Washington National Cathedral

Dean Lloyd: Good morning and welcome to the Sunday Forum, to our continuing conversation at the intersection of faith and public life. We’re here in the midst of a very busy political season, a very busy season in terms of what’s happening in the world around us, and we have with us as a guest today someone who has spent his whole career thinking hard and advocating for important causes related to issue of social justice and issues of religious tolerance and liberty. David Saperstein is an activist, we could say. He is also a rabbi, a lawyer, a university professor and to quote the Washington Post, the quintessential religious lobbyist on Capitol Hill. So we have one of these lobbyists with us for today we’ll hear from. I’ll let Rabbi Saperstein explain what it means to be a lobbyist on the Hill in just a minute, but for now I want to recognize his formal title as director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, where he interacts constantly with policy makers on the key issues of the day. David, welcome. It’s great to have you with us.

Rabbi Saperstein: It’s a delight to be back here at the Cathedral.

Dean Lloyd: Let’s talk about lobbyists for a minute. They get a pretty bad rap these days. There seems to be a contagious sense that lobbyists are not healthy parts of our society but you’re a lobbyist. Is that a good thing, an honorable thing to be doing with your life?

Rabbi Saperstein: The Constitution of course provides that we all have freedom of speech, freedom to associate with like-minded people and freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances and its often impossible for each individual lives wherever they may life across the country to do it only in their own name and so groups of people often come together and either hire someone on their own staff or someone from the outside to represent their interests more effectively. There is in Washington a couple of thousand public interest groups. What distinguishes public interest groups from some of the corporate lobbyists and other lobbyists in Washington is while most lobbyists are advocating for the self-interest, usually the financial self-interests, of who they represent, the public interest community in America, the religious community, the civil rights community, the women rights community, the environmental community, they are advocating for causes. There may be some work that actually effects them directly but in the main they are advocating for a sense of what the world can become and should become and amongst those are forty faith groups and denominations that have full-time staff here in Washington to take the positions passed by the governing body of the denomination of which they are a part and to try and to have those views enacted into law or try to pass… prevent legislation from being passed that would gravely undermine the values that they advocate in American Society and in the world.

Dean Lloyd: And yours is the religious action center.

Rabbi Saperstein: Mine represents there are six million Jews in the United States by a slight margin the Reformed Jewish Community that’s we’re sitting at the Cathedral, so you’re surrounded by Washington Hebrew Congregation and Temple Micah just a few blocks away and about a mile and a half, two and a half miles away Temple Sinai, they are three of the nine hundred synagogues with a million and a half members in North America that I represent here in Washington.

Dean Lloyd: And what’s distinctive about the Reform Jewish movement?

Rabbi Saperstein: It is the theologically liberal segment of the Jewish community, which means that whatever Jews call themselves—Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Hasidic, Mitnagdic, Sephardic, Ashkenazic—there are basically two kinds of Jews: those who believe that the Bible, the Torah, as given at Mount Sinai was literally the word of God and those who believe out of the encounter at Sinai men and women through the ages wrote down their understanding of what God called us to do in a process that continues throughout the ages until today. We represent that second liberal strand, and we tend to be both theologically liberal, and the Jewish community as a whole tends to be socially and politically liberal, and the Reform movement segment of the community probably a little more so than even the rest of the community.

Dean Lloyd: In just a moment I want…we asked you to think about five major issues that ought to be at the heart of the discussion as we go into this presidential election and what’s going, what should we be paying attention to; but maybe we could pause first for you to say something about what it means to be a distinctively religious advocate. That is to say, out of your own Jewish tradition, you are a vigorous advocate for a whole set of social justice issues. What is it that you draw from your own tradition? What is the sort of fire and energy that flows out of your own faith tradition that informs and energies what you do?

