by Albert Vorspan
President Obama embodies the impossible dreams of generations of Americans. Indeed, he represents the golden harvest which we gather today, but it is the product of all those who planted the seeds in the hard, sometimes bloody, ground under constant duress for countless decades.

Obama has said that he stands on the shoulders of that great coalition of decency which prepared that soil and nurtured the faith. Central to that coalition was the alliance of blacks and Jews who marched, organized, did the heavy political lifting, provided their votes and streamed into jails to protest segregation. This Reform Jewish Movement, I can testify, played a central role in mobilizing the conscience of the Jewish community and partnering with the black leadership to transform America.

I spent much time in the Deep South in those years, trying to strengthen inter-religious and inter-racial coalitions of change. I will never forget my visits to Mississippi where I met with a brave rabbi, Charles Martinband, and an equally courageous white newspaper editor, P.D. East. In their homes, I met a remarkable group of black intellectuals and leaders--college presidents, doctors, teachers, preachers. Not one of those folks had ever been permitted to vote. Not one of them ever expected to vote. It staggers me to realize that not only can they vote, their vote has transformed the South and the entire country.

Like many American Jews, I was privileged to know and work with Martin Luther King, Jr. King had a special relationship with American Jews. We contributed generously to the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Committee) because we trusted King, respected the non-violent pursuit of social justice, felt a kinship with the prophetic faith which drive King. We knew that, to King, justice was a seamless web and he cared about the plight of Soviet Jewry, the security of Israel. He denounced anti-Semitism, even from black bigots.

I marched with him throughout the South, including his last demonstration in behalf of sanitation workers in Memphis. Earlier, in 1963, I joined with sixteen Reform rabbis and rushed to St. Augustine, Florida, to challenge racially segregated public accommodations in that historic town. We all ended up in jail; my transgression was sitting down with white and black colleagues in a nice restaurant for lunch. Not only were we arrested, we were subjected to cattle prods for presuming to request non-segregated confinement. The sheriff, to whose tender mercies we were entrusted, was also known as the Grand Kleagle of the KKK.

The demonstrations in the South--and especially the widely televised brutality in Birmingham, Alabama--generated powerful momentum in Washington. The civil rights coalition organized the March on Washington. Black and Jewish agencies spearheaded the effort. Behind the public pronouncements was the extraordinary cooperation of Bayard Rustin, Will Maslow, Arnie Aronson and Rabbi Richard Hirsch, then director of the newly-formed Religious Action Center. The largest civil rights rally in American history will be remembered, justly, for the soaring I Have a Dream oration by Martin Luther King. But I am not the only person in attendance who was profoundly moved by the words of Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a rabbi who had fled Berlin to escape the Nazis:

"When I was the rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime, I learned many things. The most important thing that I learned was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is...Silence."

The prairie fire sweeping America inevitably penetrated the halls of Congress and the White House. The landmark civil rights laws of the U.S., especially the Voting Rights Act adroitly engineered by President Johnson, were drafted by non-governmental civil rights lawyers, working under the Leadership Council for Civil Rights, in the conference room of our organization, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. In both houses of Congress, unprecedented inter-faith coalitions were everywhere, putting the members' feet to the fire. Mobilizing the citizens lobbies and turning up the political heat were Clarence Mitchell, Washington representative of the NAACP, and Joe Rauh, Jr., member of our Commission on Social Action, representing much of the labor movement and much of the Jewish community, including the agencies of Reform Judaism. The giants of the Congress got used to the two lawyers, black and Jewish, so joined at the hip that they were referred to with grudging admiration as the "gold dust twins." Blacks and Jews, then and now, vote closely together, even in 2008 when the majority of white Americans voted otherwise.

The black-Jewish coalition transformed America for everybody. As one who grew up in the Twin Cities when it was known as the capital of anti-Semitism, I know what changed it into a liberal bastion of pluralism, decency and equal opportunity. It was the civil rights revolution, which Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota bravely helped ignite, which brought down the walls of discrimination and, in its sweep, leveled barriers against women, against gays and lesbians, against persons with disabilities. The conscience of America was touched and slowly roused to action, but it has transformed us forever.

The Reform Jewish community played our proud part in writing this history. Today we hail an African-American Chief of State, and our tears join those of millions, of all races throughout the world. We will have occasion to complain in the future and maybe to protest Obama policies because our Movement is not in anybody's pocket. But with our work and with our votes and with our faith in the possibilities of repairing this world, we helped America to overcome the night and witness the rising glow of a new dawn.

Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the RAC, blessed President Obama with a stirring benediction. That was a fitting tribute to the part we played in ushering in this miraculous day. But now comes the hard work, for Obama, and also for the Reform Jewish Movement, joining in an ever-widening coalition of decency, to save America, to heal the planet and to repair God's world.

Albert Vorspan is the Senior Vice-President Emeritus of the Union for Reform Judaism and founding director of the Commission on Social Action. He has authored and co-authored many books including Jewish Dimensions of Social Justice with Rabbi David Saperstein.  

Print

Email

Comment

Comments

Post a comment