Congregation Agudas Israel
February 27, 2013
GNMA Lenten Service
Thank you to Grace United for hosting us for this Lenten Series, to the GNMA for inviting me to speak this morning and to Rev. Windom for sharing his pulpit. My name is Rabbi Philip Weintraub and I lead Congregation Agudas Israel, just a few blocks away on North Street.
I have to say I was a little surprised to be asked to speak at this event. Ash Wednesday, Lent, and Easter are not Jewish traditions. The Hebrew Bible includes three sections, the Torah (Genesis-Deuteronomy), the Prophets, and the Writings, what you would call the Old Testament, although you all have a different order for some of the books than we do, which is something I recently discovered when I decided to read the Christian Bible. At the same time, with our shared biblical heritage we have many traditions in common. While your Lent will end with Easter, during Passover, which begins a few days before and overlaps Easter, we will begin counting the Omer. From the 2nd night of Passover, we count 49 days, 7 weeks of 7 days (per Leviticus 23:15/16) to Shavuot, or what you would call Pentecost, when we celebrate the receiving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai. During that time, similar to the Christian practice of Lent, we consider our actions. While it is not necessarily a time of penance, it is a time for us to improve ourselves, to make changes in how we look at the world and ourselves, to find ways to whittle away our rough edges and make ourselves into our better selves. In this time, some Jews do not shave, go to concerts or schedule weddings, remembering the many Jews that were killed by the Roman persecutions and during the Crusades.
I am glad to stand here before you, to help us, together, think about the beautiful quote from the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. How can we use our faith to, as he said, “hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope?” I was asked to speak about slavery. In America, we, especially white Americans, think that slavery is a relic of the past. We think of it as a tragic history, a blot on the progressive nature of our country. We remember the horrible conditions, the inhumane treatment and we watch movies like Lincoln and think it was all in the past.
I ask for your participation. Raise your hand, call out.
How many people in this room have a smartphone?
A laptop?
A tablet?
Any computer?
Any cell phone?
Do you wear clothing?
Do you wear shoes?
How many of you eat dinner?
If you say yes to any of these things then you have slaves working for you. In our global economy, people farm our food and make our products around the world. While working conditions in this country our regulated, they are not in the same ways around the world. In recent months, we have seen fires and employee deaths that remind us of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911. In Bangladesh, workers in factories burned to death after the doors out were locked to prevent stealing. Clothes produced in those factories were sold by Walmart, Sears and even contractors for the US Marines. Even when companies think their supply chain is ethical and clean, the contractors of the factories that they checked may subcontract to other factories. If Target places an order for 100,000 tshirts, an “ethically approved factory” may take that order even if they can only produce 50,000 shirts. They will then outsource again to other factories and you can end up with a tshirt produced by an 8yr old paid virtually nothing.
The same is true about electronics. In recent weeks, Apple, Samsung, and other companies have “discovered” that Foxconn and other companies in China have used student “internships” to get access to skilled but very cheap labor, lowering the costs of all the devices in your pocket, purse or living room.
This does not even begin to address the human trafficing and sex slavery that happens not just around the world, but in this country. Women, girls and boys are promised a better life elsewhere and then their passports are held hostage until they earn enough to cover their smuggling fees via prostitution. This does not just happen around the world, this happens right here in New York!
Right here in Newburgh, there is gang slavery. A young man or woman enters a gang imagining money, power, sex and quickly finds that leaving is far more difficult that entering, that many of the “benefits” are a mirage, but the consequences, the potential jail time, the crimes are very real.
On the State Department’s website, they have a link called “What is modern slavery?” On this page it speaks in detail about forced labor, sex trafficking, bonded labor, debt bondage among migrant laborers, involuntary domestic servitude, forced child labor, child soldiers and child sex trafficking. We thought the scourge of slavery ended with the Emancipation Proclomation, but it didn’t. We thought it ended with the 13th Amendment, but it didn’t. We thought it ended with the Brown v. Board of Education, but it didn’t. We thought it ended with the Voting Rights Act, but it didn’t.
When I searched my slavery footprint, at the appropriately named slaveryfootprint.org/, I found that 58 slaves work for me. Fifty-eight! You might have less if you don’t have children or tons of electronics!? But 58? How is it possible that in 21st century American there are 58 people that work for me, that I do not know, and yet are enslaved, partially because of me?!
