This coming Thursday, September 20, is scheduled to be the final day of hearings by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Mr. Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to a life-time seat on the Supreme Court.

Thursday  is also the day after Yom Kippur.

There is a traditional Jewish practice that on the evening after the break-fast meal at the end of Yom Kippur, the community drives the first nail in building its sukkah. This practice embodies our commitment that –

• after prayers for compassion from the Breath of Life to us and from ourselves to others,
• after prayers that we turn ourselves to affirm our deepest inner truth through action,
• after hearing the outcry of the Prophet Isaiah on behalf of the poor and the prisoners,
• we actually take action to begin the building of the sukkah.

To build the house that trembles in the wind, the house where refugees were welcome 3000 years ago as we fled slavery in Egypt, the house that is open to the earthiness of wind and sun and rain, the house that welcomes and celebrates the seventy nations of the world.

I think that on Thursday, a strong opposition to Mr. Kavanaugh’s confirmation would help build the sukkah of an America that is suffering the suffocation of compassion and justice by its government  -- a suffocation that would become worse if Mr. Kavanaugh takes a seat in the Supreme Court.   

So I urge that it is at all possible for you, please come at 9 a.m. on Thursday to the Hart Senate Office Building  at Constitution Ave NE & 2nd St NE, Washington, DC 20002. There will be powerful options for both people who want and people who don’t want to risk arrest in  an act of nonviolent civil disobedience --while in either mode they oppose confirmation of Mr. Kavanaugh..

You can register at bit.ly/nokavanaugh but do not need to. If you are coming from a distance, registration may help the organizers try to provide travel subsidies.

Whether or not you can come to DC on Thursday, please start NOW, today, calling two Republican women senators whose votes could tip the balance. Call 202-224-3121 and ask for Senator Collins of Maine. Talk with her staff or leave a recorded message.  Then call again and ask for Sen. Murkowski of Alaska.

Why do I suggest taking these extraordinary steps?

All the evidence we have suggests that Mr Kavanaugh is a smooth and polite Donald Trump.  

For example:

He has refused to say outright that the Roe v. Wade decision that women have a Constitutional right to choose an abortion is settled law, and he has explicitly said the Supreme Court could reverse its decision.  

He was himself directly responsible for trying to prevent a 17-year-old girl who had applied for asylum as a refugee from having an abortion she desperately wanted and needed, and was reversed by a higher official only after delaying so long that the choice was much more complicated.

Just yesterday afternoon, California professor Christine Blasey Ford told the Washington  Post that Kavanaugh and a male friend of his corralled her in a bedroom during a gathering at a house in Maryland in the early 1980s. She says that both boys were "stumbling drunk" and that the friend watched as Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed and clumsily tried to pull off her clothes.

She said she tried to scream and Kavanaugh covered her mouth with his hand.

Ford says she escaped when Kavanaugh's friend jumped on top of them and they tumbled.

The now-53-year-old Kavanaugh denies the allegation.

Ford says she didn't reveal what happened until 2012 during couples therapy with her husband. The Post’s article included an interview with Ms. Ford’s husband and her lawyer, Debra Katz, and described a therapist’s notes from 2012 in which Ms. Ford told of the attack.

Meanwhile, evidence has emerged that strongly suggests Kavanaugh lied under oath during his confirmation hearings for his present judgeship. The issue is whether he knew of the theft of important correspondence of a Democratic Senator by a Republican Party operative. Kavanaugh denied knowing. Newly found emails suggest he did.

His views about the “previous conditions” provision of the Affordable Care Act and about strong regulations to control CO2 and methane emissions suggest he would probably throw them out.

The Trump Administration has refused to release records about his views on US use of torture when he worked for the Bush Administration during the Iraq War. There is no public evidence he objected, and it is very likely he supported the use of torture.

And his statements about Presidential power suggest he would oppose even subpoenaing the President who has appointed him, let alone indicting him, though he supported such actions against President Bill Clinton.  He refused to commit to recuse himself, even on grounds of personal conflict of interest, if such an issue arose before the Court.  

 All this suggests to me that he holds views directly opposite to those of the Prophet Isaiah whose prophetic words we continue to hear every Yom Kippur, 2500 years after he said them.

I urge us to stand with Isaiah.

Shalom, salaam, paz, peace --  Arthur

 Are you surprised to hear that President Trump and Judge Kavanaugh, his nominee for a lifetime post on the Supreme Court, might appear in a text that is about 2500 years old?

