June 11, 2009
In last week’s column, I wrote about a speech given by Ruth Messinger, president of the American Jewish World Service, to graduates of the Jewish Theological Seminary. In the column, I welcomed (or at least I think I did) the Jewish engagement with global social justice causes, but said I felt Messinger had given short shrift to the material and identity needs of Jews themselves.
The column got an unusually large response, and I think it’s worthwhile to reprint some representative reactions.
Among those who agreed with me, Jerusalemite Seth Frantzman’s response was typical. “I’ve lived in Israel for five years and there is terrible Jewish poverty in this country,” he wrote. “The American Jews who believe all Jews are wealthy New York Jews from the Upper West Side have blinders on. They, like so many of their colleagues in the West, see only suffering in Africa and ignore it in their own backyard.”
Others commented that there are plenty of people and organizations willing to alleviate global injustice, while Jewish causes must rely on Jewish support.
But the negative responses proved more challenging, and to my mind, more thought-provoking. I had written of a need to “teach Judaism as a spur to action.” But what if that education failed to instill a sense of responsibility beyond the Jewish community? As a friend wrote on my blog, “What if we have a Jewish state — and a Jewish tribe — that values Torah and mitzvot in the narrowest, most exclusive sense?” In many ways, I think this is the welcome takeaway from Messinger’s address: a challenge to prevent Judaism from becoming so parochial that it refuses to engage in the wider world, and ends up ignoring the “other.”
One of Messinger’s colleagues also provided a challenging riposte at the “Jewschool” blog. Rabbi Brent Chaim Spodek, rabbi-in-residence/director of Jewish communal relations at the AJWS, took issue with my assertion that ‘“tribal identity’ is a prerequisite for the pursuit of global justice.”
“This couldn’t be further from the truth,” he wrote. “[T]he pursuit of justice is more accurately seen as a prerequisite for Jewish identity. Judaism is a system of practices — some ritual, some interpersonal — and to claim the ‘tribe’ of Judaism, without claiming its practices, is to claim a hollow shell.”
Those practices, he suggests, are those that lead to “fighting for the human rights of all of God’s creatures, not just those who are Jewish.” To be concerned only with “this holy slice of God’s creation” — i.e., the Jews — “is nothing more than racist chauvinism.”
Ouch. But as I wrote in a response to Spodek, I don’t define “tribal identity” as racial or genetic, but rather as a combination of family ties, folkways, laws, beliefs, shared history, national belonging, and, yes, behaviors that define us as a certain people. It’s not chauvinism to promote this identity, only to act on it in a way that ignores the plight of others.
Happily, it fell to Rabbi Arthur Waskow, the founding director of the Shalom Center in Philadelphia, to strike a balance — between the parochial and the universal — that I thought was missing in Messinger’s talk and Spodek thought was missing in my column.
Rather than balance, however, Waskow prefers “synthesis,” which his organization recently put into action. “[W]hen The Shalom Center and Elat Chayyim celebrated the specifically Jewish ceremony of Hoshana Rabbah on the banks of the Hudson River and incorporated a challenge to General Electric to clean up the PCBs it had poured into the river, we were going deep into the unique and parochial in order to address the universal,” Waskow wrote on my blog. “We strengthened knowledge and practice of this uniquely Jewish ritual while involving non-Jews and facing the world.”
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