Rabbi Saperstein: Well, some we share in common with all the Abrahamic traditions. So for instance, where in the National Cathedral the Episcopal Church as a full-time representative, Maureen Shay who is wonderful and a highly skilled advocate for the positions taken by the church. The Catholic bishops obviously have a staff that is involved in advocating for the positions that they hold, and the Methodists, Presbyterian Church and in the Jewish community, the Reform movement and the Orthodox movement have full-time staff here. The Conservative movement, the other major stream of Judaism, while not having full-time staff here nevertheless uses its rabbis to make known there views and what we all share in common is a belief that God has called us to be partners in shaping a better more hopeful future. That out of the prophetic tradition enshrined in our sacred texts has come a mandate that we should be to the best of our God given knowledge and wisdom a moral goad to the conscience of our country and that we have certain foci of our efforts. Most particularly the care for the vulnerable and the poor who often are not able to advocate as effectively for their own needs. God’s pervasive preference for the poor should animate our work here today. That’s one group of issues of a number that we have the notion of the dignity that comes from what it means to be created in the image of God and the attended liberties and freedoms that that brings to every…that adhere in every human being and the rights that are therefore enshrined here thankfully in America with our notion of the declarations call that we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights. That idea was based on this common understanding we have so we have a number of mandates that was have in common. I guess if I had had anything distinctive about Reform Judaism is that having emerged out of the age of reason. If you will remember in the age of reason, many of the great age of reason philosophers argue that that part of religion that was most logical, rational, and scientific weren’t our rituals, our customs and our ceremonies. It was ethics. If only we knew everything God knew we could rationally determine what was good and what bad, what was evil and what was hopeful, what was a blessing and what was a curse. And we are charged to try to use our God given reason to figure that out and to take our understanding and conclusions that represent the consensus of our church bodies and bring it into the free market place of ideas. So while Judaism has a 3000-year-old tradition of… a prophetic tradition of speaking truth to power. From the time that Abraham challenges God over Sodom and Gomorra to protect the innocents there. If Abraham can challenge God, how much more so we can and should and must challenge human rulers where we see injustice and evil and suffering in the world. But on top of that having come out of the age of reason with many of the same influences that shaped America we here feel at home in that prophetic tradition in trying to raise and ethical voice. So I think that America being shaped by the age of reason and Reform Judaism being shaped by the age of reason actually intensify that passion for social justice so it has always been part of the Jewish people.

Dean Lloyd: There is that wonderful resonant phrase out of your tradition, “tikkun olam,” that seems to ring through so many of the prophetic words that are spoken. Would you say something about that?

Rabbi Saperstein: Well it’s actually a tiny bit of a misimpression about the term tikkun from the word tkn to fix or repair; olam is the word for the world or the universe. So the notion to fix the universe. It is understood in contemporary times to be synonymous with the work of social justice, the work of the prophetic tradition. It’s actually a fairly modern understanding of it. It began about 50, 60 years ago although elements of it have been part of the tradition. We first find it in the liturgy “l’taken olam b’malchut shaddai,” to perfect the world under the sovereignty of God. It was a rule used by the rabbinic rabbis at the time that Jesus lived. Where there were problems that the law couldn’t quite resolve on the face of it: that for the sake of tikkun olam you could make adaptations in the law in order to have a more effective result come out of it. And then in the medieval Cabalistic mystical traditions, this notion of the world, the outer shells of the universe having been shattered into shards and our job was to put those shards back into place and to complete creation again where you began to see the resonance with our modern idea of tikkun olam. But whatever we call it that notion, that central notion that came from Sinai 3,000 years ago of ethical monotheism, of a God that calls the Jewish people and humanity to the cause of justice and righteousness in repairing this often hurting, shattered world has been central to the Jewish sensibility, our understanding of what it means to be called to be a light to and of the nations and I would say to all of the Abrahamic traditions. So tikkun olam while a distinctly Jewish term is something I think that unifies all of us, Sam.

Dean Lloyd: Thank you. We asked you to think about the key moral questions that the next president whoever that may be is going to have to face and the first one that came up in a litany of things from you is one that we hear almost nothing about in the campaign and that’s the moral issue of genocide, focusing particularly on Darfur but it’s obviously a much larger issue than that. Can you say something about the nature of your passion for that and what you think has been done and what should be done in that area?