Read Deuteronomy Chapter 17: 14-20 --  a section often called Perek HaMelekh, “Passage on the King.”

The passage is worried about the possibility that an Israelite king might turn himself into a tyrant, like Pharaoh.

So it  starts out by setting limits on the power and behavior of a king, and then it tries to create a way of enforcing these limits. .

The king must not act haughtily toward the people – that is, with contempt.

The king may not multiply gold and silver for himself.

The king may not multiply wives/ women for himself.

The king may not multiply horses. (Horse chariots were the jet bombers of the day, weapons for an aggressive imperial army like that of Egypt’s Pharaoh). 

What’s more, the king may not send the people back into Mitzrayyim (the Tight and Narrow Place, which in Hebrew is the name of Egypt) to buy horses for himself. (That is, he may not oppress the people by imposing taxes or forced service so he can pay for an oppressive army).  

And the king must every day of his life read --  under supervision by the levitical priests --  the Torah passages that restricted his powers and protected the poor. 

 Under priestly supervision – ahhh, that is what the Torah hoped would keep him under control. For the Kohanim, the priests, members of the Tribe of Levi, were utterly independent of the king. They had religious power to come close to God, YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh -- the Interbreathing Spirit of the world. The Breath of Life.

They were not appointed by the king. They were not members of the king’s family. Not even of his tribe, since they were descendants of Levi, like Moses and Aaron and Miriam, and the kings were descendants of David, of the tribe of Benjamin.

 When the heirs of the Maccabees, the Hasmonean kings, broke this ancient Constitution by merging the priesthood and the kingship, they turned out to be terrible kings. Among other things, they sold out Israelite independence to a foreign power --  Rome.

Why does all this matter? So Torah seeks to limit the power of a king, as do the US Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. Why does this matter to us today?

Because it embodies wisdom that speaks through centuries and millennia  --  not just about a single generation’s crises, fears, desires. It is a wisdom that our culture today often, though not always, seeks to learn from  -- precisely because it embodies what has lasted.

Surely that wisdom, like the US Declaration and Constitution, was flawed. The Bible, for example,  assumes and often seems to endorse the subjugation of women. (In how the furthest reaches of the Bible see the great arc of the human future, not so; but that is another exploration.)  So did the original US framing documents, as well as the subjugation of Blacks.

Yet some wisdom even deeper has kept moving the adherents of both sets of framing Teachings to keep trying to move beyond those subjugations to a fuller sense of human dignity. What we call the “spirituality” of the Bible is a distillation of a wise relationship of a small tribe to all that is greater than itself – to the great round Earth, to the other cultures (“strangers”), to its own future, its great-grandchildren, to the over-arching Mystery of how we came into physical, biological, and cultural existence in the first place.

So it behooves us in our perilous present moment to recall that the Bible was and is worried about the concentration of power in a single human’s hands.

All right. Let us look with eyes wide open at our present.

We have an elected king who speaks of his own people – Blacks, Latinos,  the free and independent-minded press, Muslims, women with contempt (“haughtiness above his kinfolk”).  

Who speaks and sometimes acts toward women as mere objects of his own pleasure (“multiplying wives”).

Who has used his own power before and since becoming “king” to cheat workers and contractors, to make secret deals,  to hide his finances from the public (“multiplying gold and silver for himself”).

Who threatens other nations with ”fire and fury” and who seeks a trillion dollars to “modernize” a nuclear arsenal that can already destroy all life on Earth several times over, and who is planning to erase the bright line between nuclear and other weapons by producing “small” nuclear weapons for battlefield use (“multiplying horses for his army”).

And who now seeks to appoint to the Supreme Court – our nearest effort at inventing the independent check of the Levitical priesthood --  a man whose previous record indicates willingness to support the “king’s” hostility to women’s rights, to workers’ rights, to efforts to heal the Earth.

Whose previous record suggests support for such egregious misuses of kingly powers as the use of torture. A man who is opposed to even the limited possibility of subpoenaing the “king” to testify under oath.

All this while the “king” himself is already under very serious clouds of possible violations of the Constitution and the laws. And when his appointee, if confirmed, would probably be a crucial weigh-in for how this sacred body of the Court would vote.

So for all these reasons, I urge you, all members and readers of The Shalom Center, and all your friends, to call 1202-224-3121. To ask for your Senators and Congressmember.

