Problems Jewish Roots of Social Justice

Nechama's Method

...Nechama Leibowitz loved to bring the "Four Questions" from the night of the seder in order to illustrate the difference between a kushiyah (problem) and a question. In her characteristic manner, she'd say:

"Do you not know the difference between a question and a kushiyah. Yet every year you, and the children, present the Four Kushiyot (as they're called in Hebrew), not the Four Questions!"

She would point out the construction of the four kushiyot: "On all other nights we _____. On this night we _____." For if this is a question, its intent is, "Why do we do _____ on this night?"

In other words: a question is a request for more information that does not derive from encountering any sort of a difficulty at all, while a kushiyah points out a difficulty. Because of this, a kushiyah is much sharper, and requires of the problematizer understanding and discernment. A kushiyah is therefore a basic pedagogical, didactic tool...

-Haggadah Nechama: Teachings on the Haggadah according the commentary and lectures of Nechama Leibovitz.

The Beginning of It All: Abraham's Kushiyah to God

Yom Kippur's Kushiyah to Us

Freakin' Karl Marx

Labor

Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.

- Karl Marx, Estranged Labour

Emma Goldman is Amazing

Sex

From infancy, almost, the average girl is told that marriage is her ultimate goal; therefore her training and education must be directed towards that end. Like the mute beast fattened for slaughter, she is prepared for that. Yet, strange to say, she is allowed to know much less about her function as wife and mother than the ordinary artisan of his trade. It is indecent and filthy for a respectable girl to know anything of the marital relation. Oh, for the inconsistency of respectability, that needs the marriage vow to turn something which is filthy into the purest and most sacred arrangement that none dare question or criticize. Yet that is exactly the attitude of the average upholder of marriage. The prospective wife and mother is kept in complete ignorance of her only asset in the competitive field---sex. Thus she enters into life-long relations with a man only to find herself shocked, repelled, outraged beyond measure by the most natural and healthy instinct, sex. It is safe to say that a large percentage of the unhappiness, misery, distress, and physical suffering of matrimony is due to the criminal ignorance in sex matters that is being extolled as a great virtue. Nor is it at all an exaggeration when I say that more than one home has been broken up because of this deplorable fact.

If, however, woman is free and big enough to learn the mystery of sex without the sanction of State or Church, she will stand condemned as utterly unfit to become the wife of a “good” man, his goodness consisting of an empty head and plenty of money. Can there be anything more outrageous than the idea that a healthy, grown woman, full of life and passion, must deny nature’s demand, must subdue her most intense craving, undermine her health and break her spirit, must stunt her vision, abstain from the depth and glory of sex experience until a “good” man comes along to take her unto himself as a wife? That is precisely what marriage means. How can such an arrangement end except in failure? This is one, though not the least important, factor of marriage, which differentiates it from love.

-Emma Goldman, "Marriage and Love," Anarchism and Other Essays

Heschel

The decisive event in the story of the exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt was the crossing of the Red Sea. The sea became a dry land and the waters divided. It was a moment of supreme spiritual exaltation, of sublime joy, and prophetic elevation for the entire people. Every Israelite beheld the Glory with a clarity which even a prophet like Ezekiel did not experience.

Then Moses led Israel onward from the Red Sea, and they went three days in the Wilderness and found no water. When they came to Marah, they could not drink the water in Marah because it was bitter. And they murmured against Moses, saying: “What shall we drink?”

This episode seems shocking. What a comedown! Only three days earlier they had reached the highest peak of prophetic and spiritual exaltation, and now they complain about such a prosaic and un-spiritual item as water … .

The Negroes of America behave just like the children of Israel. Only in 1963 they experienced the miracle of having turned the tide of history, the joy of finding millions of Americans involved in the struggle for civil rights, the exaltation of fellowship, the March to Washington. Now only a few months later they have the audacity to murmur: “What shall we drink? We want adequate education, decent housing, proper employment.” How ordinary, how unpoetic, how annoying!

Life could be so pleasant. The Beatles have just paid us a visit. The AT&T is about to split its stock. Dividends are higher than ever. Castro is quiet and well-mannered. Russia is purchasing grain from us. Only the Negroes continue to disturb us: What shall we drink?