Rabbi Saperstein: For Jews, one of the most seminal experiences of Jewish history, as you all know, was the Holocaust. The first effort that I can think of in the history of the world, there were other genocides before but where the entire apparatus of government in a military force was aimed to eradicate entirely from the face of the earth an entire people. And if there is any central lesson that comes from the Holocaust, if the eleven million, the six million Jews and eleven million non-Jews who were killed by the Nazis, exterminated by the Nazis are not to have been lives lost in vain, it must be that we learn the central lesson that of what evil can happen when good people stand idle by. And it is true we cannot do everything. We can’t even stop necessarily all genocides across the globe but the notion that cannot do everything should never be justified to mean we should not do anything. So I see…we saw the Cambodian genocide. I’m not sure at that moment in history what might have been able to have been done to stop the horrific experience of the killing fields. We could have done something in Rwanda and it is to our shame as a nation, as people who see God as our partner, that we failed to act at that time. But Darfur has been happening under our sight. The world sees it taking place. This genocidal activity in which the tribes of the Darfur are being engaged in ethic cleansing, pushed out of their area often as way of doing that exterminated and the world has seen it and America called it for what it was – genocidal activity – and promised it would lead the way and I believe, I truly believe the president really has wanted and wants to do something about this. As I once had the opportunity to share with him in the end, all of us will be judged not by what we tried to do but by what happened on our watch. Did we allow genocide to happen? Did we stop it? And unfortunately the Sudanese government, and you must remember, they had engaged for 20 years in a brutal civil war against the south in which far more people were killed and displaced than have been killed and displaced in Darfur, went on for 20 years and more people were killed and displaced in Rwanda, in Kosovo, Bosnia combined and the world stood idly by. Darfur – something happened to grab the attention of the world and most of us got involved in efforts, economic pressure on Sudan and political pressure on Sudan aimed to try and get peacekeepers in there that could really do something, but Darfur is an area as large as Texas. It is huge and the notion of having 15,000 peacekeepers from the African Union and was doomed to failure. And their charge was not to protect the civilian populations. It was to protect only the humanitarian efforts that were going on and even on that level now it is failing. When I was in camps a couple of years ago I was just astonished at how well run many of them were. Some in other areas were much greater challenges but the ones I saw were extraordinarily well run by UNHCR, by the World Food Program, by many of the individual groups that you support, I’m sure in your personal lives. They were making a difference. They were saving lives. The infant mortality rate was almost at a third-world level in some of those camps. The standard of living significantly higher than many of the surrounding areas in Darfur and Chad where the camps were located which caused problems that had to be addressed. So with the daunting challenges that they faced, at least they were making some progress. But in the last couple of years we have been seeing things fall apart with rebel groups and the government troops attacking humanitarian forces making it much harder for them to operate, enemy in many of the areas increasing and it is the children who are dying first. It is the children, when food gets cut off and medical care gets cut off it is the children who are dying and we know it will require a greater military intervention than we have now. A doubling of the troops. It has to be under blue helmet control. Under U.N. control. We know what know what needs to be done. The Sudanese government has agreed in theory to significant expansion but we know that they have to have modalities of moving troops rapidly from one place to the other so when they hear of an attack on a village, there are helicopters that can move troops there very, very quickly and able to follow from the air some of the forces on the ground that have engaged in these attacks in order to apprehend the perpetrators here, and we have to have much greater protection for the humanitarian work. We know the outline of what has to do but he truth is we are spread so thin militarily and the Western’s world interaction with the Muslim world is so complicated right know that the forces have arrayed against a successful humanitarian intervention here. And I really think history will look back with astonishment at our failure after Rwanda to have once again allowed this to continue. So I hope whoever the next president is, will vigorously, vigorously and this administration in its remaining months, the implementation of the U.N. agreement to move a mushily, a far more robust expanded force into that area here to do it with the Sudanese government if possible but if not to get the international backing to significantly expand our presence there, to impose a no-fly zone that NATO would have to do and to better train and mobilize the African Union troops who are there.

Dean Lloyd: That’s hard to follow with another issue, something as momentous as that in front of us, but the second one you listed is one that is ominous in its own way and that’s the concern about the spread of nuclear weapons. Certainly around the world in a variety of ways but of particular concern, I understand, with what’s happening in Iran. The possibility that they are developing weapons there. That’s something that you think runs right up there near the top of the list.

Rabbi Saperstein: Well it does. You know, we live in a moment where we can blow up the world in a nuclear holocaust. When does humanity ever lived with that before? This is really a different moment and it is dangerous enough that countries that have a structured system of government, no matter how free or oppressive it might be, but a functioning stable structure of government has these weapons. As we’re seeing weapons now spread to countries that have a less stable form of government. This because far more alarming. To be one of the great failures, what great failures, of these last few years was that Dr. Khan in Pakistan who had been spreading and selling this technology placed under house arrest and all of our close relations President Musharraf during that period of time, we never got permission to actually interview him at least not as far as anyone has ever publicly said and our government says they have not had that opportunity and we simply don’t know where those weapons went. And if the next time Al Qaeda attacks it is with the nuclear weapon, what happens to New York, to Washington, to whatever the target that will be?

