political activism

A Time for “Eternal Vigilance”

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Trauma is everywhere.

I know. My experience would not be shared if I lived in Youngstown, OH; Lansing, MI; or Green Bay, WI. But I don’t. I live in suburban Washington DC and I am a rabbi who works with and among Jews.

My synagogue was packed on the shabbat after the election. Many came who were not regulars because they needed one another and our rabbi created the space for people to share their feelings during the Torah service. It reminded me of how people flocked to our small, suburban synagogue on Long Island two days after the assassination of President Kennedy. It was not a shabbat; people were traumatized by the event and needed a community of comfort. A friend of mine who has been a long-term attorney in the Department of Justice indicated that he would need to resign, not because he was a political appointee but as a matter of principle; he could not serve in a Trump Administration. Another friend, a psychiatrist, indicated that new prescriptions for Xanax (anti-anxiety medication) were flying off her pad.

This column appeared in the New York Jewish Week on November 23, 2016.

In the week after the election I followed several rabbinic list serves. There were voices of reason suggesting that we need to work harder to understand the Trump voters so that we don’t exacerbate the divisions in our society. Admirable sentiments but I am not there yet. Our democracy is at grave peril from a President-elect who fans the flames of bigotry, has no regard for truth (e.g. Obama is not an American; climate change is a hoax), and whose primary behavioral filter is how his wealth or ego can be serviced.

A night that might have ended with a woman breaking the proverbial glass ceiling instead ended in a frightening echo of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. Donald Trump won the Presidency on Nov. 9, 2016, the anniversary of the night that demonstrated that Hitler intended to act on his promises. It would be a pleasant surprise if a President Trump would walk back the dozens of irresponsible promises he made during the campaign. But for Americans to count on that would not only be utterly irresponsible but would also demonstrate a total disregard for history. Authoritarians are not mollified when they attain power, they become addicted to it and their appetite is rarely satiated.

I am not a person prone to fear or anxiety. I tend to be hopelessly optimistic and I am often teased about how much I trust everyone. But today, I am scared. The Southern Poverty Law Center recorded close to 500 hate incidents across America in the one week since the election. The Jewish tradition teaches us that human beings have both good and evil inclinations. The campaign of Donald Trump fed off of people’s fears. Hate speech, bigotry and even violence were the hallmarks of his rallies. Now, that behavior has been given sanction by his elevation to the highest office in the land. In schools and stadiums and public squares across the country, the bullies now have a champion and the weak will cower in fear. For the first time in my life, I feel deeply ashamed to be an American.

Thomas Jefferson said “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance”. Indeed. I say that not in any partisan sense. It is not just progressives who will suffer when climate change deniers and the fossil fuel industry start to control environmental policies in this country. It is not just minorities who will suffer when the Department of Justice gives a wink and a nod to more “law and order” instead of serving as a break on the exercise of undue and often lethal force by police. Ironically, it will be Donald Trump’s base of the white working class that will suffer the most when tax rates are cut for the top 1%, the estate tax is eliminated, deficits balloon, and there is no money for jobs program, subsidized college education or health care.

We-as Americans and as Jews-have our work cut out for us. Now is not the time to “normalize” a President-elect who is so ill equipped to govern a nation or to give him six months to see if our worst fears will come to pass. It is a time for eternal vigilance.

It is a time for Americans to get back into the civic arena with time, energy, ideas and money. Join non-profits that champion the causes you care about. Ally with populations that are most at risk. Fight efforts to restrict voting rights that mostly target minorities and the poor. Exercise your rights to assemble in peaceful protests wherever and whenever power is exercised unjustly. Let the world know that the America that was once known as “the land of the free and the home of the brave” has not disappeared. If that spirit will not be made manifest in the corridors of political power, it will be manifested by the American people.

Let us take a lesson from the common ancestor of Jews, Christians and Moslems, from Abraham. In the Hebrew language, he was called an ivri. It is translated as “a Hebrew”. The word’s origin means “from the other side (of the river)”. The rabbis of the Jewish tradition teach us that it is the destiny of those faithful to the lessons of our Patriarch to be willing, when necessary, to stand on the other side. To stand in sacred opposition.

Now is such a time.

Elie Wiesel: The Echo Chamber of Moral Witness

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Although I had the privilege of hearing Elie Wiesel speak at least a dozen times and had the opportunity to once have a private meeting with him in conjunction with a book that I was writing, my thoughts about him actually relate to how much impact he had on those who never met the man.

