by Larry Kaufman
On behalf of the Just Congregations Healthcare Team
at Beth Emet - The Free Synagogue, Evanston, IL

When I'm called upon to prepare divrei Torah, my usual procedure is to look at the parasha and try to extract a message that will establish its relevance to my hearers or readers.  But for this foray into Biblical explication, the procedure had to be recalibrated.  I was invited to the bimah this past Shabbat to talk about the work of my congregation's Just Congregations Healthcare Team, and had to work backwards from its message to the sedrah.

Fortunately, the parasha was Pinchas, so the quandary dissipated. Pinchas not only deals directly with healthcare, beginning as it does with the end of a plague that has killed 24,000 Israelites, but it also stands out as a manifesto for taking action and standing up for one's rights, along with other parallels to our work as a Just Congregation. Now, since other Reform congregations and other faith communities share our concern, I invite others to latch onto our cause on its merits, if not on its connection to Pinchas.

As the parasha opens, our ancestors are still wandering in the wilderness, paralleling the economic wilderness which heightens our concern about healthcare and healthcare reform. Our congregations would at any time be concerned about millions of Americans without medical insurance - and 14,000 more losing it every day as it vanishes with their jobs -- al achat kama v'kama, how much more so are we concerned when the Jew in the next pew, and others of our friends and neighbors, are jobless and thus plunged into that coverage vacuum.

Without Moses or Joshua to lead us out of the wilderness, we have turned to Jonah - not the Jonah of the whale, but Rabbi Jonah Pesner, who has one whale of a mission in heading the Reform Movement's Just Congregations initiative, guiding Reform congregations to apply the principles of community organizing to the expressed needs of their communities.Rabbi Pesner's visit to Beth Emetlast year gave impetus to our Just Congregations process -- sharing stories, listening, and responding to specific cases when we can, but also seeking cures for the underlying causes through coalition efforts -- as our siddur suggests, joining hands with others and marching together.

Our Just Congregations stalwarts interviewed over one hundred Beth Emet members with a central question:What keeps you up at night? Among the pervasive concerns, health issues were a prime driver for congregants' insomnia: access to affordable providers, to social services, to 24/7.care for an elderly parent, to solutions for replacing the health insurance that disappeared along with their lost jobs.

If dozens of our congregants tell stories like these, think of the many more we haven't reached, or who have been reticent, and if these situations prevail in such numbers in our congregation, think about the prevalence of similar problems in the greater community. The situation mandates action; to know exactly what to do, we seek guidance both from the Torah, and from congregants who share our concerns.

We come to Pinchas remembering that the previous week's episode in the Biblical narrative closed as an enraged Pinchas summarily executed Zimri and his Midianite lover Cozbi, for publicly flaunting their idolatrous liaison. Now, as the new sedrah begins, Pinchas and the community are rewarded for his zealotry in upholding God's word.

The Rabbis are troubled by Pinchas taking matters into his own hands rather than following due process, but God's verdict in this case is clear -- in extreme circumstances, you seize the moment, and stamp out a dangerous situation before it spreads.Pinchas comes down to us as a meritorious symbol of zealotry, a positive role model for taking prompt action.

God now instructs Moses to do what God often instructs Moses to do when things get slow - take a census, or to use today-speak, compile a database.The people have some challenges ahead of them, as they get ready to take possession of their promised land, and it's important to know what and who their resources are.Our team has been working to take a census of our resources, to identify the people in our congregation who need help with health-related issues, the people who can provide help or at least access to it, and the social activists who can connect us to coalitions seeking to repair a broken system. The Reform movement, through our Religious Action Center and its coalition partners, is already on record as favoring a single payer solution, but ready to support lesser remedies that include a public option.The important thing is that we put the needs of people ahead of those of insurance companies.

We have invited the congregation to an open meeting in the interest of census and consensus - the two-way sharing of information, to learn what's on the mind of our concerned participants, and to hear suggestions from a panel of experts on affordable insurance, low-cost medical care, available social services ,and political action for improving the U.S. healthcare system.This will create a platform for deciding what to do next.

That platform will be built on the lesson extracted from part three of Pinchas, the tale of the daughters of Zelophehad.Living in a society where men owned all the real estate, the five brotherless sisters come to Moses to assert their right to inherit their father's property,

Moses consults with God, and the sisters prevail, not onlysecuring their own inheritance but establishing the ongoing right of women to inherit.Tradition says the favorable verdict was a direct outcome of the Z girls' proper presentation of Talmudic arguments - but the point we derive is the importance of standing up for one's rights, even, maybe especially, when they seem counter to the status quo.

The parasha continues with Godonce again sending Moses to a mountain-top, this time to view the promised land that Moses will not enter. Weary and too-often challenged, Moses reminds God of the need for succession planning, and the orderly designation of a new leader.Clearly he is now ready to fade off into the sunset.Moses's condition reminds us that we Jews are the fastest aging segment of the American population, making health care reform a parochial and personal issue as well as an expression of our universalistic concern with social justice.

In sum, Pinchas teaches us to be zealous in doing the right thing at the right time, to end a plague that menaces our community. It reminds us to start by tallying our own resources so we can move forward effectively. The daughters of Zelophehad role-model the need to speak up, to assert the right to affordable access to care, and coverage, for every member of our community and our society.As individuals, as congregations, and as coalition partners, we have to take our case to the highest levels:making sure our representatives in government hear our views, joining with our Reform movement leadership and our partners in other faith-based communities, in traveling out of the wilderness to a promised land of health care and social justice for all Americans, struggling or secure, young or old, employed or unemployed.

We are not only a Just Congregation, but also a just congregation, and our values demand that we be rodfei tzedek, pursuers of justice.We invite you to join your hands with ours as we march out of the healthcare wilderness.

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