What could they do? They could oppose with every nonviolent means the confirmation of Judge Kavanaugh. They could, for example, use legitimate parliamentary rules to hold all Congressional decision-making in suspense  until the Senate Judiciary Committee tables the nomination. They could demand roll-call votes on “ordinary” business instead of giving unanimous consent. The future of our Constitution and our freedom is at stake; this is no time for “ordinary” measures.  

Demanding this kind of action is not just “politics.” It upholds what the Bible itself taught was and is a crucial part of the spiritual health of a community committed to human dignity.

Call 1202-224-3121.

With blessings of joyful action in this coming new year, this Time of Transformation,  for the sake of human dignity – Arthur

We Offer a Handbook for Your Own ICE Action

Dear friends,

. Many of you were stirred by the story of our nonviolent civil disobedience action confronting ICE. Many have written to ask how you could make a difference in your own communities about the Trumpist attacks on refugees and immigrants, especially at the southern border and especially against families  -- sending little children to prison camps.

So I am writing to describe how our action emerged, how we organized it, and what the results were.

To help you even more to create your own actions, here at The Shalom Center we have set up a small collection of items from the ICE action at which we were arrested: our press release, a “Did you know?” list about the back history of social chaos in some Central American countries, the program we used of chants and songs. We offer it to you as a model, a handbook,  to use and modify if you find it helpful in your own situation. It is at  <https://theshalomcenter.org/ICEActionHandbook> 

The story begins on June 20.  Someone I had known in the ‘60s in a different city called me to ask whether I would be interested in a possible direct action challenging ICE. I said I was. He said he had been talking with five or six other people who were veterans of the movement to end the US War against Vietnam, and they too were interested.

We worked out a date when somewhere between six and 10 of these people could gather, and we met. Most of the people were new to Phyllis and me, and we were clear about the need to ask how the people in the room whom we did know could vouch for the people we didn't know. They did.

When we were set, a couple of people reviewed some ideas about what we could do to keep alive the issue of brutal treatment of refugees and immigrants. After Trump had issued the Executive Order, some of us wondered whether the energy around the issue would now die out. Phyllis, with great energy, said that the children ripped away from their parents were already being deeply traumatized and that for her the most immediate demand is for the children at once to be reunited with their families. It was already clear that Trump’s executive order did not address that question at all, and she was burning with the need to end the devastation and traumatization of these families.

Most of the people in the room agreed. So then we focused on choosing a specific action

The 40th Day: Birthing the Poor Peoples Campaign.

A Letter from Rabbis Arthur Waskow & Phyllis Berman

[Rabbi Waskow is director of The Shalom Center. Rabbi Berman founded and for 37 years directed an innovative and intensive school for adult immigrants and refugees from all around the wprld to learn English and America, and has a special concern about attacks on immigrants and refugees by the present US government.]

Dear friends,

The two of us had an extraordinary Shabbat day before yesterday (June 23) in Washington DC, from two perspectives: a Jewish perspective on the vision and work of the Poor Peoples Campaign, and the wonderfully multi-issue, multi-“identity” fusion vision and work of the Poor Peoples Campaign itself.   It was the 40^th day and the culmination of the nation-wide work so far, which involved  thousands in nonviolent civil disobedience  in state capitals all across the country.  This day was intended to be a beginning, not an end. 

As Rabbi Jeff Roth taught us, the recurrent "״"40 motif in the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospels may be rooted in the real length of human pregnancy –- 40 weeks, not 9 months. So the Poor Peoples Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival  began with Mother’s Day and lasted 40 days of pregnant maturation, to be born for a new life yesterday as a continuing movement. 

The Jewish perspective first:  Since the Poor Peoples Campaign had chosen a Saturday for this action, the Reform movement could have chosen either to keep hands totally off (which for some years had been their stance on social-justice actions called for Shabbat) or to enter with a strong Jewish action that flowed from Shabbat and into Shabbat. Their choice did a lot to bring Jewish and even more multireligious and spiritual depth and breadthinto the Poor Peoples Campaign action. We say "even more" because all along, the Poor People's Campaign has shaped itself as a "National Call to Moral Revival."

The Reform movement's Temple Sinai Erev Shabbat service and the 45-minute Shabbat morning service sponsored  by their Religious Action Center were rich and creative. (Full disclosure of one dimension of why we felt good about it: : On Friday evening, to our utter surprise,  Rabbi Jonah Pesner, head of the RAC, singled Arthur out among clergy present for having been a prophetic voice long ago and still. That certainly felt  good.)   

