Just read Rabbi Daniel Gordis’ recent op-ed in the Jerusalem Post, one of several articles that have given some free publicity to Ta’anit Tzedek.  But it wasn’t Gordis’ offhand slam on TT that really bothered me – it was the decidedly patronizing way he analyzed the gulf between the American Jewish community and Israel – or as he termed it, American Jewry’s “growing abandonment of Israel.”

Gordis’ main premise: American Jewry’s newest generation is essentially self-centered (tainted “with the ‘I’ at the core of American sensibilities”) and simply cannot relate to the national sense of duty embodied by Israel:

In America, the narratives of immigrant groups are eroded, year by year, generation after generation.  In America, we are oriented to the future, not to the past, and if we cling to some larger grouping, it is to a human collective whole rather than to some “narrow” ethnic clan…

Similarly, the recreation of the State of Israel is truly powerful only against a backdrop of centuries of Jewish experience, and is spine-tingling only if my sense of self is inseparable from my belonging to a nation with a past and a people with a purpose.

In today’s individualistic America, the drama of the rebirth of the Jewish people creates no goose bumps and evokes no sense of duty or obligation. Add the issue of Palestinian suffering, and Israel seems worse than irrelevant – it’s actually a source of shame.

It’s not clear to me if Gordis is interested in winning over the hearts and minds of young American Jews, but if he is, I’d suggest that talking down to them from an Israeli ivory tower is not the way to do it.  I’m afraid that record just doesn’t play any more.

Gordis is correct when he posits that the old narratives simply aren’t working on American Jews the way they used to.  But that’s only because a new, more complex narrative is now being written by the current generation. It’s compelling in its own right, though this may be difficult to understand when viewed from the conventional Israeli vantage point.

I work with a great number of American Jews – particularly the 35 and younger demographic that Gordis cites – and from where I sit they look nothing like narcissistic, self-obsessed Americans he describes. On the contrary, most are engaged, seriously seeking Jews.  Yes, it’s true, unlike previous generations they don’t necessarily understand their Judaism in traditionally tribal terms anymore. But that doesn’t make them self-centered. Rather, they are increasingly viewing their Jewishness against a larger, more universal global reality.  In short, to be a Jew and a global citizen is what gives them “goose bumps.”

If, as Gordis suggests, American Jews are abandoning Israel, I’d suggest it’s not due to the lack of a sense of Jewish “duty or obligation” – I believe it’s because they are left cold by an Israeli national culture that appears to them to be overly tribal and collectively self-centered.

Indeed, while most young people today seem to be interested in breaking down walls between peoples and nations, Israel often appears determined to build higher and higher walls between itself and the outside world. It’s a poignant irony of Jewish history: while Zionism was ostensibly founded to normalize the status of Jewish people in the world, the Jewish state it spawned seems to view itself as all alone, increasingly victimized by the international community.

Gordis himself exemplifies this “it’s us Jews against the rest of the world” ethos in the opening paragraphs of his article:

About one thing, at least, the world seems to be in agreement: Israel is the primary culprit in the Middle East conflict, the cause of relentless Palestinian suffering and the primary obstacle blocking the way to regional peace.

The international chorus of opprobrium is growing by the day…It’s relentless, this ganging up, but it’s also not terribly new. The momentum has been building for years, and though we may not like it, we cannot honestly claim to be surprised.

While I understand the psychology of this world view, I don’t think it helps make Israel’s case for young Jews today – nor do I think it promotes a particularly healthy Jewish identity. It seems to me to be the product of self-pity, more than pride – a victim mentality that’s not likely to get us anywhere with newer generations of Jews who are feeling increasingly comfortable with the “outside world” and who don’t particularly identify with the claim that when push comes to shove, all the world really does just hate the Jews.

I will also predict that Gordis’ two cynical references to “Palestinian suffering”  will not resonate for growing numbers of Jews who are legitimately troubled by Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.  I understand full well that our criticism sounds galling to most Israeli ears. And no, I don’t believe that we American Jews can even begin to understand how Israelis feel – on so many levels.

But whether Israelis like it or not, there is a steadily growing demographic in the American Jewish community: proud, committed Jews who are deeply troubled when Israel acts oppressively, who feel implicated as Americans and as Jews in these actions, and who are galled at being labeled as traitors when they choose to speak out.

At the very least, I hope that Gordis will understand that if American Jews are identifying with organizations that protest Israel’s oppressive policies (organizations, yes, such as Ta’anit Tzedek) their affiliation does not come from a shame-filled desire to “bash” Israel. It comes from a deeper and much more Jewishly authentic place than that.

I realize that all of this may be too much to ask for. It’s long been clear that the American Jewish and Israeli Jewish communities are two very different animals with two decidedly different ways of understanding what it means to be a Jew in a rapidly changing world.  (Sociologists Steven Cohen and Charles Liebman pointed this out with great insight in their book “Two Worlds of Judaism” twenty years ago).

But it seems to me if we truly want to facilitate the Jewish future, we’re going to have to do it together. And to do that, we’ll  need to meet one another with openness and understanding, not dismissal and judgment.

The humanitarian situation in Gaza has grown beyond intolerable.  If you have any doubts, just read this devastatingly important article by Sara Roy, senior research scholar at Harvard’s  Center for Middle Eastern Studies:

Today, 96 percent of Gaza’s population of 1.4 million is dependent on humanitarian aid for basic needs. According to the World Food Programme, the Gaza Strip requires a minimum of 400 trucks of food every day just to meet the basic nutritional needs of the population. Yet, despite a 22 March decision by the Israeli cabinet to lift all restrictions on foodstuffs entering Gaza, only 653 trucks of food and other supplies were allowed entry during the week of May 10, at best meeting 23 percent of required need.

Israel now allows only 30 to 40 commercial items to enter Gaza compared to 4,000 approved products prior to June 2006. According to the Israeli journalist, Amira Hass, Gazans still are denied many commodities (a policy in effect long before the December assault): Building materials (including wood for windows and doors), electrical appliances (such as refrigerators and washing machines), spare parts for cars and machines, fabrics, threads, needles, candles, matches, mattresses, sheets, blankets, cutlery, crockery, cups, glasses, musical instruments, books, tea, coffee, sausages, semolina, chocolate, sesame seeds, nuts, milk products in large packages, most baking products, light bulbs, crayons, clothing, and shoes.

What possible benefit can be derived from an increasingly impoverished, unhealthy, densely crowded, and furious Gaza alongside Israel? Gaza’s terrible injustice not only threatens Israeli and regional security, but it undermines America’s credibility, alienating our claim to democratic practice and the rule of law.

And now the news has just come in that Israel has seized the “Spirit of Humanity,” a boat carrying a cargo of humanitarian aid in international waters, and  is  forcibly towing it to an Israeli port.  The boat contained 21 human rights workers from 11 countries, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire and former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. It was bringing medicine, toys, and other much needed humanitarian relief.

If you’re looking for a way to channel your upset over this dire situation into effective contribution to Gaza relief, I particularly recommmend American Near East Refugee Aid.  Their projects in Gaza include:

- Delivery of  life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies to hospitals and clinics;

- Distribution of  fortified milk and high-energy biscuits to 25,200 children in 186 preschools.

- Water projects that bring water networks to families in need and pumping systems to keep raw sewage off the streets.

- A psychosocial program that helps thousands of children and parents struggling to survive the effects of war.

- Cash-for-work programs that employ workers to clear agricultural land of plastic waste and provide 200 families a means of self-reliance.

Micro-blogging and development…

We have seen the great potential of real-time micro-blogging – for example a student journalist who used the platform to get out of prison.

But now even NGOs and charities have flown into the ‘tweeting’ nest in a bid to share videos, stories and blogs - and as a way to keep their supporters up to date on the development work they do.

Some people are still wary and critical of this method of communication, with fears that it will totally replace a more conventional method of reporting.

‘Bits of tiny shorthand’

Anna Kramer of Oxfam America says:

And as a nonprofit communicator, I fear that Twitter undermines everything I try to do: Use words. Tell stories. Talk about people… I imagine Oxfam writers coming back from the field in the not too distant future.

To get the word out, we’d tweet about our experiences, crafting bits of tiny shorthand to share with followers. They’d then re-tweet, passing things on, sure, but not really connecting anyone to the heart of our story–the people and organizations we work with on the ground. With space for only 140 characters, I wonder: Where do those voices fit in?

Impersonal?

I understand Kramer’s point. Twitter produces media that is devoid of the ‘human face’ factor and you cannot simplify a humantiarian crisis in 140-characters. But it does give NGOs a human voice that followers can engage and interact with – not forgetting applications like twitpic that can accompany tweets.

It can get over-personal however, as the tweeter’s personal views cannot cloud the NGO’s micro-blogging goal. It also gives them the real-time opportunity to be more transparent in the work they do. What they must not do is use it as a platform to advertise themselves per se.

New audience

Twitter gets the information across without emphasising the element of poverty voyeurism to which people have grown so accustomed, and gradually becoming immune.

