By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
A few days after Passover ends, one local rabbi will be doing what the story of the holiday impels us to do: To make those are enslaved free.
Under the auspices of Village Volunteers, a local volunteer organization, Rabbi Jay Rosenbaum of Mercer Island’s Herzl-Ner Tamid Conservative Congregation will head to Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India to work with a group called New Light, which helps the children of prostitutes rise out of poverty or a fate similar to their mothers’.
He’ll be working with “those kind of kids who are basically headed for that same kind of life itself, were it not for somebody’s intervention,” Rosenbaum said. “The mothers eventually have given up on themselves, but they want their kids to have a future.”
Located in one of the large city’s oldest red light districts. New Light shelters and educates recently born babies to kids as old as 17. Rosenbaum will be helping kids with their studies, their English speaking, and other needs that may be required at the time.
But Rosenbaum did not throw a dart at a map and land on this vibrant, populous country. His interest in India actually stems from his sense of how the world views Israel. And his desire to work with children of prostitutes, women who are, for all intents and purposes, enslaved, comes from the attention he has given in the past decade to the fight for human rights.
“Five or six years ago, Israel was being excoriated in the world press for being the worst human rights [violators] in the history of the planet,” Rosenbaum said. “It seemed to me there was something fundamentally skewed about that — off-base, distorted. I knew that the worst human rights violators were elsewhere in the world.”
He became inspired by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who he believes has single-handedly changed the way Americans look at human rights abuses. He read author Kevin Bales, who has written several books about slavery, and female Muslim journalist Irshad Manji, who has written about human rights in the Middle East outside of Israel.
Rosenbaum came to see that the idea of empowering women, particularly in developing nations where they do not see the same equality they may see in places like the U.S., was the key to moving toward solutions to those abuses.
“If you were to pick one issue that was the key to everything else that’s going on the world today, it’s the issue of women’s rights,” he said, “what might be called global women’s empowerment. It seemed to me if you wanted to pick one solution, it seemed like the education of girls.”
From his reading and attending a conference on human rights specifically for rabbis, Rosenbaum said he discovered that countries with the worst human rights violations — he pointed out Iran in particular — tend to be the most virulent attitudes toward Israel and Jews. Those that do better with women — Turkey, for example — “They enfranchised their women years ago, and it shows in their attitude toward everything,” Rosenbaum said. “I truly believe that a world in which human rights is respected, Israel is respected.”
As Jews, Rosenbaum believes, addressing the plight of what the U.S. State Department estimates are between 4 and 27 million slaves in the world today, is the essence of the religion.
“We were forged out of slavery, so how could we as a people not be standard-bearers when it comes to be addressing this issue?” he asked.
Though slavery holds a particular significance at Passover, it’s an issue he has brought to the pulpit throughout the year — and a reminder for Jews to follow through on the story read each year in the Haggadah of the Exodus from Egypt.
“Passover should be a stimulus for us to fight for freedom in the world,” he said.
It’s that fight for freedom, incidentally, that he thinks attracts people to Judaism.
“As a Jewish people, we need to recover the sense of global mission that is at the core of who we are as Jews,” Rosenbaum told his congregation in a recent sermon about his reasons for taking this trip. “We are not a proselytizing people, but we are about world transformation. We have always thought of ourselves as a change agent for good in the world, since the time of Abraham.”
It’s not a focus inward on saving ourselves that will bring people to participate in this religion, he said. “Our future vitality depends on our marshalling our collective energies towards a meaningful cause, an idealistic purpose.”
Rosenbaum has had human rights on his mind for many years, but he’s also had India on his mind. Aside from the culture and dominant religion, Hinduism, which as a religion about acceptance — “some would even say about resignation,” he said — has long been attractive to Jews, Rosenbaum is interested in seeing first-hand a country that, though it has some of the worst poverty in the world, has addressed its problems and tried to learn from them. India reminds him of Israel, he said, in the way that the traditional and modern butt right up against each other and have to learn how to live in harmony.
“This tension between the old and the new, the ancient and the modern,” he said, “how do you balance that? I see India struggling with those things, I see them succeeding. Without throwing out everything, they’re willing to acknowledge as a country, as a culture, that there are negative things in their past, in their culture, but they don’t want to get rid of it all.”
Rosenbaum says he’s excited about his upcoming experience and hopes to bring what he learns back to his congregation as well as finding ways to apply it to his own life.
“You always learn something about yourself by going outside of yourself and see what other people are doing,” he said.