Jews For Justice In Darfur
By CBSNews.com's Jennifer Hoar
On its Web page for Darfur activism, the Jewish Community Center of Manhattan prominently features the statement: "Genocide is a Jewish issue." The profound suffering that was and is so personal to Jews as a result of the Holocaust would seem to explain much of, if not all of, that sentiment.
There's actually more to it.
There's more to why an estimated 7,000 people attended the Darfur Rally in Washington through the Manhattan JCC alone. There's more to why the Cleveland Jewish Community re-scheduled its once-yearly "Super Sunday" fundraiser so that members could board buses to D.C. in the name of Darfur. There's more to why two rabbinical students took a red-eye flight from Los Angeles to attend the rally yesterday afternoon and lobby Senators today for action in Darfur.
What more is there besides "never again" allowing the decimation of millions at the behest of a cruel regime?
In a word: tradition. Because, for Jews, "saving one life is saving the world."
"The call to social justice is an important voice in Jewish tradition," said Rabbi Michael Strassfeld of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism in New York.
That call is certainly an old one, too, as it originated in the Jews' slavery in Egypt about 3,500 years ago. What matters today, though, is that the experience is one that continues to resonate with Jews and their sense of obligation to "treat strangers with compassion," as Strassfeld put it.
"We're called to remember that experience [of slavery and Exodus] and be humbled by it even when it no longer oppresses us," Strassfeld said.
What's more, with the proximity of the celebration of Passover to yesterday's rally, the remembrance-compassion theme was very much at the forefront of the Jewish consciousness.
Arona Schreiber, one of the members of Rabbi Strassfeld's synagogue who came to Washington by bus and held a magic marker-scrawled sign at yesterday's rally, spoke to that.
Schreiber recalled a Passover reflection she heard about the slavery of the Jews. For her, it intensified and "increased the theme of the importance of freedom," she said.
That motif, in conjunction with her own 1960s civil rights spirit, motivated Schreiber to take a stand against the atrocities being perpetrated against citizens of Darfur by the government and its militia.
For her part, Carol Anshien, who stood alongside Schreiber at the rally, emphasized the mantra of social action as it was preached by formative twentieth-century Jewish theologian, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.
"He used to say, 'I am praying with my feet,'" Anshien recalled of Heschel's metaphor that action – physically moving to effect change for others — is valuable worship.
Anshien was not the only one moved by Heschel's words. In fact, a number of synagogues and Jewish organizations that coordinated trips to the Darfur rally quoted Heschel on their Web sites.
"In a free society where terrible wrongs exist, some are guilty, all are responsible," it said on Web sites ranging from that of the Jewish Theological Seminary to that of the Temple Beth Sholom of Smithtown, NY.
What became apparent at the Darfur rally was that for Jews, applying Heschel's words means so much more than preventing another Holocaust.
The Holocaust is, without question, the most direct, and visceral, association for the Jewish community when the term "genocide" comes up. And, yes, Jews still ache that there was silence when lives could have been saved during World War II.
Yet Strassfeld explained that the concern now "needs to be for the universal, from the particular." That is, the lessons of the Holocaust, not to mention those of the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, need to benefit not only those who are suffering in Darfur right now but anyone, anywhere else in the future, who might suffer as well.
What it really comes down to, Eliza Feller from the Beth-am synagogue in Baltimore said, is "basic Jewish values: looking out for your neighbor."
By Jennifer Hoar