NGOs can also open up to audiences always on the move whose concentration spans can only cope with 140-characters and it can help with the branding of an NGO who needs to get a real feel for their audience and who is missing from it. People choose to follow you on Twitter so it’s also not so passive.

If NGOs use the right techniques they can effectively utilise this cost-effective media tool to expand their donor base and maintain awareness over a longer period of time than you would get with a 2-minute television ad. And then there are celebrities, with whom Twitter is a big hit – if you get them retweeting your updates, you have the potential of a massive audience.

Take a look for yourself at at how these organisations are using Twitter:

Médecins Sans Frontières

Oxfam

Red Cross

Unicef

You can also read an interesting report on global activism and new media here.

For many Jews, no three letters seem to conjure up rage and fury as effectively as “BDS.” Still, I have a strong suspicion that we’ll be hearing them bandied about increasingly in the coming months.

Since the Gaza war, the movement for global Boycott/ Divestment/ Sanctions against Israel seems to have gained new momentum. Among its prominent new supporters is economic journalist/activist Naomi Klein, who made a passionate call for BDS at the peak of the crisis:

Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause, and talk of cease-fires is doing little to slow the momentum. Support is even emerging among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors stationed in Israel. It calls for “the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions” and draws a clear parallel with the anti-apartheid struggle. “The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves.… This international backing must stop.”

Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can’t go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. And they simply aren’t good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tools in the nonviolent arsenal. Surrendering them verges on active complicity.

Count longtime peace activist Rabbi Arthur Waskow is one of those who “still can’t go there.” The current issue of “In These Times” contains a fascinating debate between Klein and Waskow on the merits of BDS. For his part, Waskow opposes it primarily for tactical reasons:

(The) BDS approach is not the way to bring about the change that is absolutely necessary.  The most important, and probably the only effective, change that can be brought about is a serious change in the behavior of the U.S. government. That means we need to engage in serious organizing within the United States…Boycotts and divestment are not going to do it. I understand that they express a kind of personal purity—”not with my money you don’t”— but they won’t change U.S. policy, which is exactly what needs to be changed.

Klein and Waskow’s conversation is edifying as far as it goes, but to my mind it doesn’t address the main concern over BDS articulated by so many American Jews: namely that given all of the odious regimes throughout the world, the unique singling out of Israel for sanction is an expression of flat-out anti-Semitism. This point of view was well summed up by Thomas Friedman in the NY Times back in 2002, at a time when student movements were increasingly pressuring universities to divest from Israel:

How is it that Egypt imprisons the leading democracy advocate in the Arab world, after a phony trial, and not a single student group in America calls for divestiture from Egypt? (I’m not calling for it, but the silence is telling.) How is it that Syria occupies Lebanon for 25 years, chokes the life out of its democracy, and not a single student group calls for divestiture from Syria? How is it that Saudi Arabia denies its women the most basic human rights, and bans any other religion from being practiced publicly on its soil, and not a single student group calls for divestiture from Saudi Arabia?

Criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic, and saying so is vile. But singling out Israel for opprobrium and international sanction — out of all proportion to any other party in the Middle East — is anti-Semitic, and not saying so is dishonest.

For his part, Alan Dershowitz expressed a similar critique in response to recent reports (later retracted) that Hampshire College was divesting from six companies that profit from Israel’s occupation:

The divestment campaign applies to Israel and Israel alone. Hampshire will continue to deal with companies that supply Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, Cuba, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Belarus and other brutal dictatorships around the world that routinely murder civilians, torture and imprison dissenters, deny educational opportunities to women, imprison gays and repress speech. Indeed many of those who support divestiture against Israel actively support these repressive regimes. This divestment campaign has absolutely nothing to do with human rights. It is motivated purely by hatred for the Jewish state.

Klein is absolutely right when she writes of BDS that “many of us can’t go there.” The reasons for this are complex and painful – and Friedman and Dershowitz do a compelling job of spelling out just how deeply painful and divisive they are. I must admit I have serious hesitation in taking on an issue that pushes so many of my own Jewish fear-buttons. (I’m not unmindful of the tragic historic spectres that boycotts against Jews and Jewish institutions conjure up for us.)  Still and all, I can’t help but wonder that by dismissing BDS as simple, abject hatred of Jews and Israel, we are misunderstanding the essential of the point of this movement. Even more fundamentally, I wonder if our rejection of BDS simply papers over our inability to face the more troubling aspects of the Jewish state.

I’ll start here: I believe I agree with Dershowitz when he writes that divestment has nothing to do with human rights. It is certainly true that there is no shortage of human rights abuses around the world that have not given rise to global BDS campaigns. But this particular movement did not in fact arise out of the international community’s concern over human rights in Israel/Palestine: it was founded in 2005 by a coalition of Palestinian groups who sought to fight for self-determination through nonviolent direct action. It arose out of their frustration over Israel’s continued refusal to comply with international law on any number of critical issues – and the oppressive manner in which Israel has occupied and ruled over Palestinians.  In other words, it is absolutely true that BDS is not a human rights campaign. It is, rather, a liberation campaign waged by the Palestinian people – one for which they are seeking international support.

Yes, there are many oppressive nations around the world – and if a call came from indigenous, grassroots movements in these nations calling for international support of BDS, I’d say we most of us would seriously consider lending them our support. To use a partial list of nations mentioned by Friedman-Dershowitz, if any constituencies of the oppressed in Egypt, Syria, Saudia Arabia, Libya, Zimbabwe or Belarus called for nonviolent global boycott/divestment/sanction campaigns to force change in their countries’ policies, yes, I think we might well agree that they would be worthy of our backing. However, the absence of such movements does not necessarily negate the justice of the Palestinians’ current campaign. And it doesn’t seem to me that support of their call automatically constitutes hatred of Israel or Jews.

What I think Friedman-Dershowitz – and so many of us – fail to grasp is this: even as we recoil from nations that “choke the life out of their democracies” and “routinely murder civilians, torture and imprison dissenters, deny educational opportunities to women, imprison gays and repress speech,” the only way we can help truly address this kind of oppression is to support the ones who struggle for rights within these countries themselves – it is not for us Westerners to determine what is best for them. (And I particularly fear that when we frame this as a fight for “democracy,” as Friedman does,  this is really just a code for “imposing Western influence” – but perhaps that is a discussion for another day.)

The bottom line? While I believe there are undoubtedly those out there who will support BDS out of hatred pure and simple, I think it is just too easy to dismiss this movement as ipso facto anti-Semitism. Beyond the fears articulated by Friedman, Dershowitz and so many others like them, I think there’s an even deeper fear for many of us in the Jewish community: the prospect of facing the honest truth of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.

For so many painful reasons, it is just so hard for us to see Israel as an oppressor – to admit that despite all of the vulnerability we feel as Jews, the power dynamic is dramatically, overwhelmingly weighted in Israel’s favor.  Though a movement like BDS might feel on a visceral level like just one more example of the world piling on the Jews and Israel, we need to be open to the possibility that it might more accurately be described as the product of a weaker, dispossessed, disempowered people doing what it must to resist oppression.

I have to say it feels like I’m going out on a serious limb by writing these words. I’m only raising these issues, as always, in the hope of starting a wider discussion in the Jewish community. Somehow, I feel that it is only by facing the stuff we prefer not to have to face that we might begin to find a way out of the this painful reality.

As always, I welcome your thoughts and reactions…

Hard to believe, but Tuesday, March 24 will mark the 20th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska. On that infamous day nearly 11 million gallons of crude oil was spilled into this exquisite sea habitat, covering 11,000 square miles of ocean. Hundreds of thousands of animals died as a result; untold aftereffects continue to plague the sound and its surroundings to this day.

To mark this important anniversary (which will likely fly pretty low under the media radar) I recommend this excellent series from Buzzflash.com which reveals, among other things, that Exxon is still avoiding reparations to struggling Alaskans while making record profits (see clip above.)

Stumped for a way to acknowledge the importance of this day? Click on this action alert from Ocean Conservancy, and encourage your senator and representative to pass legislation that addresses the severe challenges confronting our ocean and marine ecosystems.

My very first year of teaching, I had the wonderful good fortune of meeting one of my dearest friends.  Julie McCue taught in the classroom next door to me, and we became the best of friends and the truest of colleagues.  There are MANY funny stories of our times together including one where my whole class snuck out of our room, went outside, ducked under her bay of windows which spanned the entire length of the classroom and jumped up to bang on the glass of her window at a preappointed time while she was delivering a freaky lecture on something in psychology as a Halloween prank.  As you might guess, it didn’t go just as we had planned.  My kids were so psyched about this prank that they totally hit the windows to hard and the windows shattered.  Fortunately, no one was hurt, but we (Julie and I,  not our kids who were only doing what we told them to do) were totally called to the principal’s office over the intercom system.  Nice, mature first year teachers that we were.  Still, ours was a special bond that was sealed with passion, good humor, boundless energy, and righteous indignation.  At the end of our third year together, we both moved away from that school, but those years produced some of the dearest memories in my heart.