I read The Jews of Silence soon after it was published in 1966. I was 14. No other book had as much impact on my life. It was my wake up call to social conscience. I was transformed by the poetic way that Wiesel flipped the image of Soviet Jews, whose impulse to connect to Jewish practice and Jewish people was silenced by the Communist State, to the image of Western Jews whose silence was a function of moral indifference.

Note: This article appeared in the New York Jewish Week on July 14, 2016.

In the ensuing years I made several trips to Russia to meet and bring Jewish “contraband” to Soviet Jews. I also had a supply of name bracelets with the names of select prisoners of conscience. I attended dozens of rallies and spoke at dozens of synagogues, showing my slides of my visits with Soviet refuseniks. My first congregation adopted refusenik Lev Elbert, who lived in Kiev. While he was serving a prison sentence for trumped up drug charges in 1983, we helped to facilitate a Bar-Mitzvah for his son, Karmi, via telephone. This type of activism was not atypical for thousands of Jews in the West during those years, Jews who emerged from their “silence” to mobilize the single most successful grassroots human rights campaign of the 20th century.

Ironically, my first face to face meeting with Elie Wiesel took place on December 6, 1987. I was then the executive director of the Jewish Community Council of Greater Washington D.C. and we helped to organize the Freedom Sunday for Soviet Jewry the day before Premier Mikhail Gorbachev met President Ronald Reagan for a summit meeting.

Wiesel and I met on the podium of the rally. The rally would not have happened but for the efforts of Wiesel and recently released prisoner of conscience, Natan Sharansky. The rally was not exactly the “style” of the Jewish establishment, which preferred to do their advocacy behind closed doors. But the rally captured the imagination of Jews across the country and it did not take long for Jewish organizations to sign on and support it. A quarter million Jews and non-Jews attended the rally and it changed the course of history. Within a year, the gates of emigration opened and close to a million Soviet Jews went to Israel and to Western countries. Two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed under the weigh of its own tyranny.

A month after that historic rally, I left my position to found PANIM: The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values. It was a national organization designed to use the moral teachings of Judaism to inspire greater social and political activism on the part of young American Jews. For more than 20 years, almost any Jewish institution that worked with teenagers would send them to our 4-day Panim el Panim seminars in Washington D.C. throughout the school year. During the summers we ran longer, more intensive programs.

By rough estimate, during those years, I gave over 200 keynote presentations to over 10,000 Jewish teens participating in PANIM programs. The life and wisdom of Elie Wiesel was a centerpiece of those presentations.

First I would relate my own moral “wake-up call” and tell how I became involved in the struggle to save Soviet Jewry. Second I would ask how many knew of Elie Wiesel and then, ask why he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. Since most teens at least knew of, if not read, Night, most were surprised to learn that Wiesel’s Peace Prize came not because he became a voice for the victims of the Holocaust—and that he was for sure—but because he turned from championing the memory of Jewish suffering during the Shoah to a more broadly framed commitment to stand witness to the dangers of intolerance, persecution and genocide wherever in the world it occurred.

Wiesel’s Nobel acceptance speech is a beautiful re-statement of Hillel’s famous maxim: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me; but if I am only for myself, what am I?” Wiesel never turned his back on his Jewish commitments. But he did realize that such solidarity with one’s own is not sufficient in a world so filled with violence, hatred and oppression.

My third point would be considered controversial in many Jewish spaces but, here again, I quoted from a speech that I once heard Wiesel deliver. Wiesel stated two lessons that he learned from the Shoah. One was that we must be forever vigilant against those who might seek to persecute Jews or threaten the State of Israel. Jews have enemies in the world and, after the Shoah, it would be naïve to ignore those ongoing threats. But, he hastened to add, the second lesson he took from the Shoah is that Jews cannot make “defense” the totality of their public agenda. We are a people with a sacred mission to bring healing to a broken world. We must therefore ally with the most vulnerable people in the world, regardless of their race, religion or creed.

I would inevitably build on these lessons from Wiesel to challenge our students and ask rhetorically: What will be you wake-up call? What are you destined to do? How will you use your education, your political access, your privilege to ally with those who don’t have your good fortune, be they Jewish or not?

Hundreds, if not thousands of Jewish young people took that message to heart and are doing the sacred work of tzedek all over the planet. Thousands more were exposed to Wiesel’s teachings in other contexts, reading his books, attending his lectures, being taught by those, who like me, were simply echo chambers of his profound moral witness to the world.

May we be worthy of the example of his life.