him to understand that when you hand an audience of 20,000 people a villain from a stage, you don’t get to choose which of them takes you up on it.

Presumably, my post reached Dave, and he stood up before a stadium filled with people and tried to answer. His speech wasn’t perfect, and I said so in a subsequent blog. But he had listened, and I refused to torch him for an imperfect first step. And when my own side reached for the pitchforks – with “too little, too late” – I pushed back on them, too. Judge someone only by their worst moment and you are not asking for change. You are asking for a villain you get to keep.

So, I left the door open. Since that night, the fans who track his every setlist say Dave has not said one word about Israel or Gaza from a stage. The sermons stopped.

It doesn’t give me back the lawn. Nothing will. But something I typed alone from my couch reached a man with a microphone and an audience of 20,000 – and it moved him.

That is what I most want you to take from this. Speak up. You never know who is listening. And when someone finally does – when they take one clumsy step toward you – let it count. Hold the door open.

We lost the lawn. We don’t have to lose each other.

A Central Florida native, Jaclyn S. Clark is a graduate of Lake Brantley High School, the University of Central Florida, and the University of Florida Levin College of Law. She is Senior Litigation Counsel at StandWithUs Saidoff Law, the legal arm of StandWithUs, a civil rights and nonprofit organization that combats antisemitism and educates about Israel. She also blogs frequently for The Times of Israel on the intersection of antisemitism, pop culture, and the law.