We are ready to applaud dramatic struggles once a year in Washington. For the sake of lofty principles we will spend a day or two in jail somewhere in Alabama.

But that prosaic demand for housing without vermin, for adequate schools, for adequate employment— right here in the vicinity of Park Avenue in New York City— sounds so trite, so drab, so banal, so devoid of magnificence...

...“The gods attend to great matters; they neglect small ones,” Cicero maintains. According to Aristotle, the gods are not concerned at all with the dispensation of good and bad fortune or external things. To the Hebrew prophet, however, no subject is as worthy of consideration as the plight of man.

Indeed, God Himself is described as reflecting over the plight of man rather than as contemplating eternal ideas. His mind is preoccupied with man, with the concrete actualities of history rather than with the timeless issues of thought. In the prophet’s message, nothing that has bearing upon good and evil is small or trite in the eyes of God.

The teaching of Judaism is the theology of the common deed. The Bible insists that God is concerned with everydayness, with the trivialities of life. The great challenge does not lie in organizing solemn demonstrations, but in how we manage the commonplace. The prophet’s field of concern is not the mysteries of heaven, the glories of eternity, but the blights of society, the affairs of the market place. He addresses himself to those who trample upon the needy, who increase the price of grain, use dishonest scales, and sell the refuse of corn (Amos 8: 4-6). The predominant feature of the biblical pattern of life is unassuming, unheroic, inconspicuous piety, the sanctification of trifles, attentiveness to details...

...The challenge we face is a test of our integrity. We are all on trial, we are all under judgment. The issue is not political or social expediency. The issue is whether we are morally strong, whether we are spiritually worthy to answer God’s demand. Shall we continue to be deaf, shall we continue to be sensitive only when our own needs and interests are involved?

We have attained a high standard of living. We must seek to attain a high standard of thinking.

The problem we face is to be or not to be human. The situation of the Negro is the test, the trial, and the risk.

It is not only how we worry about the Negroes in America that is our test. It is also how we are concerned for the spiritual plight of the Jews in Russia who are denied the right of religious equality, how we are concerned for the people of Tibet, the hungry masses in India and Brazil, for the sick and the poor, the wetbacks, the Braceros in our own country.

The plight of the Negro is a living reminder of our failure, a melancholy example of our dereliction. I cannot speak about the Negro without a sense of embarrassment at the fact that it was not the authority of the religious institutions that proclaimed once and for all the evil of segregation, that the religious institutions had to be prodded into action by the decision of the Supreme Court of 1954...

Let us not reduce the great idea of integration to an empty togetherness. Our vision is not of white and Negro in integrated saloons. Our vision is of a day when the problem of color and race will be irrelevant. It is not the admissions office that will do it— it is the inspired teacher and the power of a great faith that will accomplish it.

The primary issue is not to integrate the schools, important as it is. The primary issue is to improve and to democratize the school. Integration is implied in democratization. The primary issue is to revolutionize education.

What exacerbates the situation is the fact that the entire system of our civilization finds itself in a grave crisis. The goal we have in mind is integration. But is it significant to speak of integration into a disintegrating society? Integration means relating and adjusting individuals to a society and to a system of values. Yet our values are in a state of dissolution, and our society betrays its own commitments. There is a continual corrosion of our moral and spiritual sensitivities. Is it possible to achieve the desegregation of the Negro while promoting the dehumanization of man? Togetherness in emptiness?

Are we in a strong position to preach to the Negro about family morality while the breakdown of standards is treated casually by the entire society— abetted, fostered, and exploited by vast commercial interests? Will it be a gain if the Negro churches, many of which are rich in simplicity of faith, in discipline and devotion, will be dissolved and integrated into the more sophisticated bourgeois institutions, into churches with a swimming pool?

Integration of the Negro is an opportunity to examine the integrity of our entire society, our standards of thinking, our modes of living. If integration is not to be a move from the ghetto of Harlem to spiritual slums, if integration is to be more than mechanical and formal, we have to transform the fabric of our society.

What is needed is a spiritual revolution. We must rise to a higher plane of thinking.

Heschel, Abraham Joshua. Insecurity of Freedom. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

What a Source Sheet Should Actually Look Like

The Beginning of It All: Abraham's Kushiyah to God

Yom Kippur's Kushiyah to Us