As the Director of Education for Jewish World Watch, I spend a large portion of my time talking to adults and students about genocide and mass atrocities, the unrest and fragility across the globe, our obligations as Jews, and the need for all of us to participate in the great but weighty mitzvah of tikkun olam, healing our broken world.
Just weeks before the High Holy Days is the perfect time to talk about these topics and the Torah provides the perfect road map to start our discussion. In the following paragraphs, I will do three things. First, I will teach a little Torah to explain why the JWW mission is both a humanitarian and essentially a Jewish one. Second, I will tell you just a little about what is happening around the world. And, third, I will let you know some of the things that JWW is doing with help from partners such as yourselves.
We need to start at the beginning – the birthday of the world. My favorite midrash about creation is that God made the first being, Adam, whose name comes from “adama” or earth, by gathering all of the soils of the earth- the white sands, the red clay, the black loam, the yellow silt and the rich brown peat- to create the first being. In so doing, God created a being that was inextricably linked to all others, no matter which of the colors of the soil predominated.
Next, God was explicit in his Torah about how all beings must be treated. You may know that we are told twice in the Torah that we must love God. Do you also know that at least 36 times the Torah tells us that we must love, protect and care for both the neighbor and the stranger? The distinction between these two concepts- the neighbor and the stranger- is an important one. The neighbor is a person who you can recognize as a fellow traveler and potential ally. Even if you do not know your neighbors, they seem familiar and not at all scary. When they need help, it is not hard to offer a hand.
The stranger is different. The stranger may look very different from you and me. The stranger is an unknown with customs, ideas, life experiences that are foreign and unimaginable. The stranger is not predictable. I do not know what she will eat, I do not recognize how he speaks, I cannot imagine what their day looks like.
And yet- God exhorts us to treat the neighbor and the stranger alike. Why? Because we are all alike, created from the same composite soils that were then spread across the globe. It is not easy to reach out arms to the stranger, and sometimes not even so for the neighbor, but God instructs us that this is a mitzvah that we cannot ignore. Over and over again- 36 times- twice Chai- the Torah tells us to take care of those who we do not know. We are asked to remember that we, too, were strangers in the land of Egypt, that we should be like Abraham who ran willingly from his tent to greet three strangers and prepare a feast for them, that others like Ruth should be welcomed into the community of Jews without distinction.
Our God does not stop there. We are expressly told in Leviticus tzedek tzedek tirdof –– “justice, justice, you must pursue”. We are directed hochai’ach tochee’ach –– “you shall rebuke” – that we must speak up, to be a social critic when we see that people are treating others wrongly. Such criticism is viewed as an expression of care for others. And, the words which are the motto of Jewish World Watch: lo ta’amod al dam rei’echa – “do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor”- show that God expects us to be accountable, to be responsible, and to be proactive.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, formerly the chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, contrasts the opening chapters of Genesis with those of Exodus. He says,
The opening chapters of Genesis are about failures of responsibility. Confronted by God with their sins, Adam blames Eve, Eve blames the serpent and Cain asks, “am I my brother’s keeper?” Even Noah, called “righteous, perfect in his generations,” has no effect on his contemporaries. By contrast, at the beginning of Exodus, Moses takes responsibility. When he sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, he intervenes. When he sees two Hebrews fighting, he intervenes. In Midian, when he sees shepherds abusing the daughters of Jethro, he intervenes.
Moses, brought up as an Egyptian, could have avoided each of these confrontations, yet he did not. He is the supreme case of one who says: “when I see a wrong, if no one else is prepared to act, I will.” Moses, who led the Hebrews out of Egypt and helped them in the transition from slavery to freedom, illustrates three of the basic tenets of our faith: we are free, we are responsible, and together we can and must, change the world.
And that leads me to my second topic: the state of the world. No matter what your politics are, no-one can deny that our world today is a very broken place, with millions crying- “Where are the people who will help?” and “Where are the peoples of the world who care when we need them?”
Of all peoples, we Jews can understand this cry. We who claim the Holocaust as our heritage, we who cried “where was the world when this was happening to us?” Even the word “genocide” is of Jewish making. It did not exist before World War Two. Raphael Lemkin, a young Polish Jew who unsuccessfully tried to persuade his family to escape Poland before it was too late, lost his 47 family members to the Nazis. Distraught, angry, and, a lawyer, the young Lemkin understood that the Shoah was a crime without a name and could not properly be addressed, fought, legislated against and punished unless it was distinguished from other acts of inhumanity. He settled on the word genocide as an amalgam of Greek and Latin word roots “genus” meaning a group of people and “cidere or cide” meaning killing. The specific kind of killing was different because it was done with specific intent to destroy a people and their culture; to wipe a group from the face of the earth simply because of who they are, what they look like, what tribe they belong to, what god they worship.
Despite the optimistic proclamations in the wake of the Holocaust that this type of egregious conduct must never again take place, the world has witnessed too many additional genocides taking the lives of Cambodians, Serbs, Rwandans, Sudanese and now the Rohingya and Uyghurs. Too many lives lost and too many who survive as a lost generation, living unnatural lives in refugee camps where skills are unused, talents untapped, minds uneducated and hopes squashed.
Today, more than 70 million people live fragile existences, displaced from their homes by genocide, war and mass atrocities. 70 million people is an abstract number but let me help make it real. 70 million people is the combined population of these 12 states: California, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Alaska and Hawaii. Can you imagine what the United States would look like if all of these states emptied as their residents ran for their lives? Can you imagine in an instant having everything that you own, everything that you do, everything that contributes to your identity taken away?
This is the case with the Darfuri people of Sudan, whose genocide 15 years ago provoked Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis of blessed memory to ask his Valley Beth Shalom congregation on Rosh Hashanah to look beyond their personal issues, to see beyond the walls of the synagogue, their homes, and our country, to become a Jewish “world watch”, a “commission of caring men and women” organized to educate themselves about the world.
Rabbi Schulweis said:
To be a Jew is to think big.
To be a Jew is to think globally.
To be a Jew is to act globally.
To be a Jew is to love God, who is global.
And Rabbi Schulweis said:
We must know; to know in order to do. And we must do in order to change
the world. We know how essential raising our voice is. We know that
silence is lethal and feigned laryngitis, wicked.
And yet, fifteen years later, the Darfuris are still living in refugee camps. And they are not alone. South Sudan, the world’s newest country, has been bleeding its people into refugee camps in Uganda to escape the man-made famine created by constant warfare. Syria, Yemen, Burundi, Cameroon, the DRC – all of these countries are imperiled. The Rohingya of Myanmar are the target of the globe’s newest genocide, where more than one million people have been displaced, rendered stateless, homeless, are unable to work, incapable of schooling their children, and not permitted to live without fear. Add to this the Uyghurs, the ethnic Muslim population of China whose treatment parallels that of the Holocaust atrocities. More than 2 million Uyghurs have been subjected to mass arbitrary detention in what are being called “re-education camps”, separated from their families, cremated in mass executions or killed for their organs.
The Pulitzer prize winning author and former Vietnamese refugee, Viet Thannh Nguyen, recounts the experience he knows first-hand:
To become a refugee is to know, inevitably, that the past is not only marked by the passage of time, but by loss – the loss of loved ones, of countries, of identities, of selves.
He continues:
Keeping people in refugee camps is punishing people who have committed
No crime except trying to save their own lives and the lives of their loved ones. The refugee camp belongs to the same inhuman family as the internment camp, the concentration camp, the death camp. The camp is where we keep those who we do not see as fully being human, and if we do not actively seek their death in most cases, we also often do not actively seek to restore many of them to the life that they had before, the life we have ourselves.
What can be done for these strangers ultimately must be a matter of the political will of countries not our own. But that does not mean that we can stand idly by the blood of our neighbor. It does not mean that we can fail to pursue justice or remain mute in the face of unspeakable horrors and appalling personal destruction.
Which brings me to my third and last point: what is Jewish World Watch doing with your help as our partners here in Los Angles and thousands more throughout our country? I am proud to say that we are doing many things to help the lives of fragility lived by our refugee neighbors and strangers so far from us. In Chad, where the Darfuris fled, food rations have been reduced to the point where people live for an entire day on the number of calories I consume in my morning chai latte. To help, we are teaching “perma-gardening”, a technique that allows a bounty of crops to survive little rain and poor soil conditions.
In Uganda, the new home for hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese, we have dug water wells to prevent death and disease from polluted streams and lack of availability of sufficient sources of water.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) which is not experiencing genocide but where mass atrocities abound with people are living in chaos with rape as a method of control and children forced to fight in militias and mine for the minerals that power our computers, cars and phones, we are taking a variety of measures on multiple fronts. First, we are partnering with 2018 Nobel Peace Prize recipient and Congolese gynecologist Dr. Denis Mukwege to do something amazing. Dr. Mukwege’s team walks for miles into the bush to reach “last mile communities” in remote areas of eastern DRC to treat survivors of the sexual violence utilized by armed actors as a weapon of war. Woman are given surgery for genital repairs needed after rapes, psych-social counseling and other medical procedures such as treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. These villages are so remote that without the rapid response missions, no treatment would be available at all.
Also in the DRC, we are keeping children in school who otherwise would be working in the mines, and rescuing and rehabilitating former child soldiers through the courageous and life-risking efforts of our partner, Murhabazi Namegabe, who goes into militia strongholds to negotiate directly for the release of children from ages 5-17 who are serving as cooks, messengers, spies, sex-slaves and gun carriers. Our Sons of Congo program conducted through our partner, Generation Hope, uses scripture to teach Congolese men how to be better fathers, husbands and humans and to stem the use of sexual violence which has made life so difficult for DRC’s women and children.
In Bangladesh where almost 1 million Myanmari (Burma) Rohingyas are living in stateless exile, unwanted by both Bangladeshis and Burmese, we have constructed semi-permanent structures to replace the tents that would have washed away during monsoon season.
In Syria, our cargo ship containers filled with medical supplies are carried in stealth through perilous land directly to hospitals where children once bled out and died for want of tourniquets and other medical supplies. And for the Uyghurs of China, the Yazidi victims of ISIS brutality, and the people of Yemen who we cannot access, we are urging legislative interventions to make their lives somewhat less unbearable.
We do not do this alone. We do it with the help of Jews and non-Jews across our country who advocate for legislation to protect the displaced and for resolutions to pressure other countries to reconsider their acts of inhumanity. We do this with the dollars raised by Bar and Bat Mitzvah students, from public and private school students, from those young and old who each year Walk to End Genocide, and from those who give to Jewish World Watch as one of the
charities they deem worthy of assistance.
On the High Holy Days, we wonder aloud who will live and who will die. Perhaps you, like me, will also wonder who will be left homeless, who without sufficient food and water, who without access to medical supplies, who without the means to obtain an education, who without hope of ever reclaiming the lives they have lost. We do not, however, have to wonder about who will care about those so affected. We know that you, as Jews and humanitarians, care about these crises and with you as our partners, we will continue to try to alleviate some of the suffering in the world. Why must we do this? Why for them when there are so many ills that need our attention here at home? It is not “either/or” but “both/and”. We do this because our Torah tells us we must. We do it because God expects this from us. We do it because we are Jews.
In closing, I wish that your High Holy Days are meaningful, that your fast is an easy one, and that your sukkah remains free from rainfall, no matter how much we need it, at least during meal times.
Shana tova.