By Avidan Halivni
On Sunday, March 11, the Nachshon cohort had the privilege of meeting with a series of high-level professionals, each engaging in their own way with the intersection of Judaism and social justice. I came into this day eager to learn from and with accomplished and passionate individuals whose Jewish identity gave way to a career in Jewish service. The day was facilitated by Dyonna Ginsburg, the executive director of Olam, an umbrella organization for various Israel- and Jewish-related social justice groups. She framed our time together with a text study about obligation and the objects of our obligation in the twenty-first century as Jews and as people, a conversation that would set the tone for understanding the people we were to meet throughout the day.
Ms. Ginsburg chose as her starting point the oft-cited lesson from Baba Metzia 71a, that when there are Jews and non-Jews in need, the Jew takes precedence for one’s help; all the way to when the poor of your city are measured against the poor of another’s city, “the poor of your city are preferred.” This Talmudic dictum would serve as sort of a straw man for Ms. Ginsburg for the session as a way to deepen our tribalistic understanding of our social responsibility. Firstly, she pointed out that this hierarchy merely exists in regards to lending money, undermining the all-encompassing tone that, when viewed in isolation, this line implies. She also pointed to later responsa written by highly esteemed authorities, such as the Hatam Sofer (19th c.), who declared that when the poor of another city are in more dire need than those of your own city, the obligation falls on you to help them first, for their need is more pressing. I appreciated the exposure to the multi-vocality of the rabbinic corpus on this particular issue and was impressed by Ms. Ginsburg’s command of the language and spirit of the traditional discourse as a foundation for her session.
I was particularly struck by one text that she brought by Rabbi Micha Odenheimer from 2011. Rabbi Odenheimer challenges the notion that our responsibilities can even be conceived in concentric circles, as depicted by the Talmudic rhetoric and its later interlocutors.
In today’s ever-globalizing world, it has become increasingly impossible to speak of one city as an enclosed economic unit; when Israel’s food is grown by Thai or Chinese workers and the elderly nurtured by Phillipino or Sri Lankan caregivers, issues affecting those countries has a direct influence on the innermost circle of our lives. So many issues have become “borderless and transregional,” necessitating a revision of what truly constitutes social and international responsibility in 2018 -- and I was excited to engage with that thought experiment throughout the remainder of the day.
In that vein, I found it refreshing that many of the Jewish professionals we met throughout the day represented a group of people that chose to dedicate their careers either to Jews outside of Israel or America, or not to the Jewish community at all, and that both were a powerful manifestation of their Jewish identity. It was very powerful to meet with the director of the Center for International Migration and Integration precisely at the moment where the protests were heating up. Hearing from him, as well as from Rachel Gerber, the Project Coordinator of the Jerusalem African Community Center and a representative from the African community, raised a lot of questions for me about the nature of Israel as a Jewish state and the implications for our religious imperative to care for those who need it, no matter who they are. Overall, the day was filled with consummate professionals, smoothly facilitated by Ms. Ginsburg, and a successful exploration of a theme highly relevant to the Nachshon cohort.
