I just saw Barack Obama speak yesterday at Temple University at the big campaign rally for Casey, Rendell, and everyone else in Pennsylvania.
(on Shabbat, no less).
I began to believe.
I was impressed. It's not his charisma. It's not his good looks. It's not his ethnic diversity. It's that the man's got some serious communication skills. He knows how communicate to people. It's his three years of working as a community organizer for Gamaliel in south-side Chicago. He knows how to communicate a vision. He knows how to share his public story in a way in which people can relate - in a way that people can understand. He knows how to listen to people. After listening to him talk, you learn something about him -- how he works and how he operates - how he's come to the decisions that he's made. Whether or not you ultimately agree or disagree with every political position that he takes, you leave respecting his judgement and his character. I want the opportunity to help elect this man into the white house.
As a rabbinical student, studying about community organizing, and the power that it has to transform congregational life, I've been especially drawn to Barack Obama. This makes sense, now that I've found out that he was a community organizer, in the
Congregation Based Community Organizing model:
For three years Barack Obama was the director of Developing Communities Project, an institutionally based community organization on Chicago's far south side. He has also been a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, an organizing institute working throughout the Midwest.
From his writings on community organizing theory, it's clear that he understands the need for building broad-based movements, consistent with Crashing the Gate and Howard Dean's 50-State Strategy:
In theory, community organizing provides a way to merge various strategies for neighborhood empowerment. Organizing begins with the premise that (1) the problems facing inner-city communities do not result from a lack of effective solutions, but from a lack of power to implement these solutions; (2) that the only way for communities to build long-term power is by organizing people and money around a common vision; and (3) that a viable organization can only be achieved if a broadly based indigenous leadership -- and not one or two charismatic leaders -- can knit together the diverse interests of their local institutions.
This means bringing together churches, block clubs, parent groups and any other institutions in a given community to pay dues, hire organizers, conduct research, develop leadership, hold rallies and education campaigns, and begin drawing up plans on a whole range of issues -- jobs, education, crime, etc. Once such a vehicle is formed, it holds the power to make politicians, agencies and corporations more responsive to community needs. Equally important, it enables people to break their crippling isolation from each other, to reshape their mutual values and expectations and rediscover the possibilities of acting collaboratively -- the prerequisites of any successful self-help initiative.
He frames his speeches in the classic language of Ed Chambers and Saul Alinsky - setting up the dichotomy between the "world as it is" and the "world as it could be". He gives us permission to hope, to dream, to imagine that if we join together as partners, the mess that our government is now, the mess that our country has become, is not set in stone. We have the power, and indeed the obligation to change things, to set the ship aright.
His strategy is to first connect himself to others, addressing points of commonalities, and then only afterwards explaining the nuanced differences. Thereby, he leads the audience along with him on their journey to the next destination. For example, paraphrasing from his speech on Saturday:
"You know, I believe in capitalism, but you know, sometimes, the owners want to keep a little bit too much of the money ... so that's why we needed to have a minimum wage."
Obama is not afraid of who he is and who he was - he seems to be very comfortable in his own skin.
Obama does something no one else in politics does: He plumbs his own anxiety and doubt, and ties his life story to political problems that few elected officials dare to discuss so personally, including the disparities of race and class, drug abuse, poverty, and, of course, faith
He's a human being, an imperfect person who has grown and developed. His adolescence involved periods of flirting with black power, alcohol, and drugs --- trying to come to terms with his own identity as the son of a Kenyan exchange student father and white mother from Kansas, who were divorced when he was young, growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia.
He struggled with the connections of faith and social justice - and the appropriate role of religion in public life:
As a community organizer in Chicago in the 1980s, Obama had put together demonstrations and registered voters alongside Christian leaders who honored the civil-rights tradition of social change. His faith-grounded fellow activists, he explained, "saw that I knew their Book, that I shared their values, that I sang their songs." But, he said, they also "sensed that part of me that remained detached and removed, that I was an observer in their midst." He continued, "In time, I came to realize that something was missing for me as well, that without a vessel for my beliefs, without a commitment to a particular community of faith, at some level I would always remain apart, and alone."
He eventually, though, found his own path to faith, about which he effectively communicates to others, in a way in which others can relate:
And perhaps it was out of this intimate knowledge of hardship, the grounding of faith in struggle, that the church offered me a second insight: that faith doesn't mean that you don't have doubts. You need to come to church precisely because you are of this world, not apart from it; you need to embrace Christ precisely because you have sins to wash away -- because you are human and need an ally in your difficult journey.
It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and affirm my Christian faith. It came about as a choice, and not an epiphany; the questions I had did not magically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt I heard God's spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.
The path I traveled has been shared by millions upon millions of Americans -- evangelicals, Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims alike; some since birth, others at a turning point in their lives. It is not something they set apart from the rest of their beliefs and values. In fact, it is often what drives them.
Exchanges like these, show that he is the candidate that has the power to connect with voters from across the spectrum:
So let me end with another interaction I had during my campaign. A few days after I won the Democratic nomination in my U.S. Senate race, I received an email from a doctor at the University of Chicago Medical School that said the following:
"Congratulations on your overwhelming and inspiring primary win. I was happy to vote for you, and I will tell you that I am seriously considering voting for you in the general election. I write to express my concerns that may, in the end, prevent me from supporting you."
The doctor described himself as a Christian who understood his commitments to be "totalizing." His faith led him to a strong opposition to abortion and gay marriage, although he said that his faith also led him to question the idolatry of the free market and quick resort to militarism that seemed to characterize much of President Bush's foreign policy.
But the reason the doctor was considering not voting for me was not simply my position on abortion. Rather, he had read an entry that my campaign had posted on my website that suggested that I would fight "right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman's right to choose." He went on to write:
"I sense that you have a strong sense of justice ... and I also sense that you are a fair-minded person with a high regard for reason ... Whatever your convictions, if you truly believe that those who oppose abortion are all ideologues driven by perverse desires to inflict suffering on women, then you, in my judgment, are not fair-minded. ... You know that we enter times that are fraught with possibilities for good and for harm, times when we are struggling to make sense of a common polity in the context of plurality, when we are unsure of what grounds we have for making any claims that involve others ... I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words."
I checked my website and found the offending words. My staff had written them to summarize my pro-choice position during the Democratic primary, at a time when some of my opponents were questioning my commitment to protect Roe v. Wade.
Rereading the doctor's letter, though, I felt a pang of shame. It is people like him who are looking for a deeper, fuller conversation about religion in this country. They may not change their positions, but they are willing to listen and learn from those who are willing to speak in reasonable terms -- those who know of the central and awesome place that God holds in the lives of so many, and who refuse to treat faith as simply another political issue with which to score points.
I wrote back to the doctor and thanked him for his advice. The next day, I circulated the email to my staff and changed the language on my website to state in clear but simple terms my pro-choice position. And that night, before I went to bed, I said a prayer of my own -- a prayer that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me.
It is a prayer I still say for America today -- a hope that we can live with one another in a way that reconciles the beliefs of each with the good of all. It's a prayer worth praying and a conversation worth having in this country in the months and years to come. Thank you.