February 12, 2010

In 1968, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the leading Jewish thinkers of the last century, invited Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to join him at his Passover Seder. We’ll never know what they would have talked about over all that matzoh and four cups of wine. But we know that the night before he was assassinated, Dr. King saw himself as Moses, viewing from the mountaintop the Promised Land that he would never enter. He presciently ended his speech by saying those famous two lines we all know by heart: “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!”

Dr. King gave that famous “Mountaintop” speech in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had been invited to speak by Reverend James Lawson, a leading figure of the Civil Rights movement and practitioner of non-violence, who at the time was helping to lead the Sanitation Workers Strike.

Why all this history? Because I’m excited to hear Reverend Lawson speak next month about the struggle for equality at “A View from the Mountaintop: Social Justice in the 21st Century.” The event also presents a new chapter in the long partnership between Jews and African-Americans, harkening back to Dr. King and Rabbi Heschel marching together from Selma to Montgomery. Organized by the Progressive Jewish Alliance, Reverend Lawson will be joined by Rabbi Sharon Brous and USC Professor Dr. Manuel Pastor to discuss, among other things, a present-day alliance between Jewish, African-American, and many other activists to fight for food justice in Los Angeles.

The campaign for food justice is a campaign for access to healthy food and market jobs that pay middle-class wages—neither of which are to be found among the shelves of processed foods in the small convenience and liquor stores that dot the ‘food deserts’ in Los Angeles. If you look at the distribution of supermarkets on a map, you’ll notice that large sections of the city—in South L.A., East L.A. and the northeast San Fernando Valley—are largely devoid of the large grocery stores that are abundant in other, more affluent, parts of the city. These food deserts are home to rates of diabetes and childhood obesity up to eight times higher than in areas like West L.A., and grocery workers in these neighborhoods earn, on average, roughly $8,000 less per year than their counterparts on the Westside.

There are a lot of complicated issues out there but this isn’t one of them. The legacy of Dr. King and Rabbi Heschel pushes us to solve this inequality. With a positive public-private partnership we can expand the grocery industry to all parts of the city and, over time, transform the physical and economic health of entire communities.

I’m looking forward to hearing what Reverend Lawson thinks about this issue, and what we can do to help bring this change about. Oh, and if anyone out there is wondering, I take my soy gefilte fish with plenty of horseradish (organic preferred).

A View from the Mountaintop: Social Justice in the 21st Century is presented by the Progressive Jewish Alliance on March 4, 2010 from 5:00-8:30pm at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. You can find out more and purchase tickets for this community gala on their website: www.pjalliance.org.

I wonder how many people can say they’ve shared a Sabbath dinner… with a New York Yankee.

I suspect those two things don’t turn up in the same sentence very often.

But recently I spent a Sabbath with a whole bunch of Yankees, and I’ll never forget it.

I’m just back from Yankees Fantasy Camp, at their spring training facility in Tampa, Florida.

When you’re a fan, Fantasy camp is the ultimate up-close-and-personal-experience you dream about. You wear the pinstripes. You play ball on the same field the pros do. You share the same clubhouse. And you meet the Legends… the old players… the guys you idolized as a kid, watching them on TV.

I’m a lifelong Yankee fan and for years I desperately wanted to go to Fantasy Camp. But I’m also an Orthodox Jew. I keep Kosher, and I observe the Sabbath. Fantasy Camp was always out of the question for me, because of the food, and because I’d miss the one event everybody waits for… the high point of the whole camp… the Dream game when the campers play the Legends. They do it on the last day of camp… Saturday.

But this year, the Bombers made some changes. To accommodate five or six Orthodox folks like me, the club brought in kosher food. They gave us our very own Kosher Dream game, on Wednesday. And best of all, they gave us Shabbat.

We had a synagogue set up in a small dining room, next to the fitness center. Friday evening we gathered, the kosher campers, their families, and a local rabbi. We lit the candles. We blessed the wine. We sang the prayers. We had our Sabbath meal. It felt very warm, friendly and familiar. And we had some special guests.

It’s a Fantasy Camp tradition that on Friday night the campers take the Legends out to dinner. But three Yankees came to our dinner first, before they went off to theirs. Ron Blomberg, a Yankee slugger from the 70’s and baseball’s first Designated Hitter, only now he calls himself the Designated Hebrew. Ron sat at our table, asked a lot of questions, and talked about growing up Jewish in the South, where some of his high school classmates were in the KKK.

Jesse Barfield was there too, dressed in his Sunday best. Jesse was a right fielder with a rifle arm. But on this night, he wasn’t talking baseball. Jesse spoke about the progress we’ve made in race relations. How much easier things were for him coming up, compared to the generation before. He also told us about the interracial marriages in his own family. “Color,” Jesse said, “doesn’t mean a thing to me. We’re all brothers.”

And Homer Bush. Homer’s a more recent legend… he played until 2005. Homer didn’t make a speech, but he sat with us, he put on a yarmulke and flashed a big smile. Sometimes you don’t need to say anything.

I remember looking around the room and thinking, this is surreal. This is impossible. After a week of hitting, running, throwing, spitting, cursing and scratching, The New York Yankees are helping me celebrate Shabbat!

I loved it!

You see, when you grow up Orthodox, you grow up separate. Just a little bit different, a little bit apart. You don’t go to friends’ houses for birthday parties, because the food’s not kosher. You don’t hang out with them on the weekends, because, on saturday, they’re playing ball, and you’re in the synagogue. You figure out very early, that you’re never going to be quite like everybody else. And although you’re proud of who you are, in the back of your head you can’t help wondering if the world sees you as slightly weird.

So just imagine how we kosher campers felt, when our world intersected with the Yankees world, and everybody went out of their way to include us, to accept us, and respect us. Just a bunch of good friends spending time together. I’ll treasure that forever.

