As a child of the Reform Movement, the core value of social justice has always been a guiding force in my life. Most kids’ bedtime stories were fairy tales and Beverly Cleary. My mother read to me from Al Vorspan’s “To Do Justly: A Junior Casebook for Social Action.”
In elementary school, I wore a bracelet with a refusnik’s name on it and marched for Soviet Jewry. In tenth grade, I secured a speaker for a pro-choice program, and ended up introducing her. To my surprise, I was forever after labeled a radical, militant feminist.
During rabbinical school, I was unsure what I wanted my rabbinate to be. I thought perhaps I would go into academia. But during my first year, our class met with an amazing rabbi who told us of his social justice work in Washington, D.C., on behalf of the Reform Movement. He spoke of his activism in defense of the poor and disenfranchised. This rabbi was Rabbi David Saperstein, the Director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism (RAC), one of the premier and most influential agencies of Reform Judaism.
It had never occurred to me that I could make a career out of doing what I had always been taught was something we all just did, something that was part of what it meant to be Jewish. I decided that was what I wanted my rabbinate to be.
Next year the RAC celebrates its 50th anniversary. In those years, the RAC has been at the center of some of the most important social justice movements in our country’s history.
Both the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act were drafted in the RAC’s conference room. In 1968, the Reform Movement took a leadership role in the anti-war movement, and the RAC became a first-aid station for protestors who had been tear-gassed in rallies held in Washington.
Today, the Reform Movement, through the RAC, is a leader in the fight for genocide victims in Darfur, freedom for Tibet, reproductive rights, universal health care, the environment, and much more. And for me, I am proud to have been a Legislative Assistant at the RAC while a rabbinic student, and a member today of the Reform Movement’s Commission on Social Action.
Rabbi Bonnie Margulis is director of clergy programming at the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.
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