“Excuse me, but, can you give me directions from Sinai to Egypt?” Moving from Oppression to Redemption...and BACK again-PART ONE

Here is the problem as I am coming to understand it.

Faith Based Community Organizing (FBCO) which encompasses Congregation Based Community Organizing (CBCO) aims to help communities to generate social change for themselves through establishing and harnessing its own relational power. No one empowers a community to do this, the community finds the power within themselves to generate social change.

This is awesome!! Jewish Congregations are well served by this model. Congregants come to know one another more intimately, more personally through an intensive process of one on one interactions where people share their stories, through house meetings where a shared vision for change is shaped based on the self interest of the members of the congregants, a plan is put in to action, action is taken, success is hopefully achieved.

Many FBCOs are uniting together to harness more relational power and are effective some powerful change communal and systemic changes.

This too is fabulous

The CBCOs (Jewish Congregations) are not signing on

How come? Here is the rub FBCOs and CBCOs are struggling to find a place of shared self-interest. The issues which keep members of FBCOs (often representing lower-middle and lower class communities) up at night are not the same issues which keep members of CBCOs (often representing middle, upper-middle and upper class communities) up at night. To put it plainly, as Jewish communities have made more money, we have shifting our care and concerns away from broader social issues. Quite frankly, we seem to care less about the little guy now that we are not him.

And I am especially struck by this at Passover where we say again and again, remember you were a slave in Egypt. It is central in our liturgy, on our holiday life cycle, in our Torah, and for good reason. Repeatedly we are reminded to not oppress the stranger because we too were strangers because we repeatedly seem to forget.

I am not judging us. This just seems to be an unpretty truth about how Jewish life in America seems to have evolved. And there are individuals who are exceptions (and are exceptional in all that they do) and congregations which are exceptions to the class distinction (I know, shocking, in fact all Jews do not have money) and congregations who have found shared self-interest with other communities and have made huge changes in our social structure. (I am thinking of Temple Israel in Boston, for example, and their work with health care workers because TI members wanted better health care for their parents.)

Here's the question...Torah and “Judaism” as a monolithic voice is pretty clear that we SHOULD care, be invested and fighting these fights. So, I am going to assume this point for now. HOW DO WE GET THERE?

Well, it is certainly not through yelling at people to care more although, that does feel satisfying...and wholly self-defeating.

Here is a burgeoning theory....
1.Generating social change involves personal sacrifice
2.Personal sacrifice...sucks for lack of a better word
3.We make personal sacrifice in spite of its inherent deficiency (the aforementioned sucking) because
1.the benefits of self sacrificing (which must be obvious, direct, and immediate) outweigh the discomfort and inconvenience of the sacrifice
2.the benefits of self sacrificing (which must be obvious, direct, and immediate) for someone else with whom we are in a real relationship outweigh the discomfort and inconvenience of the sacrifice
1.A relationship with a person
2.A relationship with an institution
3.A relationship with God (GASP, yes, a real relational experience of GOD!!)

Members of Jewish communities are totally willing to self-sacrifice. Hell, we do this all the time for the people we love and for ourselves. However, the changes we mak may be social changes, but it does not generally seem to be social-change.

It seems like something like this, we genocide in Darfur to end, for all Americans to receive and education, for everyone to have health care, for people not to die of AIDS, malaria and TB but at the end of the day, we're busy with work and family and carpools and deadlines and pressing emails and returning phone calls in areas of our lives we really value. And honestly, there is only so muchh time in the day, and there is only so much energy to spend. So we send checks when we can and we read the news and bear witness to the world's atrocities while we...well, if you will forgive the expression...stand idly by.

I mean, we worked so hard to get out of Egypt, the be redeemed, to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps, to fight our way to religious and social freedom...can't we just enjoy it for a little while? This is what our lives have become. We worship the gods of luxury and fashion because we love it and it feels good and isn't that ok? How can I love my neighbor as myself if I do not love myself? So we work hard in our jobs which take huge sums of our time because they and we are important. These employments earn us money so we can support ourselves and our loved one. And it is really really hard work. So to keep ourselves going and to recharge when we are burning out we fly off (sending tons of caustic fuel emissions in to the environment) on vacations to far off beautiful Club-Med esque places (where it turns out, many of the workers are being mistreated and used for their slave labor facing horrible choices of working these minimum wage jobs with incredible ill-treatment or a) starving to death or b) sex trafficking) or we go out to a fancy restaurant (where the food is often at the end of a lengthy chain of comprised worker's rights, pretty poor agricultural practice, and some intense and complicated global policies which ultimately look like they benefit third-world developing nations but really are self-serving to US financial gains...) or buy a beautiful new something (often made in a sweatshop) to feel better so we can get up the next day and keep fighting for more money so we can live comfier lives and buy more things to feel better when we work so hard to make more money...

This whole paragraph wants me to go back to bed (in my warm apartment under the down comforter I bought at Target made in China probably by small children subsisting on ten cents a day) and hibernate until global warming destroys the planet.

I sometimes get stuck here at this place feeling overwhelmed and I want to walk away.

But then I think, not caring, for me, is just not an option. Ahhh...the burden of being over informed...my damn intellectual curiosity is destroying my ability to sleep. ;)

See next post for more...I think there is a lot to digest here...I would love love love your comments