Advertisement
July 2, 2009
Ruth Messinger and I had been talking for over an hour, but she didn’t want me to leave the Manhattan office of the American Jewish World Service until she had shown me one of the organization’s newest projects. It’s an on-line compendium of rabbinic and contemporary texts on social justice called On1Foot.org. Want to study the Jewish view on labor rights? Click for texts from the prophet Amos or poet Marge Piercy.
“And it’s Jewish! It’s Jewish!” said Messinger.
“Okay,” I laughed. “I give. I give.”
Messinger, the president of AJWS, had asked to see me about a column I had written about her speech to graduates of the Jewish Theological Seminary. In the speech, Messinger, whose organization provides humanitarian assistance to the developing world, urged the seminary graduates to apply their Jewish learning “to help those most in need, both at home and abroad.” My column, I thought, was mostly admiring of her call to action, although toward the end I suggested she had gone too far in favoring universal (okay, non-Jewish) causes over challenges closer to home.
It was the last point that she thought needed clarification.
On the day I visited her offices, a delegation of rabbinical students had just left for Senegal to assist AJWS in its educational work with children and adults. Before I even sat down, Messinger handed me a fat AJWS curriculum on “Judaism, Justice and Global Responsibility.” Inside, in English and Hebrew, were texts from Talmud and Torah alongside policy papers on poverty and hunger.
“In the speech, I wasn’t going to talk about [Jewish] text to people who were studying it for seven years. But we do study it,” she said emphatically. “All of our service volunteers study it.”
And the point of this study is not to present a choice to young Jews — between the universal and the particular, between the Jewish and the non-Jewish — but to demonstrate the ways Jewish identity and learning lead to action.
“I say clearly that those values, those motives that were powerful in the Judaism in which I grew up — supporting the State of Israel, remembering the Holocaust, and fighting anti-Semitism — now also need a commitment to a broader universe of working for justice,” said Messinger. And such a commitment, she emphasized, can take shape either within the Jewish community or beyond it. When she urged the graduates to work to alleviate hunger, that could mean famine in Africa, or the poverty faced by elderly Jewish New Yorkers.
When young people return from an AJWS service-learning program, the goal is not to get each to enroll in the Peace Corps. “I hope a couple will come back with that notion. But I want them to come back and say, ‘Judaism is my religion. Judaism is a religion that needs to be lived and practiced.’ And I want some of them to be the people who join a movement for greening synagogues. I want some of them to be people who say, ‘Are we sure that we as a congregation or school or whatever are doing the most we can to support justice in the world?’”
The notion she returns to repeatedly is “circles of obligation” — that is, a commitment to social justice that begins with family and religion but ultimately includes a wider sphere of need. Among Jewish organizations, AJWS has its circle — the non-Jewish developing world — while other groups focus on Israel, needy Diaspora communities abroad, and challenges at home. AJWS, I realize, is one of the few Jewish organizations that doesn’t seek to duplicate the work being done by another.
And even in tough times, she said, her donors understand why it is important for Jews not only to do the kind of work she does, but to be seen doing the kind of work she does.
“I have one Jewish donor who told me basically, ‘We’re not funding our widest circle right now. We’re definitely funding you because of the extraordinary work you do with young Jews and giving Jews a good name in the developing world.’”
Messinger also wanted to clarify that she didn’t just drop in to give her speech at JTS — she was invited by chancellor Arnold Eisen, who told her the decision to invite her was unanimous. Nor did she drop into AJWS out of the blue, after a political career that included eight years as Manhattan borough president. Her grandfather was the first executive director of New York’s Jewish federation, her family includes five generations of campers and lay leaders at Surprise Lake Camp (the famed Jewish camp in upstate New York), and her mother was for many years the director of public relations at JTS.
“This is…in my blood, which is why some of this is…surprising,” she said, waving a copy of my column.
Chastened, I confessed that my reactions to her speech have evolved since I wrote the column. I hadn’t been aware of the Jewish learning that infused AJWS and should have asked. (In her speech, Messinger quotes Akiba: “Study is great for it leads to action.”) I also remembered that the Jewish world is big enough and rich enough to work on many levels, in many circles, in service of the local and the global. Those who would narrow the Jewish mission risk losing non-Jewish allies, young Jews interested in this kind of work, and the opportunity to live Jewish responsibility to its fullest.
The day after our talk, our newspaper’s board held its final meeting of the fiscal year. I didn’t remember the last time we had opened with a d’var Torah, so I decided to give one, and needed an appropriate Jewish text.
I found a good one, at On1Foot.org.
Comment: comments@njjewishnews.com
--TOP--