Where does our moral responsibility end?
That was the question I confronted at Campus Progress‘s national conference yesterday in Washington, DC. Campus Progress, a division of the liberal flagship Center for American Progress, is a group dedicated to bringing the concerns of college students to the fore of the US political discourse. Think of it as the gentile, political, richer version of New Voices. The conference focused on domestic issues like unemployment, college tuition and health care but also took an international view by addressing issues like climate change, the war in the Congo and the genocide in Darfur.
The Darfur piece grabbed my attention the most as the conference highlighted it through showing excerpts of a documentary called “Three Points” about NBA star Tracy McGrady’s trip to a Sudanese refugee camp in Chad. Josh Rothstein, whose name told me enough to determine his religion, directed the film.
Rothstein’s Jewishness, combined with the power of his film and the spirit of global responsibility that the conference’s presenters instilled in students there, led me to consider how much we, as Jews, have a responsibility to focus our attention on problems that don’t affect our community.
This question has been asked before and finds an answer in the successes of the American Jewish World Service (AJWS), of which I’m a proud alum, having gone on a trip with them to Nicaragua at the beginning of 2007 and worked for them in Iowa that summer. AJWS exists to organize Jews to help the developing world, the only Jewish American group created for that purpose. We learned in our experiences with AJWS–and I still believe–that as Jews we have a moral imperative grounded in our texts and traditions to help those in dire need, whether Jewish or not, thereby “sanctifying God’s name” and our reputation as a people, religion, nation, whatever. That point emerged again at the convention yesterday, as Campus Progress, an organization whose purpose is to help students here in the US, dedicated some of its time and resources to crises existing far beyond the scope of most college students’ lives.
So the question came back to me, this time not as a student but as the editor of a magazine dedicated to the Jewish college community. I applaud the efforts of AJWS but what does that say about the responsibility of New Voices to address those issues? My last three blog posts, I believe, have been about Jews in rock n’ roll, Jews in Israel and Jews in Israel–exciting topics, to be sure, but of the same importance as thousands of people dying in West Africa? And in a sense, these issues are Jewish college issues: Jews have been at the front of many Save Darfur campus movements and the Holocaust angle is a gimme.
But on the other hand, the magazine is not one dedicated to developing world issues, nor is the Jewish Federation focused on helping non-Jews in need. Jewish organizations, whether journalistic or political, exist for a niche population and have a responsibility to serve that population, just like FirstPoland.com exists to serve the Polish population of Chicago. Jewish American issues, perhaps like Polish American issues, do not center around life and death but do deserve scrutiny and comment nonetheless.
So the issue is less whether niche Jewish organizations are justified or whether Jews should pay attention to global poverty issues (the answer to both those questions is “yes”), but rather how much attention we need to pay. Jews invest so much money and time into their own issues; should some of that go to those who need it more? When have we as Jews done our part? Weere does our moral responsibility end?
I’m tempted to say that it never does, that as long as problems exist on the scale that they do now, we can never rest. But that’s impossible and to give ourselves that knid of burden would be unhealthier than gefilte fish from before Passover.
I have no answer to that question. It is, however, a question worth asking.