President Ahmadinejad arrives to speak to the U.N. this week there will be a major rally in New York. I am going from here to fly up to New York to be at that rally at the U.N. for Jews we’re gravely concerned. Iran is a very unstable force in the Middle East. It is in a major power struggle with the Sunni arch of countries. If Iran is as powerful, expansive, Shiite presence gets nuclear weapons, it will create a nuclear arms race in the Middle East that I hope is as frightening to you as it is to me. Ahmadinejad’s denial of the Holocaust, his constant use, and it is not just he, there is wonderful publication put out by the Jewish Center on Public Affairs - Jerusalem Center on Public Affairs – just this month and I urge you to go online and take a look at it. To look at all of this range of military and political leaders in Iran who have talked about the eradication of the Zionist entity and when pushed on it, they say, oh, we’re only talking about the government, the Zionist part, we’re not talking about the eradication of the whole nation. But when you read the language it does not read that way at all, it is not heard by their people, that way it is not heard by the right that way, it is not heard by an anti-Israel and terrorist groups that way and you know this is an extraordinarily frightening situation. You know, if God forbid any of the major countries in the world were hit the nuclear weapon, one nuclear weapon, conceivably, quite conceivably it can survive. Israel can’t. It takes just one nuclear hit to wipe out Israel. What good does retaliation do? You know, should that happen, it takes one weapon. This is literally a life-and-death situation for Israel. This something that affects Israel’s destiny, it affects the stability of the Middle East which has enormous implications for American interests. This can evolve into direct threats to Western Democratic countries, in Europe, United States, across the globe. This is a very frightening development I think of all the great threats to humanity at this point, but one that we have done… focused on the least and one that stunningly can clearly the short run the most devastating to humankind. So I really hope whoever the next president is, this will be a major priority.

Dean Lloyd: Moving along, it’s important to touch at some point here on something that seems to actually be related to both of the issues you just raised and that is the conflict in the Middle East between Palestine and Israel. Something that goes on and on and by all accounts continues to be a dynamic that affects the rest of our relationships whether were dealing with genocide or were dealing with nuclear arms. It’s a component in the puzzle. Do you see any way that a new president coming in can find a way forward to strike some kind of agreement to calm things there?

Rabbi Saperstein: Well first, this administration came late unfortunately to this. But in the last year and 1/2 led by Condoleezza Rice has been doing yeoman’s effort to really try and bring some kind of resolution and significant progress in the peace process. It should be commended with that. We try to work very closely with them on that. You have weak leadership in Israel and Palestine right now, a very confused, divided, Palestinian leadership between Hamas and a Palestinian authority. You all read about the changing role of leaders in Israel going on right now, it’s facing election, no one knows what that election will bring and, you know, right now it is the rejectionists in the Arab and Palestinian world, Hezbollah, Hamas and others who say don’t negotiate, just wait them out. We can force them out. We forced them out of Gaza, we forced them out of Lebanon, let’s do away with all this peace process stuff until we can to destroy Israel. Time is running out to have accommodation that can meet the legitimate national aspirations of the Palestinian people to believe is deeply in their gut that they have a right to determine their political destiny as Jews believe that we have a right to the fill our political and national aspirations and destiny in our historic homeland. There are two people who claims to the same area. There must be compromises and neither one can have everything that they want. But in the end, you know, the compromise has to achieve both contiguous politically, economically viable state for the Palestinians and security for Israel. You know, almost every Jew that I know, most every person that I know who cares about Israel, whether they are doves and critics of Israeli government policy, whether their supporters of Israeli government policy, whether their critics from the right and are hawks to think that the government should not be involved in the negotiations there, they all start with one postulate. If the Arab countries believe that they can militarily destroy Israel today, they were not hesitate to do so and only Israel strength enhanced by American support stands in the way of that happening, and the terrorism that has aimed at Israel for 40 years is a particularly egregious kind, not aimed at military, economic, or political institutions. The aimed at the people. What have been the targets? Pizza parlors and discotheques, bar mitzvah ceremonies, beaches, school buses, schools. This is literally a fight for survival for Israel. And window is closing. I do think it is possible the majority of people despite everything both in the Palestinian world and in Israel believe that a two-state solution and a compromise is what their destiny requires. But if we are going to do it in this generation, before the conditions change for the worse, we have to move assertively right now. So I hope the next president is will build immediately on what this last two years of this administration has done and use everything in their means to come up with a peace process that fulfills Palestinian political aspiration and enhances and secures Israel’s security and wellbeing.