Julie is now back in her native Ohio and her little sister, Hope, is completing a Peace Corps assignment in Uganda.  Julie has made Hope’s project not just part of her classroom curriculum but truly part of the fabric of her school.  I just received this update email from Julie and wanted to share it with you because I know so many of you have a love for activism, for Africa, for orphans.  In Julie’s words: 

Kudos to the British Jewish community for mobilizing big time in support of Fair Trade!

Check out their impressive new Jewish Guide to Fair Trade – it has to be the most comprehensive resource of its kind.  It’s even more remarkable when you consider that it is the product of a wide-ranging coalition that includes every major British-Jewish denomination.

This campaign is but one project of Tzedek, a British org that self-describes itself as

…a voluntarily led Non-Governmental Organisation that draws upon the skills and resources of the Jewish Community to better the lives of those less fortunate. Tzedek aims to nurture and empower open-minded Jewish community leaders to promote the fight against extreme poverty.

Their new guide is much more than just Jewish lip-service to Fair Trade. It’s filled with lots of substantive info, including Jewish sources and curricula.

Any chance that the large Jewish community on the other side of the pond might follow their lead?

It’s Mazel Tov time. This past Shabbat, our family celebrated our son Jonah’s Bar Mitzvah with our family, friends and incredible congregational community. A joyous kvell-o-rama!

As you may remember from earlier blog posts, Jonah attended JRC’s congregational trip to Rwanda/Uganda this past summer. In honor of his Bar Mitzvah, he’s been selling Mirembe Kawomera coffee every week at our congregation and he’s also raising money for our Fair Trade fund to help the Mirembe farmers with their capacity building. If you’d like to share in our naches, buy coffee!

Click below for some remarks from Jonah:

What I found interesting in my portion was that when Moses returns to Egypt, the Torah says that the Israelites would not listen to him at first. Maybe they didn’t listen because they were in such extreme circumstances that they didn’t know what to believe any more. Moses went to God and told God that the Israelites would not listen to him. So God instructed Moses and Aaron on how to deliver the Israelites from the land of Egypt.

The Torah never tells us what God actually said to Moses and Aaron. I think that God told them that they could tell the Israelites to work together for a common good to liberate themselves from the land of Egypt. They needed to understand that if they worked together with Moses and Aaron, they could create a better future for themselves outside of Egypt.

This is the main lesson I learned from my portion: that people living in hard circumstances, can work together to make a difference for the better in their lives.

This summer I went to Africa with JRC. We went to Rwanda and Uganda to volunteer with different organizations that provide help for people with HIV/AIDS and we also visited an interfaith fair trade coffee co-op called Mirembe Kowmara. Mirembe Kowamera is a group of Jewish, Muslim and Christian coffee farmers in Uganda who have come together to form a co-op.

In Uganda, we met with one of the coop’s founders – a Muslim man named Elias. One time when we met with him, he invited us to visit him at his house. So we went to his house for a short visit. While in his house we waited for him to return. We did not know what to do – whether we should leave or continue to wait for him. Soon he came back, and he started to talk about his house. He told us that he was able to build his house with the money he made from the coffee. He was very proud that he could show us his accomplishment.

Seeing this, I could really see where all the money was going. I saw the power of the co-op in action. I could see that, just like in my Torah portion, people can really make a difference if everyone works together for a common cause that will help change their lives.

How ironic…some believe god delivered the Jews from Egypt thousands of years ago, today it seems she has delivered the Palestinians to Egypt. In either case – it is a joke to say such carnage has anything to do with god. In both cases – god is what is missing.

At Yom Kippur services yesterday, I announced to my congregation that I will be traveling to Iran on an interfaith peace delegation next month. I devoted the majority of my remarks to our current conflict with Iran, and why I have been so deeply frustrated with our government’s and the Jewish community’s response to this crisis.

Click below to read the entire text of my sermon:

When I became a rabbi, I never dreamed I would end up traveling to some of the amazing places in the world to which I’ve gone over the past several years. I have no doubt that these experiences have expanded my understating of what a rabbi and a Jew could be. And as a result, I do believe that to be a Jew today, as I’ve often said, means to be a global citizen. It means to see one’s Jewishness against an unprecedented new world order. It is a challenge, to be sure, but I also believe it presents us with an invaluable opportunity.

This is all by way of introducing my latest travel plans. You may have heard a rumor that’s going around town that I’m planning to travel to Iran next month. Well, I’m here to tell you that yes, the rumor is true. At the end of November I’ll be traveling to Iran for two weeks with an interfaith delegation. I’ll say more about the trip a little later, but I’d like to devote the balance of my remarks to you on why I decided to go. I’m not unmindful, of course, that the notion of an American rabbi traveling to Iran might at the very least raise some eyebrows. But in the end, my decision to go emerged out of very deeply held convictions – convictions that I’d like to share with you today.

I’ve actually considered addressing the subject of Iran in a sermon for many years now. I’ve long believed that our conflict with Iran is one of the most critical international crises of our day – one that obviously affects us deeply as both Americans and as Jews.  In particular, I’ve become increasingly alarmed by our government’s response to the Iran conflict and I’ve also been troubled by what I believe to be a fear-based, knee-jerk reaction by the leadership of the American Jewish community. There is no question that the issue of Iran pushes all of our Jewish buttons and rekindles many of our deepest Jewish fears. I understand this. I share these fears as well. But at the same time, I harbor an even deeper fear: I fear that the current direction of our response will only further exacerbate this crisis and, God forbid, move us inexorably closer to military conflict – something that would only spell disaster for America, Israel and the entire Middle East.

Of course, there is ample reason to fear and ample reason to be concerned. Iran’s President Ahmadinejad is an odious leader and his public pronouncements are, in a word, sickening. As Jews, we have every right to be outraged when he speaks of wiping Israel off the map and when he gleefully engages in Holocaust denial. The thought of such a regime acquiring the capability for nuclear weapons should give us all more than enough cause for alarm.

Having said this, however, I have to say I am just as concerned by the American and Jewish community response up until this point, which I think reflects an utter misunderstanding and misread of the challenges Iran poses. While I do not diminish for one moment the incendiary nature of Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric, I believe it us does no good at all when we compare him to Hitler and accuse Iran of being an Islamo-fascist, totalitarian regime.  First of all, I believe this to be an inaccurate and unhelpful analysis, but even more critically, if we really, truly believe that Ahmadinejad is Hitler, then it leaves us with only one real option. we’re left with a zero sum game. Once the other side becomes Nazis, we’ve left ourselves with no other option than to storm the beaches at Normandy.

I do believe that as Americans and as Jews, we utterly fail to understand Iran. I believe we know precious little about its history, and we harbor all kinds of faulty assumptions about its people. And if we are going to address Iran’s challenge intelligently and effectively, we will need to understand them properly. And if we are going to understand our relationship with Iran, we will have to study history – something we Americans are notoriously bad at doing.

I do think that the notion of understanding your enemy has gotten something of a bad rap – particularly in the current political climate. If you were to believe our leaders today, trying to understand your enemy is tantamount to condoning their behavior. I remember well after 9/11, when our country was asking “Why do they hate us so much?” those of us who wanted to delve more deeply into this question were dismissed as naïve or worse.

But after all is said and done, we will have to understand our enemies. Unless we accept that we are to be at permanent war with our adversaries, we will have to make an attempt at understanding the behavior and their attitudes. We will have to let go of our short attention spans and study their history– and in particular, we’ll have to face the role we have played in their history.  I’m profoundly saddened that the notion of understanding our enemy is somehow considered to be equal to validation. Because in the end, engagement and dialogue will only be achieved through understanding.

So I’d like to offer a different American Jewish paradigm for meeting the challenges posed to us by Iran. One not based exclusively on fear, but also on understanding. One that rejects lines in the sand and zero-sum games in favor of a more intelligent form of diplomacy. One that doesn’t turn a blind eye to threats, but also sees engagement, dialogue and peacemaking as sacred Jewish values.

I think the most critical thing Americans fail to understand about Iran is that it is not Islam per se, but national pride that generally binds Iranians together. Indeed, Persia is a country with a proud and venerable history. For most Americans, Iran is just another Islamic theocracy in the Middle East, but this is a profoundly false impression on our part. Most of these counties were created artificially when the European nations carved up the Ottoman Empire after World War I, but not so with Iran. Iran is one of the world’s oldest and proudest nations. Its history dates back to half a millennium before the birth of Jesus, when Persia’s emperors Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes built Persia into a wide-reaching world power. It is also worth noting that Persia is home to the oldest Jewish Diaspora community in the world. Jews first came to that country during the Babylonian exile – and while many of them were allowed to return to Israel by Cyrus the Great, many others remained and built a Persian Jewish community that exists to this day.

