Parashat B’ha-alot’cha 2013 – Love at the Heart of Human Rights
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.
