"As Jews, We Have a Moral Responsibility" - United Synagogue’s Social Action and Public Policy Committee

by Joanne Palmer

The Jewish community is a network. All of us are bound to each other with invisible spider silk, flexible but sticky and extraordinarily strong.

We sometimes forget that we are also bound to the larger communities in which we live. We depend on the world around us for the civil infrastructure of our lives, and we, like everyone else, are responsible to and for the world around us.

In his role as executive director of United Synagogue’s Mid-Atlantic region, Lewis Grafman tends to the ties that bind us to each other in the Conservative Jewish community. In his other role – and yes, he does have two full-time jobs – as interim director of United Synagogue’s Committee on Social Action and Public Policy, Lew helps us understand and work on our responsibilities to the outside world.United Synagogue’s Social Action and Public Policy committee has both a twofold mission and a twofold approach, Lew says. First, on the social action front, the committee helps synagogues’ own social action committees – often called gemilut chasidim or tikkun olam – to develop their own policies and programs. Second, it arranges some programming on the international level. Our hurricane relief effort so far has raised more than $800,000 for New Orleans and the storm-ravaged cities of the Gulf coast and Florida; the project is still ongoing. We are working with Congregation Beth Israel in Biloxi, Mississippi, on Tzohar Biloxi. Through that effort we will encourage Conservative Jews to go to the Gulf coast, even if just for a few days at a time, to held rebuild; we will match their skills to the available needs.

On the public policy side, the committee, sometimes on its own, sometimes as part of the Conservative movement, looks at general political, moral, or cultural issues through a specifically Jewish – or even more specifically, Conservative Jewish – lens. It restricts itself to North American domestic issues – other groups handle the movement’s relationship with Israel. This month, the committee is focused on two programs; together, the two say much about the Conservative approach to the world around us. The United States government has said that what is happening in Darfur is genocide. It is impossible for most of us to imagine the horrors of the carnage there, but as the direct descendants of Holocaust victims, and the survivors of those Jews who died before they had a chance to have their own direct descendants, we know that we cannot sit by and let genocide happen. The Social Action and Public Policy committee is working closely with the group savedarfur – in fact, United Synagogue is one of that group’s sponsors.Save Darfur is working to make April 2 through April 9 the National Week of Prayer and Learning for Darfur.

During that week, the group urges, synagogues should set aside time to educate and inspire their members to insist that our government do whatever it can to stop the genocide. It's not too late to email the organization to learn more about the program and incorporate some of its suggestions. The program includes material that can be read at services on Shabbat HaGadol, April 8.

United Synagogue and Save Darfur also runs a postcard campaign. The cards, with the logos of United Synagogue and other Conservative groups, are to ask President Bush to take action. On April 30, the Social Action and Public Policy Committee will join with many other organizations, both Jewish and non-Jewish, both faith-based and secular, in a rally in Washington on April 30. We hope that anyone who possibly can will join us there.

“As Jews, we have a moral responsibility to speak out against ethnic cleansing and genocide,” Lew says. “And we can’t just speak out. We have to take action.”

May 22 and 23, together, are Advocacy Day. As it did last year, United Synagogue is joining with the Rabbinical Assembly to go to Washington to lobby legislators on issues important to us as a movement. United Synagogue has taken positions on matters ranging from civil rights to how to deal with some mainline churches’ divestment from Israel to religious freedom in the workplace; issues are brought to the committee’s attention, the committee debates them, decides on its stand, and then presents its work for consideration by either the biennial convention or United Synagogue’s board of directors. At Advocacy Day, participants meet with prominent members of Congress and the administration; this year meetings are tentatively planned with Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), the House’s deputy majority whip, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-NY); Rep. Ben Cardin (D-MD); and Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY), among others. Participants also will have the chance to meet with their own representatives, and will be offered training sessions on effective advocacy. Advocacy Day is open to members of United Synagogue’s affiliates; for information, click here or email Lew Grafman at grafman@uscj.org.

Lew, an attorney who practiced law for almost 30 years before joining United Synagogue as regional director, is a lifelong Conservative Jew. He is tied in many ways to the web of his community; he’s a former president of his synagogue, Har Zion Temple in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, a former president of his local central agency for Jewish education, and sits on the board of trustees of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia. “I’ve always gravitated toward Jewish communal work,” he says. “It’s deeply ingrained in me.” Now, he’s able to put all those strands together – his many years of legal experience, his deep Jewish background in both synagogue and communal work as both a lay leader and a professional – as he helps United Synagogue pursue justice.

“Why do we do it?” he says, when asked why American Jews should care so much about issues that do not touch their lives. “We do it because that’s the core of who we are.”