Iranians have always been deeply proud about their venerable national history. I think in some ways it is natural that Americans fail to grasp this, given that our own history extends back little more than two hundred years. But even today, all Iranians young and old, identify deeply with their ancient history. Though Iran is a diverse country in many ways, varying widely in religious observance and political belief, almost all Iranians are united in their reverence for Persian history, poetry and culture – and it is from this culture that they have developed their common sense of national identity.

But there is another aspect to their identity that runs just as deep: a deep sense of resentment over the foreign subjugation of their nation over the centuries. It is a profoud frustration and when you study Persian history it is not difficult to understand why. In the modern era, Iran was dominated primarily by Great Britain, who seized Persian territories as well as most of Persia’s industrial resources. Britain would later gain control of Iran’s army, treasury, transportation system and communications network, and finally in the early 20th century, they would control Iran’s significant oil industry as well. The proceeds from Iranian oil powered the British Empire during this time, while most of Iran lived in abject poverty.

Today, if you ask most Americans who Mohammed Mossadegh was, more often than not, you’ll probably get a blank look. But I’ll willing to bet that if you ask the average Iranian of any age, every single one will tell you who he was. Mossadegh became Prime Minister of Iran in 1951 and to this day, he represents what was the last and best hope for democracy in Iran. Mossadegh was a highly educated, enlightened leader and he was truly committed to liberalizing Iranian society.  But unfortunately for the British, he was also a nationalist committed to ending foreign domination of his country and shortly after taking power he called for Iran to nationalize its oil industry.

The British resisted of course, and together with the CIA they overthrew Mossadegh in 1953. The British and the Americans then installed the Shah as the sole leader over Iran and he procceeded to rule the country with an increasingly repressive regime. Indeed, those of us who accuse the Islamic Republic of being totalitarian shouldn’t forget our support of the Shah’s totalitarian rule for over twenty-five years. At any rate, you can be sure that contemporary Iranians haven’t forgotten this.

For most Americans, this is all ancient history if they even know about it at all.  For most Americans our collective memory of Iran begins in 1979, when the Islamic revolution took place and 52 Americans were taken hostage in the US embassy. This is an image that continues to burn indelibly in our collective consciousness: angry Islamic extremists holding our citizens against their will, burning American flags, chanting “Death to America” in the streets. For most Americans, this image is Iran.

But we also need to understand that for Iranians, these events represented something else entirely. After all, the overthrow of Mossadegh was directed by the CIA from the basement of that same American embassy. Iranians, who had been frustrated for centuries over foreign meddling and domination, were now venting their fury on America, the country who had deposed their democratically elected leader and supported the Shah’s repressive rule.

I do believe that most of us are ignorant of this history – and that we ignore it at our peril. We need to study and understand this history – and face up to our role in it – if we want to maneuver through our volatile relationship today. For most Americans, Iran is simply a belligerent regime that hates the West, supports terrorists and now, dangerously enough, is seeking nuclear capability. But to Iran, America is just the latest foreign power seeking to subjugate them to its will, a superpower that deposes regimes it doesn’t like, and now wants to deny Iran access to technology, modernism and independence.

What’s truly ironic about this story, however, is that though Iran has great historical resentment toward the US, a significant percentage of Iran’s citizens – particularly its young people – admire America for its freedoms, its liberalism, its ingenuity, its openness to modernity – and they wish the same for their country. They also have a strong desire to meet and learn from Americans, but what they don’t want is to be dictated to about what is best for them by Americans. And you can be sure that if we bomb or invade or attempt yet another regime change in Iran, their citizens will be inflamed against us in ways we cannot even begin to imagine.

More than anything, I believe what is most needed between our two countries is not more incendiary rhetoric that will only further inflame the other side, but a deeper understanding of one another. Shirin Ebadi, a prominent Iranian women’s rights and human rights activist – and one of my personal heroes – puts it very well:

For better or worse, the United States is the sole superpower in the world today, and Iran is the most strategic country in a restive region vital to US interests…And despite their government’s official stance, Iranian young people remain cheerfully pro-American, the last pocket of such sentiment in the angry Middle East. The two nations know they share strategic interests…but ideology and mutual suspicion play as much a role in their ongoing rift as realpolitik, which makes the exchange of ideas – essentially, access to each other’s culture and attitudes beyond official rhetoric – so imperative.

If you do accept that the best way to deal with this crisis is for us to better understand one another – then it follows that, yes, you need to talk to one another. Alas, I fear that the very notion of talking itself is politically passé at the moment. Talking has now become politicized. Our leaders somehow consider talking as legitimizing the enemy – or worse, as appeasement. But really if you truly seek peace and security, then who do you talk to if not your enemy?

As I mentioned earlier, this is why I am particularly disturbed by the Jewish community’s knee-jerk comparison of Ahmadinejad to Hitler. It automatically cuts off any road to diplomacy. It implies that any attempt to engage Iran is tantamount to Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler at Munich. I must say, as a Jew, I am deeply troubled when we invoke the shadow of a second Holocaust. We need to be very careful when we use words like this. More often than not, I think it reflects our own collective trauma more than the actual facts on the ground.

If we Jews truly want to avoid a second Holocaust, I would suggest the first step would be to stop comparing every provocation against Israel and the Jewish people in the most extreme terms possible.  Iran is not the Third Reich and Ahmadinejad is not Hitler. This is not to say we shouldn’t take Ahmadinejad’s hateful rhetoric seriously, but it does mean that this is a thorny, difficult and complex crisis. And we would do well to respond to it with intelligence and understanding, not by drawing lines in the sand and increasing even further the likelihood of yet another tragic military conflict in the Middle East.

Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is clearly the most terrifying aspect of this crisis, particularly for Jews. But as difficult and fearful this prospect is, I believe in my heart we must handle it with intelligence and understanding. Many analysts provide compelling evidence that although Iran is obviously anti-Israel, this attitude is not the primary motivation for their actions. Their political maneuvers are often much more pragmatic and strategic than we typically give them credit.  And many experts are saying that Iran’s desire for a nuclear weapon has less to do with the destruction of Israel than with deterring a United States that has invaded two states that border Iran in the last five years. This is a moment of heightened tension between the US and Iran, with the Bush administration routinely calling for a change of regime in Tehran, so perhaps it’s not so surprising that the Islamic Republic feels it requires a deterrent capability to ensure the survival of its regime.

Both the US and Iran have common strategic interests at stake in the Middle East. Still, I have no small cynicism over how easy it will be for our respective leaders to find the requisite intelligence and understanding. We have every right to expect the most out of our governments, but sadly, their words and actions don’t generally give us reason to expect all that much from them. And it is true that many Iranians are becoming more and more disenchanted with their government. Young people especially are increasingly expressing their discontent over their government’s inability to deal with low wages, spiraling inflation, and high gas prices, and over the Islamic regime’s continued discrimination against women and their religious intrusion into their private lives.

We would do well to bear in mind that many Iranians don’t appreciate being personally judged by their government’s actions just as much as many of us Americans don’t like being personally judged by ours. Ironically enough, this is probably what our two peoples seem to have most in common at the moment: an overall disenchantment with our respective governments.  Thus, as important as I believe it is for our leaders to engage, their inability to dialogue thus far shouldn’t keep American and Iranian citizens from getting to know one another in meaningful ways – as Shirin Ebadi put it, to find “access to each other’s culture and attitudes beyond official rhetoric.”  I do believe that given the terribly poisoned atmosphere between our two countries, it is more imperative than ever for us to meet one another, to dialogue, and to understand one another. And it is in this spirit that I will be going to Iran later next month.

The trip I’m participating in is an interfaith peace delegation sponsored by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, one of the oldest peace organizations in the country. The Fellowship was founded in 1915, as a reaction to the buildup to World War I, to promote non-violence, justice and peace among nations and it has been doing this brave and important work ever since.  Among the most central activities of the Fellowship are their citizen diplomacy delegations, where ordinary individuals from countries whose governments are at odds with one another have the chance to meet, dialogue and move toward a mutual understanding between peoples and nations. I am truly excited for this opportunity and I am especially thrilled that I will be joined in our delegation by longtime JRC members Sallie and Alan Gratch as well as Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, a long time Jewish peace activist and who attended a similar Fellowship delegation last Spring.

On our trip, our itinerary will take us to Teheran, and Qom, as well as the historic Persian cities of Shiraz and Esfahan where we will engage in interfaith dialogue with Shia professors and clerics and with as grassroots community groups. We will learn from one another, share our respective religious traditions’ views on peace, and avoiding politics, we’ll attempt to seek out common ground, and hopefully, create an atmosphere for further reconciliation.

We’ll also spend significant time with members of the Iranian Jewish community – a community about which American Jews know precious little. There are, in fact, 30,000 Jews in Iran, which makes it the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside of Israel. Persian Jews, as I mentioned earlier, comprise the oldest Diaspora Jewish community in the world, and they are deeply proud of their heritage. They don’t consider themselves to be an oppressed Jewish community – on the contrary, they have generally good relations with the Islamic regime, who regularly subsidizes Jewish schools and institutions. The Persian Jewish community is eager for broader connection with Jews abroad, and I am particularly excited to have the opportunity to meet and learn with them. In the end, I strongly believe that this experience, like all other international delegations of which I’ve been a part, are more than simply a two-week trip to an exotic place. It will be an opportunity to learn, to form relationships and to bear witness with others upon our return.

