I was raised in Winnipeg, where my maternal grandparents moved from Russia nearly 100 years ago.



As far as my memory reaches, I can recollect tales of my grandparents’ time in the deep zone of deadly Russian pogroms in the early 20th century. My grandfather once asked me to stop whistling to a tune, as whistling was too closely associated in his mind with the murderous Cossacks who whistled when they regularly descended on his small village.

It did not take much connectivity to go from the nightmarish imagination of what befell my grandparents and their families to the sometimes feverish fight as a young man against any injustice visible to me. After all, joining in the struggles against war or for fairness, equity and human rights meant quite logically also fighting for the safety and security of Jews.

If Canada became a better place for the homeless and poor, gays and lesbians, refugees and immigrants and people afflicted with AIDS, then it should necessarily be a better and safer place for Jews, too. Such motivation is classical, even ideological, in Jewish history and I was not particularly different.

As it happens, my time in Winnipeg from the 1950s to 1970s was replete with incidents of outright anti-Semitism and more than mere verbal taunts and insults. And so later, I sought out human rights organizations and the political left, thinking they would be free of anti-Jewish sentiments, a safe place to form alliances with other like-minded people.

I have been somewhat disappointed in this regard.

Nonetheless, it was historical and contemporary anti-Semitism that impelled me into activism as a young adult, affirming Jewish values of empathy for others, resistance and protest.

Quite accidentally, I was thrust into the world of AIDS as the epidemic exploded in Toronto in the early 1980s. I was one of about a dozen downtown doctors who had large numbers of gay men and some injection drug users in our medical practices. From the beginning, the number of Jewish physicians who treated people with AIDS was greater than their proportion in the general community of physicians. This was no accident but rather an example of the paramount value Judaism places on life and the worthiness of all lives.

Rage reigned in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, and many AIDS physicians supported their patients who fought discrimination and the wholly inadequate government response to the epidemic. A slogan enunciated by AIDS activists at the time was “Silence Equals Death,” a three-word admonition that is just as applicable to the genocides perpetrated against the Jewish people and is a call for the Jewish duty to protest injustice.

As Rabbi Ed Elkin of the First Nareyever Synagogue in Toronto taught me, even Abraham protested and negotiated with God over the impending destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, showing us that protest is part of Jewish history from the start.

In 2004 and 2005, I spent more than seven months working at a rural AIDS clinic in the small landlocked sub-Saharan African country of Lesotho, in which one of four adults is infected with HIV. The name of the clinic is Tsepong, which means “Place of Hope.” With others, I organized a Passover celebration in my compound house, to which I had affixed a mezuzah upon my arrival. I am not sure exactly why I attached the mezuzah to the compound door except I guess that I came to Lesotho not only as an AIDS physician but as a Jewish physician.

Three of the 11 Passover guests – Max, Sharon and Eli (not their real names) – were Jewish American Peace Corps volunteers who were engaged in tough community education work, on the ground, in Lesotho. And they came from wildly different Jewish backgrounds.

Max was a former yeshiva student who spent nine years studying in Jerusalem. He returned to the United States and joined the Peace Corps. He travelled 10 hours through Lesotho mountains and valleys to get to the seder.

Sharon was raised in the Conservative stream of Judaism and travelled four hours from her remote village where she taught school.

And Eli was a thoroughly assimilated secular Jew raised in the wealthy Riverdale area of New York City and lived close by our compound.

At the seder, Max gave a two-hour rabbinic-like commentary on the Passover. It was a bit difficult for Eli, who never experienced a seder longer than 10 minutes, and somewhat reminiscent of my childhood seders, he could hardly wait to eat.

A Catholic nun lit the candles and made a blessing. The other guests, including a Canadian health care worker, who knew the story of Moses, sort of, but none knew it was found in the Passover Haggadah.

Jewish values do have a universality.

These three Jewish Peace Corps volunteers from their respective streams of Jewish tradition sought out Jewishness from their humanitarian endeavours. Their actions in social justice led them directly back to their Jewish roots and Passover’s celebration of liberation and freedom. It was more than just company, dinner and sentimentality that brought them to the seder table. Jewishness and social justice, in the case of the Peace Corps volunteers their development work in education, are synchronous.

Actually, Jewish values are social justice values. Although it may be provocative and political to think, let alone to say on Shavuot, that the synchronicity of Jewishness and social justice applies to all Jews.

The responsibility for reducing suffering, for example in Toronto, or in faraway lands also attaches to the rich and powerful among us – even if it means that their own interests may be compromised in the pursuit of fairness, or peace, or justice.

Take for example, the establishment of robust social welfare programs to assist the poor, the hungry and the homeless in our neighbourhoods. Such programs require more than volunteer-staffed out-of-the-cold dinners and donation of clothes, both generously supported by the Jewish community. They require stable and sufficient financing only achievable through higher taxation on the wealthy in order to maintain and improve the services for those most vulnerable on our streets. These programs are really a form of wealth redistribution.

Somehow though, I suspect that a call for higher taxation would not go over too well in our homes. But when a collision arises between the values of self-interest and those of self-effacement, Jews must always choose the latter.

It is not good enough to raise funds for Jewish social services or Jewish advocacy organizations. Jewish participation in remedying local and world injustices must transcend our narrow interests and fears and reach into the territory of those who, upon a cursory glance, may appear disconnected from Jewish community affairs.

The universality of Jewish values makes all injustice our business and the duty to act applies to all of us, including the most privileged in the community. My well-to-do Jewish Peace Corps friend Eli exemplified just that.

I have learned from Rabbi Elkin and from friends that every value and principle that have guided me over the decades have a Jewish derivation, whether it be the long-established Jewish requirement to study, the maintenance of empathy, even for our enemies, or the absolute sacredness of life, so much so that Jews must breach the most entrenched observances and laws in order to save a life.

It is Jewish values, Jewish teachings – whether we are aware of them or not – that in an ontogenetic fashion always propel Jews onto the streets, into the demonstrations, to fight for freedom, to oppose injustice.

And maybe, just maybe to end the whistling.

Philip Berger is chief of the department of family and community medicine at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, the medical director of the Inner City Health Program and a member of the board of the Canadian Jewish Congress.

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