Dean Lloyd: Thank you. In just a moment we want to turn the floor over to you all for your questions. There were two more in thus top five we elicited from Rabbi Saperstein. I want to put one more in front of you and then you all can prepare your questions. The last two were healthcare and climate change. Both of them momentous. Quick word about healthcare. It maybe about as hard to solve as Palestine and Israel. It seems to be something that people take a run at time and again and they seem never to make progress. Do you think we can make progress on that?

Rabbi Saperstein: Well I’m going to do 30 seconds on climate change because just requires one Biblical verse. The earth is the eternal’s and the fullness thereof. What we own, we own in a trust relationship with God. God has given us creation and friends we’re blowing it and if our children and children’s children are going to have a world that is a healthy environment, it requires us to act as vigorously as possible now to ensure that we protect it. I’m willing to bet if I ask you how many of you have been affected by the healthcare crisis in your circle of family and friends, every hand in this room would go up. The skyrocketing costs of healthcare that have been going up for the last 15 years at a much higher rate than inflation at general in a country 47 million people who fall through the cracks without healthcare coverage at this point. But 70 million in any point during a given year in the richest country in the history of the world. How is this possible? You know, for those who can afford it, the best healthcare system in the world, and the one that is the most costly, the most cumbersome to use, the one that leaves the most people falling through the cracks. There is something deeply and profoundly wrong. We’re running out of time. A sixth of the economy and a growing percentage of the economy is comprised of the healthcare. A sixth of our whole economy is comprised with healthcare. And if we don’t get it right in terms of a growing number of older people in America, in terms of all of the complicated end-of-life decisions that have to be made in terms of the growing number of people falling through the cracks without coverage, if we don’t get it right soon, it’s going to spiral out of control and we’re going to be facing a crisis in healthcare akin to what we’re facing know in the financial sector. Everyone in the last couple of years saw this coming piece by piece but didn’t want to believe it and it wasn’t until the whole thing was truly in danger of falling apart that in an unprepared way we’re intervening costing the American taxpayers nearly a trillion dollars. The same thing will happen with healthcare. When are we going to learn a lesson? The sooner we act, and it requires bipartisan support of doing that. The sooner we act the better we’ll be. So whoever the president is, I hope the next day whoever the candidate who lost is will reach out and agree to make this one of the priorities that we can heal America by healing its people.

Q: Hi, Rabbi. I’ve always been wondering if it’s a flaw in democracy that on healthcare or when a child graduates from high school, he or she has spent 91% of the time outside of the schools but the schools get blamed for their progress. Whether the politicians because they essentially report to the citizens and are hired by the citizens in our democratic process are afraid to say, hey, if you do what your mother told you to do you can live 11 years longer and reduce our healthcare crisis by eating right, exercise, don’t smoke, don’t drink, etc? What is it about that democratic dynamic that keeps leaders from talking to the citizens about they’ve got a more responsible role in healthcare, education, etc. It’s starting to happen with global warming but…?

Rabbi Saperstein: One of the lesson from the Jewish tradition is that it is not either/or. Judaism created in rabbinic times, again the time that Jesus lived, the first social welfare system in the history of the world. Every community that grew to a certain size had to have taxpayer-supported institutions that provided food, that provided clothing, a burial fund, a money fund for the poor and a school to which every Jewish child rich and poor was entitled to go, actually let me correct that, every Jewish boy, rich and poor was entitled to go. A public system although every Jewish girl was taught to read and write as well. So that we recognize that there had to be, you couldn’t do it through private means alone. But at the same time, it was absolutely clear that even if the government was taking care of all of the poor, every person had to still give tzedakah, literally righteousness because it was requirement but what is known as charity so that we never got out of the habit of doing it and if we took care of all the poor in our community then the money would be used to people who lived further away and if they were taken care of then further away. The rabbis are very explicit about this. And even when the schools were educating people, every parent had an obligation to educate their child as well. So it was not either/or it was both/and. I actually think that in this campaign, Barack Obama has made that argument and knowing what I know about John McCain I think he would agree with it. The direction of where he’s positioned, the focus of his campaign has not been on this particular topic but I’ve worked with him over the years and I actually think both these candidates actually would be inspired by your question to say, you’re absolutely right. We have to call for individual family responsibility even while we’re dealing with societal responsibility and we have to do both if we’re going to make a difference.