I want to conclude by saying I know that many of the things I’ve said here today are challenging and perhaps even provocative.  I don’t expect you to agree with every aspect of my analysis. I understand well the charged and fearful nature of this issue for us, as Americans and as Jews, and I don’t take that fear lightly. I have offered you these words today only in the hope of broadening the terms of the debate about Iran in the American Jewish community. Too often, it seems, the most vocal leaders of our community create the impression that there is only one appropriate Jewish way to think about complex issues such as these. But I believe the healthiest and most effective courses of action invariably emerge when we allow ourselves to countenance a variety of viewpoints. The rabbis of the Talmud surely understood this in their deliberations – indeed, open and honest debate has always been the Jewish way – and I hope that our congregation can be a place where we can have an honest and open debate on critical issues such as this.

I also believe that seeing the other in the image of God – even the ones you consider to be your enemy – is a core Jewish value. For too many of us, our image of Iran is embodied only by the hateful words of Ahmadinejad or the news clips of angry anti-American crowds demonstrating in the streets of Teheran. But I am convinced that this is not the only face of Iran – I believe it has other faces as well, ones that are eminently worth reaching out to. That is why I am taking this trip and why I am so eager to share my experiences with you when I return. Through this, it is my hope that our congregational community can discuss this issue, yes, by expressing our fears, but also with understanding and ultimately with hope, which seems to be such an increasingly rare commodity for us all these days.

And that, quite simply, is my prayer this Yom Kippur: let us all find a way to give honest voice to our fears, let us find a measure of understanding, and in the end, let us face the future with hope.

Amen.

As I sat down to write my sermons this New Year, I somehow found myself returning to the theme of “sustainability.”  Click below for my remarks on Erev Rosh Hashanah:

I’ve always felt that one of the most valuable things about the New Year is the way it effectively shifts us into a different spiritual gear. Our lives and our world rush forward sometimes at warp speed, and then Rosh Hashanah comes to offer us a chance to slow down, take stock, and hopefully to recapture a sense of order and purpose before we begin again.

That’s not to say it’s easy to do.  Especially in a year such as this. It has been, needless to say, a profoundly eventful year for our country and for the world. It’s been a powerfully eventful year for JRC. And I will confess there have been times these past few weeks when I’ve done my share of time just gazing into my computer screen, unsure of just how or where to start.

Still. as difficult as this can sometimes be, I receive this opportunity as a gift.  I wanted so much tonight to talk about our pretty remarkable year at JRC – and yes, there was just so much to say. But in the end I appreciated the chance to sit back and think about how far we’ve come since we last gathered here together. And as I gave myself more time to put the year into context, little by little, I found myself inevitably returning to certain common denominators, certain common themes.  One word in particular seemed to present itself more than any other.  And that word is sustainability.

Now I know this word is bandied about a great deal these days, in a variety of different contexts. Some might even consider it to be something of a buzzword. But the thing about buzzwords?  Sometimes it’s true, they do reflect temporary fads or the concept du jour if you will. But in some instances the popularity of a particular word might just indicate an idea whose time has come.

So what does it mean when we say that something is “sustainable?” In the most basic formulation it simply means that something has the ability to live and thrive with permanence and continuity without exhausting limited resources. This is a fairly straightforward concept, but in the 21st century it appears to be increasingly difficult for us to grasp.  In the Western world we tend to take our sustainability for granted.  In our country in particular, I believe our power and privilege creates the illusion of permanence – we take for granted that our resources are somehow inexhaustible; that everything upon which we’ve come to depend will somehow be magically sustained on its own accord.

But of course it isn’t so. The earth’s natural resources are not inexhaustible. Nor are the human resources of our communities. Nor are the economic resources of our nation. And if we continue to plunder or exploit any of these impermanent commodities, our wells will eventually run dry. This may seem patently obvious, but if it is, we certainly don’t seem to be getting it. The only way we will sustain the precious but limited resources of our world is if we ourselves take responsibility for their sustenance.  If we understand that their care and maintenance are up to us and only us. If we live mindful disciplined lives, taking care at every turn not to squander our blessings. Indeed, only when we see ourselves as primary agents of sustainability will we truly ensure the future viability of our lives and our world.

This is, in fact, a primary teaching of Jewish tradition.  It’s actually the very first teaching in the Torah. In the first chapter of Genesis, we read that God creates an ordered and orderly world – and along with it, God creates the means for its ongoing sustenance. The earth, in turn brings forth “seed-bearing plants…each true to its type, with its seed in it.” (1:2) God also creates the various species of the animal world each with the power to procreate and commands them to be fruitful and multiply. When God creates man and woman, God also commands them to be fruitful and multiply but then God goes one step further. God puts the ongoing care and sustenance of the earth in their hands.

For whatever reason, God doesn’t just take care of the world alone, nor does God create a world that will simply take care of itself. This sacred job is given to humanity just as creation is barely out of the starting gate. A famous Midrash – one I know I’ve shared with you before – makes this point radically clear for us:

When God created the first human beings, God showed them around the Garden of Eden and said to them, ‘Look at my handiwork, my creation, how beautiful and balanced it is. Be careful not to ruin or destroy my world, for if you do, there will be no one to repair it after you.

The point here, I think, is clear. The world was designed to be sustained, but it is not self-sustaining. The future of the world, quite simply, is up to us.

We are now all too familiar with the environmental implications of this teaching. And I am immensely proud that as a religious community, JRC is not just talking the talk. By now you all should know the recent happy news: JRC has officially attained LEED certification at the Platinum Level by the US Green Building Council, which makes our synagogue building the highest-rated green house of worship in the world.

By all means, we should take profound pride in what we have accomplished.   But for me at least, my pride comes not from the certification itself, but largely from how we managed to accomplish this.  People are often surprised to learn that before we began our building process, JRC was not particularly known as a leader in the environmental movement. When we considered building green, most of our members were not all that knowledgeable about sustainable technology or energy efficiency or the science of carbon footprints. But what did excite us and eventually commit us to this project were the spiritual values underlying it. Once we grasped the religious imperative of living sustainably, we quickly found folks became invested in this project in a much deeper way.

Now that we’ve become ambassadors of this issue in the religious community, this is my primary message: it’s not as difficult as it looks.  You don’t have to a scientist or an engineer or a lifelong environmental activist. Like anything else, all you need to be is someone who cares about the future of our world, who is willing to learn what you need to know and who is ready to live a more mindful way of life.

In the end, as wonderful as it is to be honored in this way, I think the biggest honor will be when we see other houses of worship seeing what we’ve done and following suit.  Then we can take real pride in the fact that what we did truly made a difference. That we, in our way, helped to contribute to a new movement of spiritual sustainability in the religious community.   And by the same token, I hope what we’ve accomplished will continue to be a source of inspiration to us – to compel each and every one of us to take stock and to think more deeply how we can live sustainable lives.  In our homes and as advocates in our communities, our nation and the world. So yes, Mazel Tov to us all. We send out our heartfelt thanks and appreciation to all of the members who contributed to this amazing, humbling accomplishment. And now the real work truly begins for us.

By the way, while we are talking about our new building, we also shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that it is facilitating sustainability in another way: it is enabling our JRC community itself to be sustained into its future. After all, before we ever heard of LEED certification, we decided to build a new home for JRC to ensure its viability for future generations of Jews. It was a leap of faith for many reasons, but in the end it was a leap we felt we needed to take. In an age in which many synagogues are shrinking or merging or disappearing completely, we believed in what JRC stood for and felt it was a religious vision worth preserving. That we were able to accomplish this – and in such a way that further invested our members in JRC’s future – should be an important and hopeful sign for us all.

Now I’d like to share with you yet another example of how JRC learned important first-hand lessons about sustainability in the past year. It occurred this past July, when twenty-five of us participated in JRC’s second service delegation to Africa.  We traveled first to Rwanda, where we were hosted by WE-ACTx, an NGO that seeks to serves Rwandan women and children affected by HIV. A primary focus of WE-ACTx is serving the numerous women who were infected with HIV through rape during the 1994 genocide. During our stay, we also toured genocide sites, spoke with citizens and witnessed Rwanda’s courageous attempts to sustain the soul of their nation in the wake of that terrible trauma.

In Uganda we visited our old friends in the Foundation for the Development of Needy Communities, the NGO who hosted us during our first service delegation three years ago. As many of you know, FDNC promotes grassroots sustainable development in Eastern Uganda through a number of wonderful initiatives, including community health projects, a vocational school, music education, capacity building, among many more examples.

