14 Keep the Faith

Don’t you think it’s crazy, this old world and its ways
Who ever thought the 60’s
Would be called the “good old days”
But like the Weavers sang to us, “Wasn’t that a time?”
When we raised our hands and voices on the line

And we all sang Bread and Roses,
Joe Hill, and Union Maid
We linked our arms and told each other
“We are not afraid!”
Solidarity Forever would go rolling through the hall
We Shall Overcome together, one and all

The more I study history, the more I seem to find
That in every generation there are times just like that time
When folks like you and me who thought
That we were all alone
Within this wondrous movement found a home

And they all sang Bread and Roses,
Joe Hill, and Union Maid
They linked their arms and told each other
“We are not afraid!”
Solidarity Forever would go rolling through the hall
We Shall Overcome together, one and all

Though each generation fears that it may be the last
Our presence here is witness to the power of the past
And just as we have drawn our strength
From those who now are gone
Younger hands will take our work and carry on

And they’ll all sing Bread and Roses,
Joe Hill, and Union Maid
They’ll link their arms and tell each other
“We are not afraid!”
Solidarity Forever will go rolling through the hall
We Shall Overcome together, one and all
We Shall Overcome together, one and all

My partner and spouse Elizabeth Minnich once surprised me by asking, “Are you thinking about starting a new organizing campaign?”

I was taken aback. It was true, but I hadn’t told Elizabeth or anyone else.

I wasn’t ready to confess that easily. I know transparency is in vogue these days, but I really don’t like it when someone can see through me that easily, even Elizabeth. Grudgingly, I admitted that, yes, I was indeed getting ready to do exactly that. “How did you figure it out?” I wanted to know.

“It’s not all that hard.” Her smile lit up her face. “There’s a characteristic mode you have when you’re getting ready to build a new organization.”

“Like what?” I was not particularly enjoying this conversation.

“There’s a particular state you go into.” She didn’t mean North Carolina. “You get up in the middle of the night. You wander around talking to yourself even more than usual. You get very focused—when people say something, you don’t even notice they’re talking to you. You hum a lot, like you do when you’re working on a new song, except in this case you’re not writing anything, just humming.”

“Really?” My voice rose to a squeak. “I do all that?” It was like being on the old TV series This Is Your Life, except that show only covered the good parts.

She nodded. “May I make a suggestion?”

“Sure.” At this point, what did I have to lose?

She looked at me fondly. “Just this once,” she said, “would you like to talk about what’s really bothering you, before you externalize your emotions by building a new organization, and then spend the next five years complaining about all the problems it’s causing you?”

I never started the organization.

Because, you know, Elizabeth is absolutely right. Community organizers don’t just start organizations. That’s the easy part, the fun part. For those who are emotionally attuned to this kind of work, there’s great excitement and energy in the early moments of a new organizing drive, the adrenaline rush of engaging the opposition, the emotional high when your skills and intellect are running in top gear. You can get addicted to it.

But organizers also have to maintain the organizations they help build, doing their part to keep them going, year after year, crisis after crisis, defeat after defeat.

That’s where pulling your shift comes in.

I learned a lot not only about pulling my shift, but also about creative community organizing, from my father. Pop was good, not just at the usual things a rabbi does, like keeping the faith (in all senses of the expression), but at understanding and surviving work, life, and culture in major organizations—the stock in trade of people who do the work I do. Much of what I know about how to work with both people and institutions, about how to stick with a job through good times and tough times, comes from him.

Pop probably would have lived to be a hundred years old, if the Parkinson’s hadn’t gotten him. His father Gabriel Kahn grew up poor in Czarist Russia in the late nineteenth century, hardly a situation synonymous with good nutrition and comprehensive pediatric care. Drafted into the czar’s army at the age of twenty for a twenty-five-year term, he deserted as soon as he could, walked across Europe, and bartered passage to North America for work swinging a pick and shovel for the Canadian Pacific Railway. When that job played out, he ended up in Winnipeg working as a hod carrier.

Most people today have never even heard of a hod. The only time I’ve encountered the word in the last forty years was on a 45-rpm record by Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, No Milk and Honey in Baltimore.

In case you have a hard time finding that record: A hod, just so you’ll know if it ever comes up again, or if you want to surprise your Scrabble-playing friends between organizing campaigns, is a flat board about two feet square, with a wooden yoke underneath, sort of like you see on oxen teams in films about “the opening of the American West”—by white settlers, of course, not by those Native Americans who had been living there for thousands of years, for whom it had always been wide open, until the settlers came. You put as many courses, or layers, of brick on the hod as you think you can lift, hoist it onto your shoulder, steady it with both hands, then walk up flight after flight of stairs to where the bricklayers are making mortar magic with their trowels. It’s poor people’s work, the very bottom of the employment food chain.

My grandfather had a good life, but a hard one, with a very rough start. He still lived to the age of ninety-two. Pop, raised poor but at least with something to eat every day, passed on at the age of eighty-seven. I was with him when he died, on the Fourth of July in 2001, just as the fireworks were going off (a flair for the dramatic runs in the family, as you’ve probably figured out by now). I miss him every day of my life.

