Testimony : ‘In the Trying to Fix It Is Where Redemption Lies’

There’s been a great deal of conversation in our community about whether or not Jews have a stake in the survival of Los Angeles. I think it’s really clear that we do.

Jews have always been an urban people, and our success in this country has basically been connected to our success in the cities. It’s because of a good public school system that the Jewish community in the United States has done so well.

Los Angeles has the second-largest Jewish community in the country--over 600,000 strong--the third-largest in any city in the world. So this population of Jews is very important, not only to the city but also to the international Jewish community.

There are some people who think that urban issues are not Jewish issues, that the Jewish community ought to only be concerned with narrowly defined Jewish issues. But it seems clear that all these issues are Jewish issues. You take police reform, for example. It’s important to Jews to be in a city where there is constitutional policing going on. It’s important that minority rights are protected, because Jews are a minority. It’s important that a public school system flourish, because the majority of Jews still send their children to public schools, as I do. So we have a stake in the city. And there’s no running away from the problems.

We knew the night the verdicts came out that we wanted to be where the community was, in the First AME Church. Before the civil unrest there were, I think, four synagogues that had relationships with African-American churches--those are called covenant relationships. Currently more than 20 synagogues have such connections. There is an instinct to reach across racial and ethnic lines because people understand that we have a stake here.

But there is also fear in our community. The week after the civil unrest, the leading story in the Jewish Journal, the Jewish community newspaper, was about Jews buying guns in unprecedented numbers.

I think there were two responses to the civil unrest: One was the response that said, you need to be down in South Central, to participate in cleaning up, to reach out across community lines, and then there was the other response, which is also quite understandable, of fear. But the bottom line is: How high can you build your gates? How many guns . . . I mean, there is no way to protect ourselves from a society that is falling apart.

We’ve established the American Jewish Congress Urban Affairs Center in Los Angeles to reach out to other communities. We’ve also, through the Jewish Feminist Center, created a coalition with the Muslim Women’s League and the Catholic Sisters of Charity to protest the atrocities committed against Muslim women in Bosnia.

As a rabbi and as a Jew, I believe it is essential to be involved in the repairing of the world. It’s not up to us to finish the task, as the tradition says, but we have no alternative but to do what we can.

Jewish texts and Jewish traditions teach us something about how to be in the world. In Hebrew we say “Tikkun Olam;” It literally means, repair of the world. There’s a view in Jewish tradition--and we know from our own experience that it’s true, that the world is broken. It’s incumbent upon us to do what we can to try to repair it.

The Jewish community is a very diverse community. We are not all wealthy. We are also poor, we are also in need of social services, we are also on welfare, we are also single mothers, we’re a very diverse kind of community. There are a lot of different Jewish immigrant communities--Russian, Iranian, Israeli--in this city, as well as the Jewish elderly, who struggle to make ends meet.

Jews require a stable democracy that caters to the needs of the people. Unless minority rights are protected, and unless our society is set up to take care of the people who have specific needs, it’s not safe for Jews, it’s not safe for other minorities. We’ve seen what happens in other countries and we’ve seen what happens here.

When times are bad, Jews are scape-goated, like other minorities. And we can’t hide from that.

The only thing to do with our broken city is to try to fix it. And I think in the trying to fix it is where redemption lies.