There was fine singing, and pointed comments from old or new tradition (e.g.  a passage from Michael Walzer about living everywhere in some version of "Egypt";  Rabbi Rami Shapiro’s Ahavah rabbah).  As part of the service Friday night, Reverend Barber gave a brilliant sermon on the various aspects of what the Poor Peoples Campaign is doing.  And after he spoke, all the multireligious clergy present (lots!!) were invited to come up and physically bless Rev. Barber with the Priestly Blessing, Birkat Kohanim. Incredibly powerful moment!  

 For  Shabbos morning, for the 45-minute pre-Rally Shabbat service a multitude of rabbis and Rev. Liz Theoharis, the co-chair of Poor Peoples Campaign, were given  roles --  each of the rabbis in tiny slivers, so that many could take part. Arthur was invited to lead the Torah blessings. It seemed to be not an opportunity to teach in any way, till Phyllis suggested he use his responsibility for the Barchu and the brochas to teach the meaning of our new forms of the Brachot, and that we have ready a leaflet with our alternative version of them so that people could use them if they wished. 

So that’s what we did, and he was able to get across at least a hint of why “Ruach Ha'Olam” ("Breathing Spirit of the wprld") instead of “Melech Ha'Olam” (”King of the world") and “Yahhhh” (simply a breathing sound) instead of “Adonai, Lord.” About half the aliyah-niks – called up for one Aliyah honoring people who had done nonviolent civil disobedience for the Poor Peoples Campaign --  used the alternative version of the brochas. 

Then Arthur added one more piece. Why, he asked,  are we doing “Barchu” (the prayer "Let us bless," calling us into community) for the Torah service anyway, after doing it already at the beginning of the Service? Aren’t we already a community? He said it was to teach us that becoming a community is not a one-shot deal, like getting onto a plateau and that’s it. We have to keep growing into an ever fuller community. 

And then he  said that in our case, for our day, we need to grow our community to include Central American families who are fleeing terrible violence,  and he quoted the Torah verse that prohibits sending runaway slaves or serfs back to their masters –- instead,  they must be allowed to live anywhere they choose “within our gates.”  And the Torah adds, "Do not maltreat them!" (Deut. 23: 15-16)  There was a strong murmur of support for that. 

After the brief morning service,  the Poor Peoples Campaign began its “rally” around the 5 major issue-clusters it had proclaimed. Direct front-line victims / survivors spoke.  That was really great.  PPC really tried to and mostly did join “a face” with “a fact.” That is, it was in many ways a multi-issue teach-in, focusing on facts of poverty, racial oppression, eco-devastation, etc., each spoken by someone who was suffering in the result.  Live-streamed nationally & internationally. Interspersed with songs from great social-justice choirs. 

Then there was a two-hour march around the Smithsonian campus. The march was itself a community. We met up with friends from Philadelphia who had come to DC that morning and with a number of people whom Arthur had known when he lived in DC 30+ years ago, and we made connections with folks we had never met before.

Last time we took part in a Poor Peoples Campaign action,  the heat and long walk had exhausted Arthur before we could get to the arrest site. So this time we borrowed a light-weight foldable wheel chair from a temporary-lending collection of the Germantown Jewish Centre.  Phyllis was the chief wheel-pusher, AND a number of people --  some good friends from Philly, some total strangers -- were wonderful about taking a turn to push. Community-building is the destination, community-building is the path.

Tonight, the two of us are flying to El Paso TX to visit one of the refugee child “detention centers” (prisons).   The delegation we are in includes several other rabbis and other clergy. It is being organized by the American Federation of Teachers out of the commitment of teachers to childreen, and its president, Randi Weingarten, will take part. . We’ll write more afterward.

In our joy over this wonderful birthing of the next stage, let us not forget the pain of children and their families ripped apart at the border, not yet reunited. Please link to <https://theshalomcenter.org/civicrm/petition/sign?sid=25&reset=1> to sign a petition for reuniting them NOW, and for making asylum a reality, as the Bible, US law, treaties the US ratified, and the best instincts of the American people all require. "You who have fled your beloved homes for fear of horrifying violence, come live where you choose within our gates."

May the week ahead be filled with our creating sparks of holiness as we respond to lightning flashes of cruelty---

Shalom,  Phyllis & Arthur