Putting On My “Going to Prison” Clothes

Thursday, after seeing my two children off to Camp Ramah, I came home and I put on my going to prison clothes. This is something I have not thought about in a while. When I was in Grad School near Boston, once or twice a month on a Sunday I would visit Jeff (not his real name) at Walpole State Prison, about an hour or so south of Boston. One of the saddest things about these visits was seeing the children in (what I came to call) their “Sunday going to prison clothes” visiting their fathers.

Thursday, however, I was not going to visit somebody else in prison, I was going to get arrested. I was part of a group of approximately one hundred Rabbis, priests, ministers and workers who sat down in front of the Andaz Hotel on Sunset Blvd. to protest the practices of the Hyatt Hotel.

This week we marked the fast of the ninth of Av. The twenty five hour fast forces us to confront the radical idea that it is impossible to create an ethical polity. As Isaiah cried out in the prophetic portion read last Shabbat: “The faithful city that was filled with justice, Where righteousness dwelt—But now murderers.” The challenge that the Ninth of Av forcefully poses is: what can we do, if anything, to change this? How do we restore our city to righteousness? Isaiah lambasts his audience—and we are his audience—with being “Chieftains of Sodom” and “folk of Gomorrah.” Ezekiel explains that the sin of Sodom—the archetypal evil city—was hoarding its wealth and resources and not sharing them. The Rabbis expand this, saying that the Sodomites saw it as a crime for a person to share what s/he had with the needy. Ultimately, the Rabbis define the Sodomite approach as “what is mine is mine and what is yours is yours.”

In many disturbing ways in this time of dire economic challenge for most people in this city, and the country in general, there are growing Sodomite tendencies afoot. Farmer workers dying in the fields, harsher immigration laws, a growing number of day laborers being denied their pay, the Congress barely passing an extension to unemployment benefits, and workers’ rights and hard fought gains under attack across the board. The way back from this precipice, the way towards righteousness, is holding ourselves accountable for the well being of all residents of our cities. We cannot find our way out of the Sodomite morass when we are half-asleep, not necessarily doing anything “wrong” but not awake to the injustices in front of us.

The Hyatt Hotel chain (controlled by the Chicago based Pritzker family) is, unfortunately, at this moment displaying some of the worst tendencies of the “Chieftains of Sodom.” Claiming penury as a result of the economic downturn, they actually have over a billion dollars in cash available (according to a March 2010 report). Still, they fired one hundred longtime employees in Boston, replacing them with entry level workers—whom the former trained before they were fired.

At the last round of negotiations with Here-Unite, the Union representing the hotel workers, management responded dismissively and insultingly to the workers demands—a modest pay raise—and then cut off negotiations. Additionally, Hyatt management’s “counter-offer” was a rollback of medical benefits and various technical changes which could result in a loss of overtime and breaks.
The answer to Hyatt must be: we are not willing to turn our city into Sodom. The workers you are trying to push into a permanent recession are people we can see, and for whom we are responsible. They are our sisters and brothers.

And so, on a sunny Thursday afternoon, two days after Tisha B’av, with an august group of people who were awake, I sat down in the middle of Sunset Boulevard and refused to get up when the Sheriffs Department warned us that we would be arrested. People across the country, Rabbis, priests, ministers, imams, chefs, housekeepers, bell captains, doormen and others, did the same. People who are trying desperately to hold on to a salary that will enable them to live with dignity, together with people who see their humanity and dignity.