We also spent a great deal of time with the members of the Mirembe Kawomera Fair Trade coffee cooperative.  JRC has long been a supporter of this project and I know many of you have bought Mirembe Coffee at JRC over the years. For those of you who are not familiar, Mirembe Kawomera is an interfaith effort of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim coffee farmers who have founded a coop to get a fairer price for their product, to create better future for their communities, and to make a provide a real, living example of inter-religious cooperation. During our visit, we got to meet with the leadership of the coop, attend Muslim, Jewish and Christian services, and even had the opportunity to participate in the coffee harvest.

There is a great deal to say about our experiences in Rwanda and Uganda.  I think there are easily at least two dozen sermons that could come out of this one trip alone. For now, however, I want to return to my theme of sustainability. For primary among the lessons we learned was this eternal, sacred truth: communities can only be sustained when individuals take responsibility for their sustenance.   The developing world provides us with the most powerful examples of this fact.  Indeed, every day of our trip we came face to face with this reality: over and over we met with individuals who didn’t take the future of their lives or their communities for granted for one second.

As it turns out, the Torah also has a great deal to say about socio-economic sustainability. Over and over again God tells the Israelites they are about to enter a land flowing with milk and honey – a land that contains all they will ever need. But God also says it will all be lost to them in a second if they do not uphold the covenant and create the kind of holy community they have pledged to create.

God commands the Israelites repeatedly that they will have a future on the land only if they ensure the sustenance of all their citizens. And even though there is bounty in the land, they’re told that they cannot merely assume the equitable distribution of resources. In Deuteronomy we find this famous passage: “For there will never cease to be needy ones in your land, which is why I command you: open your hand to the poor and the needy kinsman in your land.” (Deuteronomy 15:11)

Jewish tradition has expanded considerably upon these laws from Torah.  While we must never shirk our responsibility to sustain the needy among us, the ideal form of tzedakah, as Moses Maimonidies famously taught, is to enable others to become self-sustaining. In Jewish tradition, we are commanded to sustain others, but ensuring their future sustainability is among our most sacrosanct commandments. Why? Because on a purely human level, it breaks down the unequal power dynamic between giver and recipient. It views human dignity and self-sufficiency as our highest aspiration – in a sense even higher than charity itself.

I believe what Maimonidies suggested so long ago is still powerfully relevant to the work of global sustainable development: the highest and most effect form of global action is the kind that will help a community to sustain itself. This is why I am so proud that JRC has forged such deep relationships with NGOs such as WE-ACTx and FDNC and a cooperative like Mirembe Kawomera. Because these organizations represent real members of real communities on the ground who are working every day to create sustainable development for themselves and their communities. Here again, I am so proud to be part of a congregation that gets it. That nurturing sustainability is an important part of the congregational work we do.

I mentioned earlier that those with power and privilege – those blessed with abundant resources – tend to take their sustainability for granted. Our country in particular has been particularly adept at living under an illusion of self-sustainability and invulnerability. But those days, it seems, are fast coming to an end. Our nation’s financial meltdown hasn’t occurred in a vacuum. It’s not a current event. We might well put it this way: our country has been living in a decidedly unsustainable way for far too long and now we’re finally seeing our chickens are coming home to roost. This, however, is a sermon for another day – tomorrow, as a matter of fact – so if you want to hear that one, you’ll have to come back in the morning.

I’d actually like to conclude by addressing a different form of sustenance – one that is particularly relevant to our season. After all, why do we gather here year after year? Why do we come back here if not our desire for sustenance? To give thanks for the blessings of the past year, to mourn its losses, and to pray that we and those we love will be sustained for just one more.

I do believe with all my heart that everything I’ve been talking about: environmental sustainability, social sustainability, economic sustainability, it all applies to the human condition as well. There is such a thing as spiritual sustenance. That is to say, our inner lives – our souls, if you will – are also designed to be sustainable, but again, they are not self-sustaining. At the end of the day, each and every one of us must take responsibility for our own spiritual sustenance.

Again, this sounds like an obvious claim, but if it is, then why do we have such a difficult time doing it? Too often we treat our emotional resources, our spiritual resource,s as endless springs that have power of eternal self-renewal. The truth is, our inner resources more accurately resemble a well. We need to be actively involved in replenishing the water in the wells of our souls or else we will surely run dry.

On this I speak from personal experience, trust me. Like most of you, I have come to learn that it’s all well and good to preach and promote the sustenance of our world – but if we cannot commit to sustaining our own lives, our own souls, then in the end, we will not really be any good to ourselves or to anyone else.

So how do we do this? How do we find the kind of spiritual sustenance that lasts; that truly makes a difference for us? This may sound like a cop-out for a spiritual leader, but in the end I’m afraid each of us needs to answer this question for ourselves. Each of us needs to ask ourselves seriously: What are the things that cause my spiritual well to run dry?  Then in turn, what are the things that truly sustain my soul?  What are the things I need to do to fill my well back up? And finally, what am I going to do about it? How am I going to change the way I live so that I can indeed live a sustainable life?

As I say, each of us must to answer these questions ourselves. Believe me, I’m asking myself these questions and I struggle with these issues just like everyone else. But I would be doing this for a living if I thought that the spiritual traditions of Judaism didn’t have a great deal to offer us by way of spiritual sustenance.

And I will say this: although I might not believe in God in the traditional manner, I fervently believe that our searches for sustenance do bear fruit. That beyond all the exhaustible resources of our lives and our world, there is a Source of Permanence. Of Eternity. Where wells never run dry and blessings flow freely and in abundance. And however we choose to believe, whatever our theologies, I hope we can all find, connect with and hold on to this place of permanence, because I don’t think we’ll ultimately be able to sustain ourselves any other way.

Rosh Hashanah comes to remind us of this every New Year. Traditionally speaking, this is the time in which we acknowledge Malchuyot – we enthrone God’s rule over the world. I choose to understand this as the sacred recognition of a power ultimately beyond our own; and acknowledgment of that which truly lasts. During the course of the year too many of us we enthrone impermanence, we ascribe ultimate meaning to that which is only temporary, to that which will ultimately pass away. On Rosh Hashanah, however, we affirm something else: we celebrate staying power, we open ourselves up to a source of endless sustenance.

Tomorrow, before the shofar is sounded, we will proclaim, “adonai, melech, adonai malach, adonai yimloch, l’olam va’ed!” “God reigns, God has reigned, God will reign forever and ever!” Yes, these are heady and difficult words to say out loud – especially for us ornery Reconstructionists. But maybe we might view this statement as our way of affirming permanence and sustenance in a world that too often feels unsustainable. This Rosh Hashanah it’s my hope and prayer that we will find the strength to connect to this place. May it renew our thirsting spirits, may sustain our world, may it give us life as we enter this new year.

And as we are truly blessed to have been sustained long enough to reach this place once more, let’s say the blessing together:

Holy One of Blessing, your presence fills creation. You have given us life, you have sustained us, and you have brought us all to this sacred season together.

Amen.

An interesting video brought to us by one of our readers empowering people to take ACTION into your own hands.  Take your protest to the voice of power.  Thanks for the pick up!

This evening begins Shabbat Nachamu (“The Shabbat of Consolation”), the Sabbath immediately following the festival of Tisha B’Av. Last week we highlighted our collective experience of pain and loss; beginning this week we begin the road to recovery through the consoling themes of the Haftarah portions chanted during the next several Shabbat services. These reminders will lead us into the High Holidays themselves – the quintessential Jewish expression of healing and hope.

In the wake of Tisha B’Av, Shabbat Nachamu comes to remind us that healing from trauma is not only possible, but inevitable – as long as we become active participants in the healing process. In a sense, it is not enough to affirm healing in our lives and our world: we need to admit that healing from pain and loss involves very real work. Yes, it is painful work, but it if we devote ourselves to it with a faith and commitment, it is truly sacred work.

This Shabbat Nachamu, I’m suggesting we learn about and support the sacred work of healing that is currently being done around the world by organizations that aid those who are traumatized in the wake of violence and war. Though there are many important national and international centers doing this work, I’d like to spotlight the Center for Mind-Body Medicine’s Global Trauma Relief Mission. The CMBM Global Trauma Relief Mission has remarkable global reach, treating victims of psychotrauma in such diverse locales as Kosovo, Israel, Gaza, Macedonia, Bosnia, in post – 9/11 New York and the post- Hurricane Katrina Gulf Coast region.

This Shabbat Nachamu and beyond, may we do all we can to bring healing and hope to a too-often traumatized world…

An informational video from Good Magazine about America’s dependency on oil.

An interview of Noam Chomsky, who believes that the American political system still mantains a imperical ideal to obtain its goals. Depite being the richest country in the world, Chomsky believes by funneling military funds towards social issues would increase the way of life and also solve foreign policy issues.

Noam Chomsky is a professor emeritus of linguistics at MIT who has written numerous books, including the bestseller, “Failed States.” In the public sphere however, he is more widely known as political activist and a libetarian socialist intellectual.