Q: Among the five moral challenges that you’ve presented, the issues of global poverty and the inequality in the world don’t figure, I’m fairly sure it would be number six, but I’d love to hear a few comments on it.

Rabbi Saperstein: You know the problem is when they ask me give us five, you’ve got to make some arbitrary decisions. There are things that I’m deeply devoted in my own work to dealing with the HIV/AIDS pandemic, dealing with the malaria, things we can really make a difference on. You know, a half a billion people, hundreds of millions of people suffering from malaria. It could be stopped with a ten dollar net impregnated with insecticide. I mean in the form of an insecticide that is safe for human beings. We know who to deal with a lot of these problems and we know what it takes to greatly slow the HIV epidemic, but between the two by the way, if we don’t do something about it and current trends continue, many areas of Africa, 40% of the kids by the time they are grown will have lost one parent and a very high percentage of these kids are going to be orphans. This is devastating. Then you have the problem of global poverty. Of two billion a year, two billion people this year, that will live on two dollars a day or less. That’s extraordinary in this day in age that that would still be true and the gap between the rich and the poor and rich and poor countries increasing all the time. And we live in a world because of technology, where for the first time in human history all the have-nots know exactly what the haves have and their saying this isn’t right. Two thousand years ago in the Talmud the rabbis wrote the sword enters the world because of justice delayed and justice denied. If we really care about shalom. Shalom is not pax, it’s not the absence of strife. Shalom comes from the word ShLM, to heal, to make whole. If we’re going to heal this world, then dealing with global poverty is front and center as one of the key moral challenges of our times. I really appreciate the question.

Q: What is Reform Judaism in the United States doing to relieve the suffering in the Palestinian refugee camps?

Rabbi Saperstein: First the Reform Jewish movement is, as I said, the largest segment of American Jewry long been outspoken in terms of talking about the legitimate national rights of the Palestinians, call for a Palestinian state fairly early in the evolution of the debates has been critical of Israeli policies, we’re dealing with the settlements called for an end to any expansion of the settlements, critical when that is ignored. I was very alarms to read just this week of the growing violence by settlers against Palestinians and Palestinian communities on the West Bank. We’ve urged Israel to find every way within its legitimate security needs to cut back on the checkpoints and particularly the behavior of some of its soldiers at the checkpoints. You know, this is one of the reasons that Yitzhak Rabin supported Oslo. He said to me and there is no military solution to stopping terrorism. There has to be a political solution and we’re going to find ourselves endlessly policing a growing hostile population if we don’t get out of the status quo. So you know, we want to see both. We want to see a secure Israel free of terrorism, we don’t believe terrorism and history doesn’t hold up, the terrorism came because of Israeli behavior. It came because of the presence of Israel. You know, this prime minister once said, you know, it’s Israel just stopped all military operations, if the Palestinian stopped all military operations today, we could quickly get to resolution of our differences. It is real stopped all military operations today we’d be destroyed. And you know, the terrorists would have free rein here. These are not people who believe in a two-state solution. These are people who want to wipe Israel out. And you know that’s the paradox. In the building of the security barrier actually helps because it stopped a lot of the terrorism but in the end it won’t be a panacea and that’s what alarms me. The whole show that because terrorism has fallen off so much, because of the security barrier, growing numbers of Israelis to favor the two state solution to say let’s just that this way. We can status way indefinitely, but you can’t. The terrorists are trying to find a way over the wall as we’re seeing in Gaza, around the wall coming in by sea, or worst of all if they can’t get over, under or around the wall they’ll start recruiting Israeli-Arabs. And think of the bulldozer incidents in Jerusalem and then you have Iraq at its worst and you have the end of any hope for a peaceful resolution. We’re not just Palestinian, there’s a major collision of every major group, Jewish group America, that is urging vigorously the Israeli government to deal with the problems faced by the 1/5 of the Israeli-Arab citizens who are lagging behind in schools, in infrastructure, in opportunities to participate fully in Israeli society. It’s not that they don’t have in the abstract full of equal rights, they do, far more rights under our definition of freedom than many Arabs who live in Arab countries have. But they are not able to really take advantage of it and that has to stop. We can’t have 1/5 the Israeli people giving up on the Israeli democracy as a way to find full opportunity in freedom so we’re dealing the territories and inside Israel itself on the issue of Palestinian communities.