Don’t get me wrong. The Dream Game was terrific! I lined a single off David Wells and got a fist bump at first base from Chris Chambliss. But, no doubt about it, the high point of my Fantasy Camp was our Sabbath together. And I know the feelings were mutual. The Sabbath ended just as the Awards banquet began. My fellow campers wanted me to sign their team photos. I explained the Sabbath still had a few minutes left. No problem. They waited. And at precisely the right moment, they put a pen in my hand.

Sunday morning Ron Blomberg and I rode the hotel shuttle back to the airport. As he got off at his terminal, Bloomie smiled and said, “Abe, I hope we see each other again. But if we don’t… I’m with ya!”

Me too, Ron. Thanks.

Thanks to all you guys.

Shabbat Shalom!

Like millions of people around the world,  I have been following the tragedy in Haiti since the earthquake jolted the country just over a month ago. Although the media portrays a great deal of the devastation that has been visited on this poorest of Western nations, it wasn’t until I traveled to Haiti on a humanitarian relief mission that I truly understood just how severe the crisis really was.

Last Thursday night my father asked me if I wanted to join him on a visit to Haiti to donate relief supplies to an orphanage in Port-Au-Prince and to generally help in writing and broadcasting about Haiti’s devastation. We would leave Sunday night and return Wednesday morning. The idea sounded preposterous. How could we possibly go to a country that is in a state of emergency? A country where all hell has broken loose.  The offer sounded somewhat irrational, but I knew it was a once in a lifetime opportunity. If I thought about it I would probably decide against it. So I quickly agreed.

About 48 hours later I found myself sitting in the Santo Domingo airport sleep deprived and cranky, trying to figure out if this whole thing was still a good idea. We met up with our friend Glenn Megill, founder of Rock of Africa, an organization that feeds families in Zambia and Zimbabwe, along with his daughter and a photographer named Peter. After much haggling and miscommunication with a Dominican representative at Avis, we were finally able to rent our minivan and start our journey to Haiti. After driving nine hours on a windy gravel road, we finally reached the border. It was there that we got our first taste of the deprivation left by the earthquake. Thousands of people were waiting in the baking sun to try and get into the country with supplies.  We waited our turn until we were finally permitted to enter.  Two hours later we reached the Haitian capital.

Words cannot describe what we witnessed. Picture Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic detonation, or Hamburg and Dresden after the devastating carpet-bomb raids delivered by the allied forces.  Picture the monstrous mounds of rubble, and the jagged edges of half-torn buildings marking every street with a sullen sign of death and destruction. Only this time the ineffable picture was not drawn any conflict or war, but came about through the sudden crush of nature alone.

Hundreds of thousands of people wandered the litter-strewn roads like zombies, their homes destroyed, many of their family members dead.  Perhaps the most devastating factor was that these people were so helpless. Haiti, already a poverty-stricken country, was now also in shambles. These people didn’t even have the means to get back on their feet if they wanted to. As we drove through downtown Port-Au-Prince, my heart grew heavier. I could not understand how G-d could have allowed such a calamity to take place. Why were so many innocent citizens lying in their graves beneath the rubble on the street, as people stumbled over them to find their way? Is the value of a life really that worthless? Did these humans really live in vain? The smell of death permeated the entire city, making us gag. Relief workers informed us that dogs had been coming during the night and consuming the decaying bodies, leaving behind piles of bones in the rubble.  In all honesty I felt as if this G-d-forsaken country had been doomed for all eternity, without any hope of salvation.

But in the midst of darkness there is always a beacon of light that shines through. My hope was restored the next day when we paid a visit to an orphanage called Child Hope, an organization run by a Christian family who left their home in California six years ago to devote their lives to rescuing suffering and abandoned children in Haiti. They have many volunteers who travel from US for months at a time to help in any way they can. Their love and devotion towards these children was incredible. They treated the orphans as if they were their own children and gave them opportunities that they could never receive growing up on the streets as most orphans in Haiti do. I sat with some of the Haitian girls who live there, laughing and talking about school and our favorite nail polish colors. They were a pleasure and their company inspired me. They were bright young women who didn’t wallow in any form of self-pity. Rather, they exhibited a zest for life and knowledge. They told me how they wanted to be doctors when they grow up.

We also went to the UN Base where we saw hundreds of doctors from all over the world united together in Haiti, all with the common goal of healing victims of the earthquake. You could hear every language spoken as doctors ran back and forth from tent to tent tending to the sick. I was especially proud of all the American volunteers both from the military and as well as random individuals who felt it was their duty to assist their Haitian brothers and sisters in this disaster.  One American volunteer introduced us to a three year old Haitian boy whose mother and sister had perished in the earthquake. The father was forced to amputate his own son’s hand in order to save him from the same terrible fate that his mother and sister had met. His father then walked ten miles, carrying him to the only hospital in the city hospital to get help. This American volunteer felt a connection with the boy and treated him almost like a younger brother, bringing him gifts and paying him visits daily.

Catastrophes such as the earthquake in Haiti are some of the darkest forces in nature. However, these same calamities also bring out the brightest qualities in humans who feel it is their duty to help others when they are needed.

You can’t go to Haiti and return the same person. You come back a little sadder, but a lot more inspired. You discover that even in the darkest of times when one cannot understand the meaning of terrible calamities, one can still make a difference with their own actions. We can’t understand why bad things happen to so many good people. However our personal decisions can make all the difference in improving their lot. Witnessing the effects of the earthquake in Haiti first hand has made me so much more sensitive toward those in need.

Mushki Boteach is an undergraduate at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women where she is majoring in public relations. She resides in Englewood, New Jersey.