DARFUR - Be a Warrior for Justice!

Friends,

Last weekend we had a house concert and raised almost $800 for the Sudan Relief Effort spearheaded by American Jewish World Service. With some extra bucks from The Forest Foundation we brought in an awesome singer song-writer and sang the night away for justice. I wanted to share this because I think our houses have a tremendous opportunity and responsibility to not just throw great parties and have fun, but also the potential to raise awareness about important issues and really create warriors for JUSTICE. Darfur is a genocide happening in our lives and we each can do more to affect change. I encourage you all to check out: http://www.ajws.org/index.cfm?section_id=2&sub_section_id=2&page_id=296 and make a donation, throw a house benefit, print out an info sheet and put it on your fridge, etc. Just cause Darfur is not on the front page, doesn't mean that 450,000 people have not been killed since 2003!

Purim is about turning suffering into joy and Pesach is about liberation and freeing the captives. I encourage us each to ACT for Darfur... from our HOMES and beyond.

Shalom, Alyson


PS. A charge offered by one of my heroes, Rabbi Harold Schulweis.

Sudan and Our Response

Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis, August 26, 2005

What have we to do with a people we do not know, in a land we have not visited? What have we to do with people of another faith, another culture, another civilization? Have we Jews not sufficient burdens of our own? Is the struggle against anti-Semitism not enough for
us? Are we so numerous that we can take on the suffering of others not our kinsmen?

We Jews see with ancient eyes. We have seen the torture, the starvation, the death by disease, the rapes, the abandonment by the civilized world before.

We Jews possess a terrible knowledge, an awesome wisdom we gained not out of books,but out of our own bodies. A knowledge out of the testimony of numbers seared into the skin of living human beings and the stench of burned flesh.

We see with ancient eyes: We are eye witnesses to the consequences of the callousness of lethal silence. We offer testimony to the morbid symptoms of apathy, the moral laryngitis that strangles the voice of protest.

We see with ancient eyes: Embassies shut down, visa denied, borders sealed off, refugee ships returned to the ports that transported the persecuted into the furnaces of hell. And we know what happens when churches are complicit with the killers of the dream.

With ancient eyes we see Darfur with a shock of recognition. We experience a collective deja vu even as we speak. More than two million frightened souls fleeing homes in Darfur/400,000 helpless people murdered/the terror of the Janjaweed, which in Arabic is derived from “jan”—which means “evil”, and “jawed”—which means “horsemen,” soldiers on horses with swords, whips and truncheons, beating down a people and trampling them.

We heard before the treacherous excuses, the lying alibis, the rationalizations from church and state and international bodies. We count six million alibis. They said: What can we do? We are too few, too weak, too exhausted, the enemy too implacable. Do we not have a prior responsibility to our own church, to our own parish, to our own congregants?
Are these reports really genocide or just propaganda?

We Jews remember what we expected sixty years ago. We prayed and hoped for a cry/ a protest from out of the basilica, from out of the nave, from out of the cathedral, some proclamation of a fast, some decision to march in public, some demonstration on to the streets and marketplaces, some sob of conscience that could pierce the hardness of the heart:

Can we do less? Like the Psalmist we cry to God into the ears of man:
“Rouse Yourself—why do You sleep?
Awaken—why do You hide Your face and ignore our affliction?”