Q: Good morning Rabbi. I would like to ask you to say a bit more about genocide in Darfur. It seems that some governments, maybe most of them and even some humanitarian groups are reluctant to act decisively out of concern for maintaining relations with the government of Sudan. And it is this a valid concern and if not, how can the new president whoever he is find his way out of this moral dilemma?

Rabbi Saperstein: Well it is very much a valid concern and it’s a great question. There a number of things we can do. First, our relations with China. China is a major trading partner for three of the most problematic areas in the world and that is North Korea, Iran and Darfur. And what China does will have an enormous impact. So the ability of an American president to engage China to be a supporter of resolving these problems, and that requires a combination of economic/political pressure, and diplomatic pressure, on China in this regard is indispensable. So that’s one step that can be taken. The second is we have to get the European union countries to step their engagement. If they were matching the United States does in terms of the economic boycott the pressures and embargoes and sanctions on the Sudanese government because of its behavior, we would be a long way along towards resolving the issue. That’s a place where our respective religious communities, the Jewish community, the Anglican community, the Catholic community in Europe, and in every democratic country, need to be demanding that they step up to the plate as vigorously as possible here. At the same time we have to work closer and more vigorously with the African union to give them the military infrastructure, training, equipment to be a more effective force as a peacekeeping force working under a blue helmeted control. So there are number of things that we can do, the religious community can do, the next president can do and can do pretty quickly if they want to make this a priority here. And as I said, at some point the international community needs to just intervene more vigorously and not allow the Sudanese government to continue to make agreements, back off of them, put obstacles in the way, and just say, okay you made this agreement, we’re coming in here to deal with the implications of that.

Q: Good afternoon, I think its afternoon. You set a lot of marvelous things and you have captured just about every problem in the world, but…and you have everybody sitting here fearful, but what you said was by the power of human and we are finite, limited. It’s by God’s power. God will give the increase, second chronicles 7:14. We’re supposed to pray and have faith in God and believe and trust in the Lord and it’s the Lord you have left out. Don’t you think God is powerful enough to handle his world?

Rabbi Saperstein: Fascinating question, it puts the theological issue front and center so I’m really glad that you put that on the table. There are two different theological view here; one is that God does intervene in history, has the power to solve these problems both in our individual lives and directly by intervening, not by inspiring us, but by intervening in global affairs. Another believes that for whatever reason God is called us to partnership here, perhaps voluntarily withdrawing, and this is one important strand of Jewish theology, God in creating the universe left one part of creation undone purposely. The creation of world justice and peace and then God gave to humanity that which is found nowhere else creation that we know of, gave to us the ability to understand the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, and gave us to con commitment, ability to choose between right and wrong and then entrusted to us in our sacred text a blueprint to how to complete creation and in calling us to be partners, in giving a space to exercise our free choice that we could create a better world, God have ennobled humanity, raised us above mere biological existence and given to our lives meaning, destiny and purpose and if God’s work is to be done here on earth, it will be through our hands as we best understand God calls us to do. Two historic theological approaches to this issue. The Jewish community there is a famous dictum that kind of combines the two and says – pray as if everything depends on God. Act if everything depends on you. And that God has entrusted you to do God’s work here. I choose to align with that liberal theology, but I’m glad we heard the voice offering the other.

Q: Good morning, Rabbi. My question involves the issue of the rights of the mentally disabled. An issue that Governor Palin has raised in regards to her son, Trig. Could you say a few words about that?

Rabbi Saperstein: We have in the Jewish community launch a major new task force to deal with disability issues, both physical and mental, more broadly than we have done in the past to try to make a wall to wall norm of our community to deal with this in the way we arrange our buildings and the access that people have and the ability of disabled people to participate as fully that there differently-abled abilities allow them to do. So we’re coming late to really addressing the so seriously as we should I know that is the experience, unfortunately too many of our religious communities across America. And one group that usually gets left out is the mentally disabled. I get left out of a lot of the health-care the programs and the health-care reforms that are being proposed and we have long advocated staunchly that any serious health-care reform must deal with people of mental illness and mental disabilities. No program can be complete without that and particularly today where the problem of brain injury from disproportionately affecting troops coming back because our body armor, our vehicle armor is so good, and medical care is so good, people would have died in any other war before this our coming back but often having sustained permit physical injuries and brain damage, trauma to brain a disproportionate rate. So we’re going to see escalating numbers of people as we do better with stroke victims, as we do better with people who have had brain injury. So there are real challenges for us. No health-care reform program can succeed that does not deal with the rights and needs of those who are mentally ill and mentally disabled or brain damage and this is an essential, moral and practical concern to us. So thank you.

