After an intense week-long trip to the Dominican Republic that the American Jewish World Service ( AJWS ) sponsored, I suppose the question plaguing me and the others is this: Why should we care ( and what can we do ) about violence against women and girls, about the mistreatment of transgender sex workers, about discrimination against members of the LGBT community in the Dominican Republic when we have similar problems and marginalized people right here at home?
Shouldn't we focus first on our own backyardfor what moral authority do we have if we do not seek justice for the marginalized in our own communities? Many in our group struggled with this, aware of the colossal challenges of poverty, crime, violence against women and girls, and poor education in our own city.
And yet, we as Jews have an imperative called tikkun olam. It means "to repair the world." How we choose to fulfill that obligation takes many forms. I consider my longstanding volunteer work to restore prairies and oak woods in the Cook County forest preserves one way of repairing the world. Yet note that the imperative directs us not only to our own backyards and cities, but to the worldto find common cause with people far beyond our political, cultural, and social borders.
Meeting with trans* sex workers in Santo Domingo and representatives from Red de Voluntarios de Amigos Siempre Amigos ( REVASA ), the LGBT-rights group there, forced us to check our privilege, to challenge our assumptions, and to discover what we share across long divides of language, religion and culture.
I know that our group already had an effect on some of the people we met. Arcy Rosmery, a young lesbian who was one of our interpreters, had never met Jewish people before and saw among us the diversity in our faith practice. When I spoke to the members of REVASA about the importance of having openly gay people serve in public office, I repeated the phrase that U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin so often uses: "If we're not at the table, we're on the menu." They laughed when I said that, but it hit home, and I suspect they will use that in their work in the future.
It's worth noting that AJWS, after a long and thoughtful evaluation of its work, decided to take a "rights-based" approach to global-justice work. Instead of supporting organizations that work in developing countries to dig a well here or build a school there, AJWS supports grassroots organizations that work to empower people to gain their own seat at the table, to fight for their rights through communal action. This work is harder and takes longer, and we don't know yet if it will be successful. But in the end, I suspect it's the only approach that has a chance of changing lives and cultures. "Yes we can," said then-candidate Barack Obama, the emphasis being on "we." "You have the power!" said Gov. Howard Dean. And we do.
After we returned to Chicago, as I was trying to manage my re-entry from the Dominican Republic, I happened to listen to a song by Mary Chapin Carpenter called "The Hard Way." In it, she sings:
We've got two lives,
One we're given
And the other one we make.
"Yes!" I thought. "That's right." Isn't that precisely the question we are wrestling with upon our return from our trip? What are we to make of the lives we are given? How are we to fulfill our imperative to repair the world?
Debra Shore is a commissioner for the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago.