The Morning After: Sustaining Social Change

By LEONARD FEIN

One cheer for mitzvah work. A real and sustained cheer. The world is made more gentle by the kindness of strangers, and congregations that create opportunities for their members to engage in acts of kindness deserve praise.

Still, there’s more than kindness to the mission of a congregational social action committee. There is, specifically, the work of justice. That is almost invariably more contentious, less satisfying, murkier than the straightforward stuff of feeding the hungry, visiting the sick, comforting the bereaved and the like. But if we are serious about tikunning the olam, there’s no way of avoiding the need to go beyond the retail amelioration of misfortune, to a wholesale confrontation with the systemic issues that so often give rise to misfortune. Yet the leap from acts of kindness to the pursuit of justice is rarely attempted in the congregational context, whether because of lack of imagination or fear of falling. Justice? That’s for sermons, it’s for the bimah, not the pew.

Healthcare is as good an example as any. The American system of health care is, plainly, broken. Too many people are uninsured, care is effectively rationed according to income, outcomes are far too dependant on race and class. (Reminder: The U.S. is the only industrialized nation that lacks a universal healthcare system.)  But the problem a synagogue has in addressing the healthcare crisis is that while the crisis itself is widely acknowledged, the remedies are not. In fact, the remedies are politically radioactive. Yet people come to the synagogue (if and when they do) in search of an “oasis moment,” a restful parenthesis in the chaos of the real world. Besides, the range of opinion in any particular congregations is as broad as the Red Sea, and parting those waters, absent a miracle, is no small thing. Why in the world mix politics with religion?

Why? Because the path to justice leads directly to the halls of government and because we pride ourselves on being dorshei tzedek, rodfei tzedek — seekers and pursuers of justice. And because very many people are suffering and will continue to suffer if we take a pass.

Wanted: Nachshon, who took the first step back then. In Boston, Nachshon has a new name: The Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, a collection of some 70 churches, synagogues, and other community organizations that for 10 years have been fighting the good fight(s) in concert. In the member synagogues, the social action committee is not only the preserve of a handful of activists; it is, de facto, the entire congregation. GBIO has campaigned for and won programs for affordable housing and, most recently, it’s successfully pressed the state legislature to vastly expand the state’s responsibility for the healthcare of its residents.

There are inspiring examples, and there are cautionary tales galore: Imagine a synagogue being challenged to mobilize on behalf of the wages and working conditions of people who clean office buildings late into the night, and imagine — not much of a leap — that some of the owners of those buildings are members of that synagogue, perhaps even members of its board. (And maybe even the rabbi’s contract is up for renewal. The American Jewish landscape is littered with the remains of rabbis who have insisted on connecting the pulpit and the public square.)

In my own work (1996-2000) at the Reform movement’s Commission on Social Action , no problem was more vexing to me than what I called “the morning after” problem — what to do with the energies that had been harnessed on mitzvah day, how to move from painting a room in a derelict apartment to a sustained effort at creating better housing. But in the last half-dozen years, urged on and guided by a small group of obstinate people, the barren wasteland I encountered and, alas, bequeathed to my successor, has been lit up. Both the Religious Action Center and the Jewish Funds for Justice are deeply involved not only in spreading nationwide the gospel of social justice in the synagogue but also in teaching congregants the technique of breathing life into that gospel.

Inevitably, some people — may they be blessed — will continue to specialize in g’milut chessed, acts of loving kindness. But here and there, the very real obstacles notwithstanding, some are also beginning to make a difference in the world of public policy. Ken yirbu — may their numbers multiply and may they, too, be blessed.