On
Wednesday night I had the pleasure of being a part of an event benefiting
T’ruah: the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, and organization whose Board I have
been co-chairing for the past two years. We work on human rights issues in
North America including the issue of human trafficking and modern day slavery
in our agricultural sector; the issues of torture and indefinite detention as a
result of the War on Terror; and combating Islamophobia. And issues in Israel
and the such as the status of African refugees seeking asylum in Israel from
persecution in their home countries, Palestinian farmers in the West Bank
seeking access to their olive groves, and Bedouins in the Negev who are
struggling to continue to live on their ancestral land.
We
were in a fun downtown location for this
event, and the emcee for the evening was actress Cynthia Nixon, whom some of
you may remember as Miranda from the TV series Sex in the City. It was exciting
to meet a celebrity and to mingle with other social justice and human rights
minded Jews, many rabbis among them. But what stayed with me was the panel of
folks we honored as human rights heroes.
Every
year we honor two rabbis who are nominated by their communities as human rights
heroes. We also honor an individual with
the Raphael Lemkin Award for Human Rights. Raphael Lemkin was a Jewish lawyer
of Polish descent who escaped the Holocaust and made a life in the United
States. He coined the term genocide and campaigned for the passage of
international laws against the crime of genocide.
I
want to share with you a bit about our honorees and what they said, because I
found them all inspiring and energizing as someone who cares about putting
Jewish values into action. I hope that what they shared will inspire you as
well.
Our
Raphael Lemkin Award this year went to an attorney, Thomas Wilner, who leads the international trade litigation and
government relations practice of Shearman & Sterling LLP. He was
involved in multiple Supreme Court cases related to the treatment of detainees
at Guantanano, going back to 2004. These cases established and held that the
Guantanamo detainees have a Constitutional right to habeas corpus as well as
the right to unmonitored access to counsel.
When
Thomas Wilner was asked why he says “yes” to this kind of work – he talked about the importance of universal
ideas, principles and values. Back in the 1880’s, his great grandfather, a
Jew living in Eastern Europe, somehow acquired a copy of the Declaration of
Independence of the United States and of President Lincoln’s Gettysburg
address. The values of equality and justice in these documents inspired him to
do all that he could to move to America and make a life here for his family. He
did make it to America, and a tradition of reading the Declaration of
Independence and the Gettysburg address was passed down the generations to Thomas
Wilner himself. While his parents didn’t raise him as an observant Jew, they also
instilled in him the belief that to be Jewish is to pursue truth and justice.
It is this combination of Jewish and American values that inspires his work. He
spoke passionately about how it is ultimately a threat to our nation if we
allow ourselves, in the name of national security, to compromise those
principles upon which our country was founded.
One
of our human rights heroes was Rabbi Susan Talve, the spiritual leader of
Central Reform Congregation –750 family congregation in St. Louis. Hers is the
only synagogue that chose to remain in downtown St. Louis and not move out to
the suburbs. Rabbi Talve is involved in numerous social justice causes, among
them a recent campaign for fast food workers to be allowed to unionize.
When
Rabbi Talve was asked why she says “yes” to being active in her community she
talked about identity and history. In
the cab on the way to our event, she passed the NYC block where her grandfather
had worked as a presser in a garment factory. And she spoke of how, when we
witness the struggle of workers today to make a living wage, we can’t forget
where we came from. Not long ago, we American Jews were struggling for the same
things. This is a part of our identity, and it should move us to stand with
today’s laborers who simply want to support their families and have access to things
like affordable health care.
The
final human rights hero was the one that moved me the most. His name is Rabbi
Everett Gendler, and he is a retired pulpit rabbi who served congregations from
Mexico City to Havana Cuba to Lowell Massachusetts in a pulpit career which
began with his ordination in 1957! From
1962 until 1968, he was active with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the civil
right movement, and has been involved on behalf of nonviolence, human rights,
and the environment. I learned from a colleague that back in the 1970’s he had
one of the first congregations to be powered by solar energy, including a solar
powered eternal light!!
Since
retirement from regular commitments in 1995, he, with his wife, Mary, have
traveled almost every year to India to help the Tibetan exile community develop
an educational program on strategic nonviolent struggle, with the sanction of
the Dalai Lama and coordinated by the Tibetan Government in Exile.
When
Rabbi Gendler was asked what has motivated him to say yes to doing this work,
he got very quiet and still. And he said, “love.”
He said that when an issue of justice or human rights has arisen and he has
felt a pull to get involved, he has always known that it was the right thing to
do if he could sense that at the center of the work was love. Love for humanity
and love, even for the people on the other side of the issue – the people you
might imagine to be your enemy.
He said he was drawn to Dr. King
because of the love he felt coming from him, and he knew it was right to get
involved because Dr. King didn’t carry any hatred or ill will for those who he
was struggling against – or as he said – for the “other.” Only love.
Similarly with the Dalai Lama –
Gendler said yes to the Dalai Lama because of the love that he radiated and
that it was clear that the Dalai Lama didn’t harbor any hatred towards the
Chinese. This love which even includes the “other” is what has assured Rabbi Gendler that he is saying
“yes” to a project that is making manifest the truth that we are all created in
the Divine Image.
In this week’s Torah portion,
Miriam and Aaron speak out against their brother Moses, slandering him for
having married a Cushite woman –a woman with black skin. Miriam and Aaron then go
on to question Moses’ legitimacy as a leader and a prophet. Hearing this, God
punishes Miriam by striking her with a white scaly skin disease all over her
body. Seeing her so horribly disfigured and suffering, Moses cries out to God, “El
na, r’fa na lah.” “Oh God, please heal her!”
Only moments before, Miriam was
leading a rebellion against Moses and was speaking in racist and slanderous
language about Moses’ wife. And still,
Moses acts out of love for his sister. His heart is moved when he witnesses her
suffering, and he pleads with God to heal her.
What Martin Luther King and the
Dalai Lama and Rabbi Gendler all teach us, is that in our struggles to make the
world better, the most powerful tool of persuasion is love. The only way to
heal the brokenness is through love – for the oppressor as well as the
oppressed
There are many reasons and
motivations for pursuing justice and goodness in the world as Jews and as
Americans. We have our values and principles that we treasure and which hold up
our society. We have our history and identity – we know the heart of the
stranger, because we were those strangers and we remember.
But the most powerful motivator
that underlies it all is love. Love for our country and what it stands for,
love for and identification with our people and our people’s struggle, and love
for all humanity out of the knowledge that we are all in the image of God. When
we are able to act on this love, we are praying as Moses did, “Oh God, please
heal her.” When we act on this love, we are making real in our earthly realm
the longing that God has for our world, and all who dwell here, to be whole.