As promised, we went to the Abayudayah Jewish community on Shabbat morning for services. It was actually a fairly auspicious time to be visiting: last week their new spiritual leader, Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, was formally installed in his home community. Rabbi Gershom has been studying for the past several years at the Conservative movement’s Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in Los Angeles and his return to Uganda has been a much-anticipated and long-awaited moment. By all reports, his installation was a major event, attended by many leaders from the American Jewish community as well as throngs of Ugandan Jews.

To judge from our experience, Rabbi Sizomu has clearly settled comfortably into his new role. He presided a lovely service together with other members of the commumity (including JJ Keki, who led us in some rousing Ugandan-style Psalms). Also attending the service was Rabbi Jerome Epstein, Executive VP of United Synagogue, who was there to dedicate new Beit Midrash (House of Learning) that the Conservative movement had funded for them. After the service we shared oneg and lunch with the Abayudayah before heading back to Mbale for some Shabbat R&R. (Sorry no pix of this visit – Shabbas after all…)

On Sunday morning we completed our interfaith “hat trick” by attending church services at the Namanyoni Anglican Church (that’s me below with the head of the church – and Peace Kawomera board member – Stephen Kabala). Just as at the Nankusi mosque on Friday, we were received with welcome and graciousness, especially as they did not have much advance notice of our visit. After the service, they greeted us with the now obligatory speeches, and I had the opportunity to lead the congregation in an impromptu Bible Study of the Jewish weekly portion.

We have been so impressed all week at the deep level of interfaith cooperation and support in Uganda. I made a point of telling our new friends, quite from the heart, that they are true teachers; that we in the United States and the West have not yet learned how to live the way they do here.

After lunch we were back with our good friends at the Peace Kawomera coop, for a better look at their operations. The coop is clearly on the verge of reaching a new level of viability. They are currently building an impressive new warehouse/office facility and thanks to a USAID grant, they have recently acquired a new high-powered pulping machine for use by all of the farmers in the coop (below). Up until this point, farmers have been pulping the beans by hand. (More in this in my next post).

We ended our day by helping JJ with the coffee harvest (top pic). We set out over the hillside, scouring the plants for the red beans, which are just now beginning to emerge (the height of the season will occur this September). It really was a thrill, especially for those of us at JRC, who have been selling and drinking Mirembe Kawomera for years.

In my next post I’ll report on the process by which the harvested beans are pulped, dryed, cleaned, and milled before they set out for the US to be roasted and distributed. It truly takes a community working together to produce a cup or fair trade coffee…

PS: Tomorrow we drive back to Kampala to begin our journey home.

That man in the picture above is JJ Keki – Ugandan farmer, musician, fair trade entrepreneur, local politician and interfaith activist (I’m sure I’m missing several more job descriptions…) JRC has gotten to know JJ well over the years through our our relationship to the Peace Kawomera interfaith fair trade coffee cooperative. JJ (a Ugandan Jew) is a co-founder of the coop along with Elias Hasulube (with JJ below) a Muslim farmer. The coop includes the participation of 705 Ugandan Jewish, Muslim and Christian farmers – and is an unprecedented example of interfaith cooperation in support of fair trade and sustainable development.

On Friday morning our group split up once again: the medical providers volunteered at the FDNC clinic and the rest of us spent our day with the folks from Peace Kawomera. We met first at the coop office (located in the Namayonyi Sub-County) with Elias, who serves as their fair trade and organic certification expert, and their financial secretary Kakaire Hatube. Joining us as well was John Bosco Birenge, and agriculturist who was recently hired by the coop to help the farmers with organic farming skills.

The governance of the coop board is guided by impressively democratic standards. The board has seven members, which must include Muslim, Jewish and Christian reps. The farmers themselves directly elect the board and chairpeople, and the bylaws require that there be an equal number of women, youth and elders represented. Their adherence to organic and shade grown agriculture as well as fair trade/sustainable development values is equally as strong. This is clearly a farming community that cares deeply about the principles by which they work and live. (Below: some JRCers outside the coop office)

After meeting with the coop staff, we took a short ride out to JJ’s home, where he gave us a personal tour of his coffee farm. Coffee growing is a difficult and fragile art form: it takes the plant three full years to grow from planting to harvest and any number of factors can compromise the quality of the beans along the way. Last year, in fact, the coop sustained a net financial loss because of heavy rains (as well as the fluctuation of the American dollar). Agriculturist John Bosco was hired by the coop largely for this reason: to help the farmers with important tips on how to improve their quality and yield.

JJ’s farm is set on the slope of a lush, gorgeous Ugandan hillside The farm includes a variety of crops: along the way we saw the coffee plants nestled among guava, papaya, banana, avocado, casava and much more. JJ commented that this is why he believes coffee promotes peace: because it thrives best when it coexists next to other kinds of plants. (The picture below shows a coffee plant coexisting with a banana tree).

I’ve written extensively about Mirembe on this blog – largely because I have just been so inspired by the example they set for us. I truly believe that the folks at this modest coop in Uganda are, in their way, showing the rest of the world how to live. If you are a coffee drinker, I encourage you to support their efforts – Miremebe Kawomera is roasted, distributed and marketed by Thanksgiving Coffee and for every bag they sell, one dollar goes back to the coop. Moreover, the coop’s fair trade social premiums support their community development efforts (which includes the Nankusi Primary School that we will visit on Monday).

We’re going to return to JJ’s farm on Sunday to pick coffee – but in the meantime, we were able to do our part by donating a new laptop to the coop. Up until now, they have kept their financials on a hand-written ledger. In the pic below you can see JRC members Rich Katz and Beth Lange giving Kakaire and John Bosco a tutorial on Excel spreadsheets. We all hope this will provide a much-needed boost to their office support.

In keeping with the spirit of interfaith coexistence, we visited the nearby Nankusi Mosque for Sabbath services after lunch. We were received by the Muslim community with incredible graciousness; we brought them welcome and blessings from the Jewish community and I offered a brief D’var Torah for the occasion. Afterwards, virtually every member of the community came up to us, shook our hands, and wished us “Salaam Aleikum.” (The pic below shows Hannah Gelder with Elaine and Kelsey Waxman outfitted in their hijabs for the occasion).

We’ll be attending the Abayudayah Ugandan Jewish community for Shabbat morning services on Saturday as well as a local Anglican Christian Church this Sunday. (I like to call this the Interfaith Sabbath Hat Trick…)

Today was another full day for our group. It was completely devoted to a visit to the Foundation for the Development of Needy Communities (FDNC) – an NGO that JRC visted three years ago during our first Africa delegation.

In April 2005 JRC was the first group hosted by FDNC, on a trip made in collaboration with American Jewish World Service. (You can read excerpts from my travel journal on the JRC website). The visit was a transformational one for us – and we just knew that whenever we returned to Africa we would meet again with our friends at FDNC. Indeed, several members of our current delegation were part of the original visit in 2005. (That’s us above in a pic taken today: from left to right: Debbie Wolen, me, Elaine Waxman, FDNC founder Samuel Watalatsu, Robert Israelite and Dan Litoff).

I’ll put it simply: if anyone asks you for a definition of “sustainable development,” just point to FDNC. Through Samuel’s inspired leadership, FDNC has grown into a model of self-reliance and grassroots sustainable development for the most impoverished communities of Eastern Uganda. They are particularly adept at developing strategies that promote community empowerment in the critical areas of vocational training, women’s rights, health/AIDS awareness and music/dance education.

During our first visit, we stayed for a week in the FDNC vocational school located in Nantandome Village, an impoverished rural area not far from Mbale. Living and working in this environment had a profound effect on our group. Among other things, we helped with construction of a classroom – we well recalled how painstaking it was to mix the cement for the mortar. Water had to be hauled in jerry cans from a river half a mile away and the mud bricks were made by hand and baked in the sun.

Just three short years later, the transformation of the area is profound. The classrooms of the school are complete and the grounds are beautifully landscaped. They are currently being served by numerous volunteers (we met teenagers on an AJWS service program as well as interns from as far away as Spain and Japan). The school no longer has to haul their water in from the river – they now have large tanks that collect rain water. They also have an ingenious brick making device that makes mud bricks quickly that require a minimum of mortar.

FDNC is clearly flourishing, serving many more students from the surrounding districts and they are currently in the midst of building a new headquarters for their operations in Mbale. It was deeply inspiring for us to witness the fruits of their labors – and how powerfully they have impacted their community.

In the morning we toured the vocational classes, which include hairdressing, computer skills, tailoring and masonry/carpentry. We also visited with an inspiring new educational program for special needs children (above) which is virtually unprecedented in Uganda. (The writing on the board in back of the children reads “Disability is not Inability.”) We also made a special donation of supplies to the school, which included some hula hoops courtesy of the Waxmans. (Below you can see FDNC vocational school director Walter Urek-Wun trying one out).

In the afternoon we visited the village of Wapando, one of the many nearby communities served by FDNC (bottom pic). They received our group joyfully, singing songs and dancing with us – and we reciprocated with a few rousing rounds of “Oseh Shalom.” They also cooked and served us a full lunch, an almost overwhelmingly generous gesture under the circumstances.