Our Torah, the Bible teaches us about slavery, but its model is very different. It speaks of debt bondage, that if you owe someone more than you can pay off, you can work for them to pay off that debt. Yet there are many conditions on this, one of which is from the reading from Leviticus we just heard. Chapter 35:40-41 says
כְּשָׂכִיר כְּתוֹשָׁב, יִהְיֶה עִמָּךְ; עַד-שְׁנַת הַיֹּבֵל, יַעֲבֹד עִמָּךְ.
| 40 As a hired servant, and as a settler, he shall be with thee; he shall serve with thee unto the year of jubilee. |
וְיָצָא, מֵעִמָּךְ--הוּא, וּבָנָיו עִמּוֹ; וְשָׁב, אֶל-מִשְׁפַּחְתּוֹ, וְאֶל-אֲחֻזַּת אֲבֹתָיו, יָשׁוּב.
| 41 Then shall he go out from thee, he and his children with him, and shall return unto his own family, and unto the possession of his fathers shall he return. |
Unlike the horrendous slavery of American history, biblical slavery required that a person be set free. In the rabbinic/Jewish tradition, many more requirements were put on the slave-supervisor (I can’t say owner, because in the Jewish and biblical tradition, a person can never truly be property). The supervisor had to provide food and clothing to the worker. He had to eventually set him free. In Leviticus, the maximum term is 7 years, although a worker could choose to remain longer, up to the absolute maximum of the Jubilee year, which was every 49 years, so in theory it could be that long, although highly unlikely. When a worker was freed, he/she had to be paid wages for all the work that was done. A worker could not be released with nothing.
So, what do we do with this information? How do we turn this mountain of despair into a stone of hope?
To this, I have a very Jewish answer: Ask a good question!
Isidor I. Rabi, the Nobel laureate in physics who died Jan. 11, was once asked, ''Why did you become a scientist, rather than a doctor or lawyer or businessman, like the other immigrant kids in your neighborhood?''
Dr. Rabi's answer. . .was profound: ''My mother made me a scientist without ever intending it. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: 'So? Did you learn anything today?' But not my mother. She always asked me a different question. 'Izzy,' she would say, 'did you ask a good question today?' That difference - asking good questions -made me become a scientist!''#
To change the world, we have many questions to ask. We have to ask every company, every store, every person:
Where was this made?
Under what conditions?
Was their child labor?
Even as we struggle with our own shrinking paychecks, we may have to be willing to pay a little bit more to ensure that we are not furthering slavery.
We have to write to our congresspeople, call our senators, email the president demanding labels that don’t just say “Made in Bangladesh” but “Made in China with no child labor.”
We need to think about making and buying more things in this country, where we have clear regulations about the number of hours and breaks that are fair, where it is illegal to employ an 8-year old to use a dangerous machine.
We have to vote with our wallets. If we do not like an answer, buy something else!
We have to ask more questions. Whether we buy our clothes at Brooks Brothers or Walmart, Nieman Marcus or Old Navy, we need to be able to know under what conditions are our products manufactured. Ethical issues abound. Is it better for a 12 year old girl in Bangladesh to work in a factory under poor conditions and earn a pittance, when that pittance is more than she would make in even worse conditions? Do we stop producing in those countries, possibly letting more children fall into the sex trade? Those are questions for economists and ministers, ethics experts and all of us. We have to weigh the costs and benefits of our choices and sometimes recognize that no choice will be perfect.
And yet, I have hope. One hundred years ago, factory conditions in this country were abhorrent. Child labor was rampant. We, as Americans, demanded better conditions and we received them. Was that struggle easy? No. But it happened. Unions were formed, government regulated. (Today we struggle with the balance of regulation, but I, personally, would much rather have some stupid regulations than a wild west!)
In this country there are many human rights organizations, many of them with religious backgrounds. They use our biblical traditions to say “Hey, this isn’t right! We need to change things! All people should have access to health care, decent working conditions, jobs!”
They remember the first verses we read this morning, that if your brother has become poor, is unable to work, that you should support him. You should not lend him money at ridiculous rates. You should not give him a mortgage he can never pay back or forgive his second mortgage and refuse to negotiate the first one. (OK, the last line is not in Leviticus, but I think you get the message.)
Our shared religious heritage says that we are not just encouraged to do right by others, but we are required to help those in need. We must stand together to work for the betterment of humankind, not just of the people that look like us, but all people. Hosea 6:8 is one of the most famous prophetic verses. It teaches us
ח הִגִּיד לְךָ אָדָם, מַה-טּוֹב; וּמָה ה' דּוֹרֵשׁ מִמְּךָ, כִּי אִם-עֲשׂוֹת מִשְׁפָּט וְאַהֲבַת חֶסֶד, וְהַצְנֵעַ לֶכֶת, עִם-אֱ-לֹהֶיךָ. {ס}
| 8 It hath been told thee, O man, what is good, and what the LORD doth require of thee: only to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God. {S} |
This is what we were put on Gd’s green earth to do. That is how we hew a stone of hope. We demand action. We make changes. We ask questions.
This is my message for us to day.
לא עליך כל המלאכה לגמור, ולא אתה בן חורין ליבטל.
"He [Rabbi Tarfon] used to say: It is not upon you to complete the task, but you are not free to idle from it.AMEN!
