Rabbis For Human Rights - North America

Conferences

"Which is greater, study or action? Rabbi Tarfon spoke up and said: Action is greater. Rabbi Akiva spoke up and said: Study is greater. The others then spoke up and said: Study is greater because it leads to action." (Babylonian Talmud, Kiddushin 40B)

Human Rights in the Abrahamic Faiths: Opening and Closing Remarks

Human Rights in the Abrahamic Faiths: Opening and Closing Remarks

Good Morning.

It is a joy to be here with all of you---students and  colleagues and friends and  fellow congregants.

Some of you may have read Jane Mayer's recent book, The Dark Side, which chronicles the recent abuses of law in our country, in particular at Guantanamo. She reports the case of Alberto Mora, the lawyer for the Navy, a Republican and supporter of the Iraq war. When he was told about what was going on at Guantanamo, he sought out more information and pursued the story.   He was asked later why he had done so, at great cost to his own career, while others had looked away. His response: If I had not, my mother would have killed me.

That may be the reason some of us here today as well.

For me, it helps that I had the privilege of being a congregant of Brian Walt for 18 years.

I thank Brian for the privilege of moderating an interreligious  panel on this day.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose 60th anniversary we mark on wednesday, grew out of a meeting of people of different faiths--men and women who overcame great cultural divides to craft together a document that became the parent of the contemporary human rights movement.

As you know, the UDHR emerged during a brief window of time after the horrors of WWII and before the Cold War, a time when a world tired of war, came together to dream of something new. The idea was revolutionary--to articulate a vision of the rights that every man and womoan in every country should share, regardless of the government under which they lived, regardless of what religion(if any) grounds their understanding of the source of human dignity.

Rabbi Joshua Boettiger, when he was a student at RRC, introduced me to a wonderful book about Eleanor  Roosevelt and her work as the chair of the commission that drafted this historic document. A WORLD MADE NEW by Mary Ann Glendon provides an understanding of what was at stake for Eleanor---recently widowed and still grieving, unsure of herself in her new role.

Eleanor's Christian faith was at the heart of why she did what she did as well as how she had the spiritual strength to do it. She also understood that others would come to this enterprise with different language, different beliefs. In the end, she hoped that the standards they could agree to articulate could become "a bridge to walk across."

Today we are going to hear from three individuals who represent historic religious traditions that teach the sacred, unique and invioble nature of each human life in their own ways. But as Eleanor said, "the ideals carry no weight unless the people know them, understand them and demand that they be lived."

So our scholars today not only can tell us how their traditions root the ideals of human rights in their sacred texts, they are also people who spend time in their communities, teaching these ideals and ask ing their co-religionists to demand that they be lived.

I hope that this morning we can talk about the challenges each of us face in our own faith communities teaching these values which are so core to our understanding of what it means to be religious.  Perhaps we can help each other; we can use our challenges as "bridges to walk across."

(Introduce the three speakers)

Closing:  Each night while in Europe, leading  the commisison writing the UDHR,   Eleanor Roosevelt would say the same prayer.  With your permission, I will close our time together by reading this prayer.

God, who has set a restlessness in our hearts and made us all seekers after that which we can never fully find,  forbid us to be satisfied  with what we make of life. Draw us from base content and set our eyes on far-off goals.  Keep us at tasks too hard for us that we may driven to Thee for strength.
Deliver us from fretfulness and self-pitying; make us sure of the good we cannot see and the hidden good in the world. Open our eyes to simple beauty all around us and our hearts to the loveliness men hide from us because we do not try to understand them. Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of a world made new.
Amen.