Our day ended back at the vocational school, where young people from the FDNC brass band and a traditional dance group performed for us for over two hours as the sun set behind them. Children and families from the area turned out in droves for the occasion as did numerous volunteers and we all helped cheer the performers on. By the end of a cathartic day, we were virtually spent – and deeply moved by what can be accomplished by people so thoroughly devoted to their community.

Tomorrow we’re going to spend the day with our good friends from the Mirembe Kowamera interfaith fair trade coffee coop. There’s much more to come…

Tomorrow I’ll be traveling, along with 25 other JRC members, on our congregation’s second service trip to Africa. I am immensely proud of JRC for organizing this effort, which reflects our deep and growing commitment to global service work in general and to addressing the HIV/AIDS pandemic in particular.

From July 7- 15 we will be in Rwanda hosted by WE-ACTx, an important Kigali-based NGO that seeks to increase women’s and children’s access to HIV testing, care, treatment, education and care at the grassroots level. In particular, WE-ACTx has done inspirational work in helping survivors of genocidal rape and violence, focusing its efforts on empowering HIV-postive women and girls to take charge of their lives and become leaders in the fight against AIDS.

Our trip was inspired in large part through our congregation’s relationship with Dr. Mardge Cohen (above), a woman’s care specialist who worked for many years at the Cook County Hospital in Chicago and is one of the primary founders of WE-ACTx. Mardge is a longtime friend of JRC and was pivotal in helping us make the connection to Rwandan efforts to address the HIV/AIDS pandemic. We have learned a great deal from Mardge over the years and are thrilled that we will now have the opportunity to bear witness to her work. (Here’s a great, extensive Chicago Tribune article about Mardge and her efforts in Rwanda).

In addition to volunteering at the clinic in a variety of capacities, we will observe the work being done in Rwanda to heal from the very deep wounds of the 1994 genocide and learn about the ways in which Rwandan society continues to work to overcome tribal differences to create a viable future for their people.

From July 15-23, we will be in Uganda, visiting old friends we made from JRC’s last service trip in 2005. Our home base will be the town of Mbale and we will be volunteering once again with the Federation for the Development of Needy Communities – an NGO devoted to the sustainable development of communities in and around the rural area of Natandome. We will also visit the Mirembe Kowamera Jewish/Muslim/Christian Fair Trade Coffee Co-op with which JRC has partnered for many years. (We are hoping to be able to participate ourselves in the upcoming coffee harvest). Our itinerary will also include a Shabbat visit to the Abayudayah Ugandan Jewish community, with whom we also had the pleasure of visiting three years ago.

Among the many things that will make this trip so special is the significant participation of JRC’s young people (including my son Jonah). I am especially happy that they will have dedicated time to spend with young Rwandans (focusing, inevitably enough, on computer skills). All in all, it promises to be a memorable and powerful July. I plan to blog about our experiences as they occur so please plan to drop in and visit regularly over the next few weeks…

If you are reading the news about recent global crises and you’re feeling overwhelmed and impotent, I’ve always found that actually doing something seems to help allay my feelings of helplessness.

To help aid victims of Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, I’m encouraging donations through the International Development Enterprises. IDE Myanmar opened in 2004 and is one of the few organizations that is doing both relief and development work in all of the affected areas and also has government permission to go into them. Donations to IDE Myanmar will be used for relief aid to survivors of the cyclone in the Irrawaddy Delta region, many of whom have no shelter, food or fuel. Most critically, IDE will initially focus on providing immediate relief but will also plan for rebuilding communities to be self sufficient in the long-term.

On a wider front, Avaaz.org is organizing a campaign to deliver the following petition to G8, UN and EU leaders to respond to the growing world food crisis::

We call on you to take immediate action to address the world food crisis by mobilizing emergency funding to prevent starvation, removing perverse incentives to turn food into biofuels and managing financial speculation, and to tackle the underlying causes by ending harmful trade policies and investing massively in sustainable agricultural productivity in developing nations.

(For important background on the food crisis, I recommend this excellent NY Times editorial.)

The revolutionary documentary television series 4REAL takes Cameron Diaz, Mos Def, Joaquin Phoenix, Eva Mendes, Casey Affleck, K’NAAN, M.I.A. and Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers to economically depressed communities around the world in countries including Brazil, Peru, Liberia and Haiti and hooks them up with youth leaders affecting change for their people. Hosted by Sol Guy, the show addresses issues such as poverty, the environment, health and wellness, children’s and indigenous rights, drugs and violence.

The series is not currently airing in the U.S. but judging from the many clips available on the website the episodes seem engaging and thought-provoking as they portray the daily struggles within these communities and the emerging heroes making a tremendous impact even when it means putting their own lives at risk. It also provides a chance to see celebs, sans paparazzi, demonstrating true compassion as they embark on these rugged journeys.

4REAL premiered on Canadian MTV earlier this month and is being broadcast globally on National Geographic Channels International (not including Canada, U.S., and U.K.) in 166 countries and 35 languages. The 4REAL project has expanded from a TV show into an online global community, educational resources and a foundation.

I truly hope they will broadcast the episodes here in the U.S. This is exactly the kind of stuff MTV should be showing — positive messages coming out of oppressed communities and youth working towards something other than extravagant cribs. For real!

Watch the clips on the 4REAL website.

If you’re looking for a meaningful way to celebrate Earth Day 2008, here’s an inspiring project worthy of your support. Taka ni Pato (“Trash is Cash”) is an income-generating, solid waste management and recycling project that removes more than 2000 tons of trash each year from a slum in Kenya.

More than 700,000 people live in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, which is large as NYC’s Central Park, yet lacks basic government services such as trash removal, sewage, and clean water. Through Taka ni Pato, however, garbage is becoming a resource in Kibera. TNP promotes solid waste management and public awareness about recycling, and creates jobs for youth that collect trash. At present, TNP engages more than 100 young people, providing them with the tools necessary to clean up their communities, creating a healthier environment while generating income for individual economic development.

If you’d like to support TNP in their efforts to create a more environmentally and economically sustainable community, click here. $25 will buy two shovels and a rake for clean ups; $75 buys a wheel barrel for transporting trash; $100 helps pay rent for land used to sort and store recyclable materials.

You should also know that TNP is but one of many important initiatives sponsored by Carolina for Kiberia – an amazing NGO run out of the University of North Carolina that was named a Time Magazine and Gates Foundation “Hero of Global Health.”

Make a difference this Earth Day! Anyone out there have a favorite environmental effort they’d like to share?

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here tonight, and how very delighted I am to see you expressing your concern about the issues that will be discussed tonight by turning out in such large numbers. I also want to say that I consider it a great honor to share this program with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi Heschel, some of the distinguished leaders and personalities of our nation. And of course it’s always good to come back to Riverside Church. Over the last eight years, I have had the privilege of preaching here almost every year in that period, and it is always a rich and rewarding experience to come to this great church and this great pulpit.

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement, and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance. For we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns, this query has often loomed large and loud: “Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent?” “Peace and civil rights don’t mix,” they say. “Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people?” they ask. And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church — the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate — leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides. Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans.

Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?” and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957, when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes, I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath –
America will be!

Now it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read “Vietnam.” It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that “America will be” are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1954.^* And I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances.

But even if it were not present, I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me, the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men — for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

Finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place, I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood. Because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned, especially for His suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them. This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls “enemy,” for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1954 — in 1945 rather — after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination and a government that had been established not by China — for whom the Vietnamese have no great love — but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all of this was presided over by United States influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem’s methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.

So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation’s only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.

Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call “fortified hamlets.” The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers.

Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call “VC” or “communists”? What must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of “aggression from the North” as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will not have a part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again, and then shore it up upon the power of a new violence?

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French Commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which could have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again. When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered.

Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva Agreement concerning foreign troops. They remind us that they did not begin to send troops in large numbers and even supplies into the South until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred, or rather, eight thousand miles away from its shores.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called “enemy,” I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and dealt death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the hearts of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.

Unquote.

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.

I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

• Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
• Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.
• Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.
• Four: Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government.
• Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement. [sustained applause]

Part of our ongoing [applause continues], part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary. Meanwhile [applause], meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service, we must clarify for them our nation’s role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. [sustained applause] I am pleased to say that this is a path now chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. [applause] Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. [applause] These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing.

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality [applause], and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing “clergy and laymen concerned” committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. [sustained applause] So such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.

It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” [applause] Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. [applause]

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. [sustained applause]

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. [applause] War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy [applause], realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions.

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low [Audience:] (Yes); the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.”

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I’m not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: “Let us love one another (Yes), for love is God. (Yes) And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. . . . If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.” Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: “Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.” Unquote.

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood — it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.”

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message — of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever `twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper, yet `tis truth alone is strong
Though her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace. If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. [sustained applause]