Dean Lloyd: We have time for only one more question, I’m sorry it must be very brief with a very brief answer in response.

Q: Can’t make this to brief, it encompasses pretty much all that you said. You focused on the prophetic and Jesus traditions of concern for the disadvantaged and people like you work very hard sometimes winning, but we know that in Congress most of the with few exceptions are program only concerned about their reelection and their care of how impassioned constituents will do the next reelection and they believe that the citizens are concerned more about other issues that the ones they talk about other high holidays or church services so it seems to be the $64,000 question how can you get people not just representatives to get higher priority to the values you talk about to convey pet to their elected representatives?

Rabbi Saperstein: Could you just identify yourself?

Q: Burt Wise.

Rabbi Saperstein: You should all know that Burt is one of the great advocates for social justice, he has worked on the hill, off the hill, here and I’ve always proud to have him at my side in terms, or often ahead of me as I follow him on many of these issues. This is a major problem. The poor don’t have the same voice and political power and wealth by definition to assert their needs and we need to both find ways at the same time to empower them to do a far better job to speak for themselves even while we are working with them to do this. So just let me make two points in closing. First, and most fearful politically about the breakdown of civility in our political discourse and cooperation in terms of bipartisan politics. Think about it. In the 20th century, I cannot think of one achievement that my community fought for - the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, the entire mentally that, the Soviet Jewry movement, support for Israel - none that did not happen or that happen without a bipartisan coalition of decency on Capitol Hill, a willingness to people across the aisle to work together to make a difference and to make a difference in the great society programs for the neediest among us. Here today that kind of cooperation is less and less. Political partisan’s stridency and bifurcation is increasingly in the norm. We have to shatter that and as parties pickup the seats and vulnerable seats, they tend to target the moderates of the other parties. After all who wins in a blue district but a liberal moderate Republican, who wins in a red district, but a conservative moderate Democrat? And we’re driving the parties apart by picking off the moderates in between. So we have to get back to bipartisan cooperation. I really believes of these candidates over their careers have stood for that principle and I hope once we get through what I suspect will be increasingly ugly election we can get back to that. And I’m going long on this, indulge me just one more minute to make a point. We live in an extraordinary moment in human history. It is the first time we have had the ability to blow up the world in a nuclear holocaust, to destroy all of God’s creation, to make Orwell’s nightmare of 1984 the reality of the world, to use genetic engineering to create new forms of life, and someone is going to decide will we use our wealth and our power to find peaceful ways for nations to resolve their differences or blow the world, to clean up the damage done to the environment or contaminate, to enhance our freedoms or diminished them, to use genetic engineering to cure birth defects or create Hitler’s master race. Someone will decide but we are also the first generation in all of human history that has the ability to feed every human being on earth, to educate every child, to wipe out diseases that have plagued humanity from time immemorial, to clean up the damage that we do do to the environment. What an extraordinary age to be alive. It is the first generation of all of human history that can make real the dreams are mothers and fathers fought religiously to pass down generation to generation and the one political truth I’ve learned is you have only one choice - really be the authors of those decisions or the audience watching others make those decisions and if you remain silent in the vacuum of your silence will come voices that do not share your dreams, your hopes, your aspirations. So whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, a conservative, a moderate, or a liberal, if ever there were a time to respond to God’s call to be partners in shaping a better and more hopeful world for all God’s children it is that this moment and I only pray as a most fundamental prayer, political prayer I can give that we will respond in a way that will say to God, we have heard, we will obey. We will make your dreams real for all your children. Thank you.

Dean Lloyd: Many, many thanks to Rabbi David Saperstein for this inspiring and energizing presentation this morning. The rabbi will linger for some coffee and conversation in the back but also in just a few moments we begin our 11:15 service and look for you to stay and worship with us. Thank you again for being our guest.