December 10 is International Human Rights Day, marking 70 years since the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948, seven months after the creation of the State of Israel and one day after the passage of the UN Convention on Genocide. When T’ruah was founded, back in 2002, Rabbi Gerry Serotta told me that one of the original goals was to educate the Jewish community about the history of human rights and its direct connection to the Shoah and other civilian atrocities of World War II. This would inspire us to observe Human Rights Day as a yom tov, a sacred occasion, which ultimately was the origin of Human Rights Shabbat.
Sign up to receive Torah from T’ruah in your inbox each week.
But in a time when the global commitment to a shared understanding of rights and obligations seems to be in retreat, it is worthwhile to reread the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UDHR never directly alludes to the idea of b’tzelem elohim, the Jewish mandate that every human being is created in the image of God, but the underlying value of universal human worth and dignity is woven into the fabric of the document, both in the lofty ideals of the preamble and the specific rights enumerated in the articles. I am likewise struck by the ways in which the UDHR intersects with memory: not as a place to get stuck in mourning but as an imperative to continue to strive for our highest common ideals. This is clear in the second line of the preamble and its reference to the Holocaust:
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people.
This line to me feels almost covenantal. Remember what happens when you don’t support human rights, and couple that memory to a commitment to the realization of your highest ideals. In an early T’ruah publication, Masekhet Zechuyot Ha’adam, we paired this line with a Jewish articulation of commitment and memory from Deuteronomy 4:9:
But take utmost care and watch yourselves scrupulously, so that you do not forget the things that you saw with your own eyes and so that they do not fade from your mind as long as you live. And make them known to your children and to your children’s children.
This may sound like a cliché, that if we do not remember the past then we are doomed to repeat it. I have come to see this differently: that the ability to forget is itself a form of power, with the freedom to simply act, without an awareness of consequences. It is power that is easily misused to dominate the other in pursuit of our own success, comfort, and safety.
In my time at T’ruah, I’ve learned that as Americans, we are often as a society very willing to use that power of forgetting. Sometimes, we rise above it, hearing the challenge to our power that emanates from the atrocities of the past. Certainly, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Jewish community was able to put aside our own fears to declare that torture is immoral.
And slower cultural change is also possible — in the past four years, I’ve seen a definite shift in white-identified Jewish communities on issues of policing. But today’s culture of scarcity in the face of plenty — that surely someone else’s success can come only at the expense of mine — is coupled with a perceived scarcity around security: that my rights can be secured only by someone else’s being trampled. The UDHR demands that we reject such a narrative— not as former victims, but as people with power.
Find more commentaries on the International Declaration of Human Rights
Recently, I’ve been mulling over a parable of Leibel Fein z”l’s, which I first heard when we were together in El Salvador in 2004, and was published in his book Where Are We? in 1988. It is a parable about Jews both in Israel and the United States. Fein writes:
In Russia in 1860, Berl, a student of Judaism and Jewish lore, says to a non-Jewish acquaintance: “We do indeed think we are your moral betters, and the reason is that we don’t hunt. You people hunt, and we don’t hunt, and that makes us better than you.” The acquaintance guffawed and then stormed, “You silly trivial people; of course you don’t hunt! We don’t permit you to own guns.” Whereupon, Berl’s Jewish friends turned and said, “Tomorrow we pack, and then go up to the land, to Jerusalem, and there we shall prove that even with guns, we will not become hunters.”
Drashing on the parable—which he saw as applicable both in Israel and North America–Fein further explained:
It is the question of whether, now that we have guns, we are on the way to becoming hunters. It is a question of what this people does once it has a choice about what to do—for ‘coming to power’ means, in the end, nothing more or less than making choices.
This is the choice we are faced with on Human Rights Day — to use our memory of being the victims of barbarous acts to remember what it means to be hunted; to understand that now, too, we have the choice to hunt or to identify with the hunted.
There is a third option, that of builder. In the Torah portions we have been reading lately, Esau is called a hunter (Genesis 27:3), and Joseph shows himself to be a builder— of the granaries that keep Egypt and Canaan alive through seven years of famine. The UDHR begins: “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”
We make that vision into a reality not through words on paper but through the slow, deliberate building, piece by piece, of a shared society.
Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster is Deputy Director of T’ruah.