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Monday, October 06, 2008

Booker Builds Bridges

Photo by Roy Caratozzolo III

Newark Mayor Cory Booker enjoys a laugh with Teaneck residents.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s first serious encounter with Judaism began when he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University in the early 1990s. Walking alone into a meeting of the L’Chaim Society, a Jewish group founded by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Booker remembered how one moment changed his world.

“I walked into a room that could best be described at that point in my life like a scene from the Barbara Streisand movie Yentl,” Booker said before a Sept. 20 crowd at the Jewish Center in Teaneck. “I could swear that everybody was wondering ‘What is this large black man doing here?’ And I was thinking to myself, ‘What is this large black man doing here?’”

Tolerance is a journey. What Booker began that day was a trip that led him to the presidency of the L’Chaim Society and a lifetime friendship with Rabbi Boteach (whose wife and one of his sons was in the audience last month). His political road led him to become the chief executive of the state’s largest city in 2006. And judging by the excitement in the Teaneck crowd, he has the potential to rise further still. But Booker’s talk in Teaneck focused on how Jews, African Americans and all Americans can overcome their differences and come together to build a greater civil society.

Moving beyond tolerance

In his initial discussion with Boteach, Booker referred to a column he had written during his undergraduate career at Stanford in which he espoused the idea that tolerance, in his words, is “really a sort of cynical state of mind. Saying let’s tolerate each other is almost like saying let’s stomach each other’s right to be different. That’s opposed to what I said to do. I said that we should move beyond tolerance and embrace each other and deepen our understanding of not just ourselves, but God’s infinite will.”

That comment sparked something deep in Boteach and cemented a friendship.

“His jaw dropped,” Booker remembered. “He said “You’ll never believe it, but I wrote the same column myself.’ The next thing you know, he and I started having a phenomenal conversation.”

Booker’s conversations with others about how to fortify the bonds of understanding between seemingly disparate people continued after he entered public life. During his speech, Booker recounted how he was elected to the Newark City Council in 1998 and soon thereafter led a hunger strike protesting poor safety conditions in a public housing project. After suffering defeat in the 2002 Newark mayoral election, a loss that was documented in the Oscar-nominated documentary “Street Fight,” Booker ultimately rose to the mayor’s chair in a city known for its formerly large Jewish population. While Booker pointed to statistics that demonstrated a 40 percent reduction in violent crime since he took office, along with a murder rate reportedly at its lowest since 1961, he also pointed to something less tangible but equally important for the future.

“Blacks and Jews, who have suffered from discrimination and anti-Semitism, have really been at the forefront fighting for revolutionary change in America,” he said. “Some of the greatest chapters in our country’s history were when blacks and Jews have worked together trying to make this country great… Judaism is not a religion simply about laws. It is a religion focused on remaking the world in the image of God…Judaism is about answering that calling.”

Booker later invoked the words of a Christian clergyman who noted one of Judaism’s greatest leaders in a famous speech.

“In many ways, Martin Luther King Jr. was the Moses of his people,” he said, referring to the late African-American civil rights leader’s 1968 speech made on the eve of his death. “He said I’ve been to the mountaintop, and I’ve looked over and I’ve seen the Promised Land… We can only get there and win if we find ways to unify our souls. This has been the theme of my experiences in government… We are now proving in Newark that if people come together, there is no problem too big for us to solve.”

A final prayer

While Booker spoke repeatedly about coming together and overcoming differences, there have been moments of tension between African-Americans and Jews in New Jersey, including during and after the 1967 civil disturbances in Newark, and in Teaneck in the early 1990’s after a police shooting of an African-American teenager.

During his remarks to a crowd that included Mayor Michael Feit and the Jewish Center’s Rabbi Lawrence Zierler, Booker spoke about what he termed “the unfinished business” between African-Americans and Jews. After his speech he spoke to Hackensack Chronicle, expanding upon this point.

“I love humanity’s struggle to perfect itself and live up to its higher ideals,” Booker said. “You are going to find tensions between all people, including siblings. Relationships shouldn’t be marked by times of division. They really should be marked by times of unity. There have been consistent stories of blacks and Jews, and Americans period, working together to try to manifest the greatness of our country. The future of black-Jewish relations lies in the future pursuit by both communities towards making this country being what it can be, what it should be, and what it must be.”

Toward the end of his speech, Booker remembered a moment from his hunger strike that accentuated this idea.

“We are all God’s children,” he said. “We forget that at our own peril.”

http://www.hackensackchronicle.com/NC/0/475.html#