“Once there was a very oppressive king,” she began, on the final day of last month’s symposium on “Theologies of Forgiveness and the Politics of Reconciliation: An International Colloquium on Human Rights.”
This king was so oppressive that his subjects delegated an old man to talk to him. The old man took the king out in a boat on the village lake. When they had rowed to the middle of the lake, the old man took out a drill and started drilling a hole under his seat. The king panicked.
“Not to worry,” the old man said. “I’m only drilling a hole under my seat.”
Just like the old man and the king, we’re all in the same boat, Soifer told the audience. There are no “others” in the kingdom.
“I try to live justly but find myself a party to gross injustice,” said Soifer. “I am a U.S. citizen and therefore participate willingly or unwillingly [in actions] that oppress others both within and without this country.”
Soifer, along with Don Goertzen, Cheryl Kirk-Duggan and James Noel, all of Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union, discussed issues surrounding racial and social injustice. They noted that even if one is neither a direct perpetrator nor a victim, one still can suffer the effects.
Noel, a professor at the GTU’s San Francisco Theological Seminary, said racism dates back to the Renaissance and is economically rooted. Today racism is insidious and sometimes elusive, he said.
“We have racism without racists,” he said, contrasting institutions with the people who run them. “Institutions can be run to the detriment of people of color without racists behind them.”
Another problem in confronting racism today is definitional.
“When a sufficient number of white people are willing to undergo a purging crucifixion to destroy their white identity, then the possibility exists” for ending racism, Noel said.
Noel did allow that the possibility for some justice existed, however.
GTU Professor Kirk-Duggan advocated a holistic approach to forgiveness and reconciliation.
“Forgiveness is reciprocal,” she said, and went on to suggest introspection.
“If I didn’t do wrong this time, what have I done in the past?”
The tendency to compartmentalize must be resisted, she said.
“Religion involves people, politics and power,” Kirk-Duggan said. “[We have to figure out] how to talk about God. With God we can live in peace.”
Goertzen, a Ph.D. student at GTU, said he has two ribbons, one black and one red, on a wall at home. The black one is for mourning, the red represents struggle. The ribbons were distributed at the funeral of a young man in the Philippines who was tortured and killed, according to Goertzen, because he was suspected of putting up anti-American posters.
Goertzen lived in the Philippines for several years, working for human rights organizations. He said he witnessed human rights violations by American imperialism on an institutional level and by personal actions. He described American solders on leave in Manila attacking and raping local women.
“They had no burden of guilt,” Goertzen said. “No burden of responsibility.”
When U.S. troops finally left the Philippines, he said, they left toxic contamination behind at their bases.
Soifer discussed abuses in Latin America — and the possibility for healing. In the early 1980s, she went to Nicaragua as a representative of Witnesses for Peace. Of the 30 participants, she was the only Jew. Her goal was to see the effects of U.S. policies and to stand in solidarity with the Nicaraguan people.
Shortly after arriving, Soifer noticed an interesting phenomenon.
“The bullets subsided wherever the group went,” Soifer said, suggesting that too much shooting and the possibility of injuring or killing a member of the group was bad public policy. She came up with the idea of messianic pragmatism: With enough groups in enough places, she said, maybe all the shooting would subside.
But solutions are not so simple.
“Domestic racism is so complex, we have to take one problem at a time and find the best way to deal with it,” said Noel.
He used a story told by black activist Jamil Al-Amin (the former H. Rap Brown) to illustrate his point — that a lot of the problem comes down to who holds the power.
One day, he said, all the banks announced that the next day they would pay one dollar for every rock brought in. African-American men stayed up all night collecting rocks and the next day arrived at the banks with piles of rocks. After they were all paid off, the banks announced that from now on, rocks would be the American currency.
“You have to be the one making the rules,” Noel said.
Sometimes interim solutions end up creating their own set of problems, panelists said.
“Affirmative action originally was to level the playing field,” Kirk-Duggan said . “Then quotas caused problems and created resentments.”
Any solution has to be both personal and political, a product of the head and heart, Soifer said.
“Tikkun olam [healing the world] and tikkun hanefesh [healing the soul], this is what I try to do as a rabbi,” she said.
Returning to her parable, she asked: What if an old woman rather than an old man had called upon the oppressive king?
First, she probably would have invited him over for Shabbat dinner. So nu? He would have met her children, and the king and the woman would show each other pictures of their grandchildren. They would enjoy chicken and challah together. Through this interchange they would recognize the humanity in one another and see that they are truly part of one family.
And once aboard that sinking boat, the two would “get back to shore and immediately start making changes,” Soifer said.
The symposium was sponsored by the GTU, the Shalom Hartman Institute of Jerusalem, the Center for Human Rights and Institute for International Studies at U.C. Berkeley, and Lehrhaus Judaica, with a grant from the Jewish Community Endowment Fund of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation.