Parashat Vayikra - Guatemala

Shabbat Shalom. This week’s Torah portion is Parashat Vayikra, the first in the Book of Leviticus. It is pretty much all about animal sacrifices, and you’re going to hear a lot about that tomorrow from our wonderful B’nai Mitzvah twins. Tonight, I would like to tell you a little about the incredibly busy and fulfilling week I had.

I spent considerable time Monday-Wednesday with colleagues from American Jewish World Service (AJWS). I was a Global Justice Fellow with them in 2014-2015, travelled to El Salvador and Nicaragua with them in January 2015, and attended a policy summit with them the following May, but this is the first time I’ve really gotten involved with them again since then. AJWS is primarily a grant giving organization that works with grassroots organizers all over the world in three main categories: civil rights and political freedom, land rights and food access, and healthcare rights, though sometimes there is overlap between those issues in the same community. Their main driving force is to identify the MOST marginalized in any given community and empower change makers from within the afflicted communities so that true equality and the dignity of human life might be achieved in even the darkest corners of a world full of troubles. 

Many of my colleagues who attended this convening with me are current Global Justice Fellows who have just returned from a trip to Guatemala. They shared their experiences with us in the space of the rabbinic convening, as well as with members of Congress and employees of the state department when we visited offices on Tuesday and Wednesday. As you may know, much of Central America is facing similar issues of destabilization and is still reeling with the echoes of the various civil wars and horrifying political violence from that spanned about 30 years in ripples across the region. Some countries, like Guatemala, have been on track in recent years to recover from that period of history but are now seeing fairly sudden backtracking of progress and justice. My colleagues’ trip to Guatemala was very much focused on AJWS's civil rights portfolio and how rule of law is deteriorating in Guatemala, while my trip to Nicaragua and El Salvador 4 years ago focused more on health for women, girls and LGBTI folks. I learned a lot from my colleagues, and I also noticed how much overlap there was in our experiences with our visits to these Central American communities, and how pressing these concerns still are now as we take them to Congress to ask for US support for human rights around the world.

For example, there is a bill currently on the floor in Congress to impose sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act to uphold and support the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, which the Guatemalan government is currently trying to undermine. The International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, or CICIG, exists to serve as a third party impartial judicial body to work with the Guatemalan Judicial system to ensure corruption is kept out of legal proceedings so that justice and human rights prevails. This is the body that has allowed for the prosecution of many perpetrators of the genocide against the indigenous populations of Guatemala that occurred for much of the second half of the 20th century. Through these justice measures, CICIG has assisted in the democratic progress in the country as well. The current regime now wants to dismantle CICIG and pass an amnesty law that would set free the genocidaires, and put a great many people at renewed risk. As Jews, a people who have survived attempts at genocide and state-sponsored violence sometimes disguised as political necessity, we have a stake in genocide wherever it occurs. We have responsibility in ending it, investment in the justice and rebuilding that happens after, and interest in helping to prevent it wherever it seems likely to pop up again. Luckily, the Guatemalan Congress did not have a quorum to vote on their amnesty bill on Wednesday, so we have some time to take a breath and urge our Congress to pass our Guatemala bills currently in both the House and the Senate, and hopefully stay ahead of the possibility of coming atrocities in our neighboring nations.

Aside from talking a lot about Guatemala (as well as Burma, and the Global Gag Rule), in preparation for and inside of our meetings with U.S. government employees, this convening of rabbis also, obviously, talked about Torah. One colleague shared a Midrash on the word Vayikra that opens our parasha. The aleph at the end of the word is written in tiny lettering in every scroll of Torah that has ever been written to our knowledge, but the reason why is not evident. One explanation is that Moses originally wrote “Vayikar”, to communicate that Moses simply happened upon God at the Tent of Meeting, as though neither Moses nor God had any great intention of continuing their talks from on the Mountain in the Mishkan. But God wanted Moses to come chat, wanted Moses to know that he was called upon, and wanted anyone else who should read these words to know that Moses was called. So the aleph was written in as a correction, and that scribal transmission has been passed down through the millennia.  On the first afternoon of the convening, we were invited to turn to our neighbors and discuss what calls us to the work of social justice. Rabbi Jonah Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism told his story of taking the train from his apartment in lower Manhattan up to the Bronx for his high school, and seeing the devastation along the way, and feeling called to help communities in New York, and that was the beginning of his lifetime of community organizing and social justice leadership. He asked us what our story is, why we are AJWS rabbis. I couldn’t think of anything. If you ask me about my call to the rabbinate, I could give you some clear moments and pinpoint the origin of that call. But for me, the call to empathy is so innate, I couldn’t think of a story. I thought about the moments of re-awakening that brought me back into activism in 2015. I thought about the time I received a “Feed the Children” donation card in the mail, to my name, and I cried because I was about 8 years old and didn’t actually have any money of my own to feed the children, and I felt terribly guilty in my comfortable home with enough food to eat that I still couldn’t help others despite my own privilege. But neither of those experiences really felt like the origin story Rabbi Pesner was asking for. I thought, maybe I just happened into this. My parents are very generous and compassionate people. My grandmother wrote anti-racist poetry in the 1960’s. My great-grandparents escaped the Pale of Settlement when facing potential banishment to Siberia for actively working to take down the czar. Maybe this was just the camp I was born into. But two fairly long days later, hearing the midrash on the word Vayikra, I thought, maybe I can’t pin down an exact moment of awakening, but I was called into working for human rights and equality as assuredly as I was called to the rabbinate, and both are equally holy occupations.

You may not be a rabbi, and you may not be an activist. But as a Jew, you too are called to Tikkun Olam, to repair the world, and as an American, you too have the right and privilege to use your moral imperative to sway our legislatures in matters of life and death for our fellow humans around the world. I urge you to use that call and that voice to make the world a better, safer place for everyone. May you find yourself called into Divine presence through holy work of peacemaking and justice. Amen and Shabbat Shalom.