For many years, until the Parkinson’s finally robbed him of so much of who he had been, Pop and I served together on the board of the Jewish Fund for Justice (now, after a number of mergers, the Jewish Funds for Justice), a national foundation that supports creative community organizing. I think it’s only fair to say that he got his board seat the honest way, through nepotism. The Jewish Fund for Justice was one of my personal organizing efforts. When it came time to put a national board together, I needed a rabbi, so I chose the one I knew best: Pop.

I was the national board chair for the organization’s first half-dozen years. Once, after a particularly stressful and difficult meeting, Pop and I were walking down the street in Washington, D.C., going to pick up his Pontiac and head home. After a few blocks, he stopped, turned, and gave me a big hug. “You were wonderful! Just amazing!” He hugged me again, half lifting me off the ground in the process.

I was touched. Pop was always wonderfully supportive of me and my work, and unusually physically affectionate for a man of his generation. Still, this was really over the top. The only appropriate response was to stand there glowing. That’s what I did.

Pop resumed walking towards the car, talking all the way. “You were unbelievable! There we were, less than an hour away from the end of the meeting, hopelessly deadlocked on a decision we absolutely had to make today.

“You went around the room. You summarized every single person’s position in a sentence or two. Then you said, ‘Let me see if I can craft something that incorporates everyone’s position, and meets everyone needs.’ You presented your resolution. It was immediately moved, seconded, and unanimously approved. Brilliant!”

I was genuinely moved.

“Here’s the fascinating part,” he continued. “The resolution you presented actually had nothing to do with what any of them had said. You basically took what you wanted done and imposed it on everybody else. And not a one of them even noticed.”

This time I was the one who stopped walking. I don’t know if I was more embarrassed at having been caught acting so undemocratically, or at having been caught at all.

Pop just stood there grinning.

“You know,” I said, “I try to do it only when I think there really is no other choice, maybe a dozen times over the years. But this is the first time anybody ever caught me at it. How did you figure it out?”

Pop put his arm around my shoulders and steered me down K Street. “Well,” he said, “you must have learned it somewhere.”

However proud Pop was of me, and in fact of himself—for teaching me as well as for catching me—this is not one of the things organizers should ever do. When I organized the Jewish Fund for Justice starting in the early 1980s, that was very much creative community organizing, a piece of work of which I’m still very proud. When I became the chair of the board of directors, I stepped away from my earlier role as an organizer and into the complementary but very different role of community and organizational leader.

I was raised kosher, so for the most part I know how to keep the dishes, and the roles, separate. But organizers need to understand how different these roles really are. It’s quite easy to slide, often without even noticing, from helping organize a community to becoming its leader and spokesperson—even though you’re not, when push comes to shove, really a member of that community.

Still, creative community organizers are leaders, although of a different sort from those who lead the communities we organize, and who lead the organizations we help those communities build. We’re more like, well, rabbis.

While he was still alive, I used to call Pop every Friday evening with the traditional Jewish wish for a “gut Shabbos,” Yiddish for “a good Sabbath,” and just to talk. Once, at the end of a long conversation, he said with warmth so great I could feel it over the phone, “Oy, you would have made such a wonderful rabbi!”

Without thinking, I said, “I am a rabbi.”

I could hear the shock in Pop’s voice. “You’re not a rabbi. How can you say such a thing?”

I hadn’t meant to say it. It wasn’t something I’d ever said before, or even thought about. It had just popped out of my mouth, all on its own.

But, reflecting, I decided that my slip of the tongue was more right than wrong. Like other organizers, there are many ways in which I am a rabbi (you should feel free to substitute your personal choice of religious leader), just without the religion.

To prove my point: My friend Irwin Kula, a wonderful rabbi himself, as well as a serious Deadhead (that’s a fanatical Grateful Dead follower, in case you missed the sixties) once, without any prompting on my part, introduced me to a group of Jewish scholars as having “a secular rabbinate.”

I still really like that description. Despite a rich religious upbringing, which has stood me in good stead in my life as a creative community organizer—particularly given that almost all my work has been in the Bible Belt—I’m a profoundly secular person. I assume, given my family background, that I had religious faith when I was younger. But, somewhere during the almost a dozen years that my mother suffered so terribly from cancer, it quietly slipped away, never to return. I don’t flaunt my lack of traditional faith, but in this radically religious nation, I do try to hold my ground as a nonbeliever.

If someone says to me, as happens from time to time, “You are a very spiritual person,” I say, “Thank you.” They mean it as a compliment, an expression of gratitude. In my secular religion, you don’t throw that back in someone’s face.

What I do believe in, what I do have faith in, is people: the power and possibility within them, their strength and generosity, their clarity and capacity for good, their restlessness and resilience. I couldn’t have lasted forty-five years as an organizer if I didn’t fully, deeply believe that people working together can make the world a better and more just place and that, in the end, the forces of good will prevail.

Creative community organizers need to have a comparably positive set of beliefs, and to communicate them forcefully to the people with whom we work. It’s our job to help people have belief, but in themselves; to have faith, but in each other; to believe a better world is possible—but in this world, not just the next, should there turn out to be one after all.

Just like spiritual leaders of many faiths, it’s part of our job to help people feel hopeful, even in the face of hardship. We need to be realistic radicals, pragmatic Pollyannas. We shouldn’t be, as Nurse Nellie Forbush sings in the musical South Pacific, “a cockeyed optimist,” but we should be at least professionally upbeat, however we may personally feel in the moment.

Some people find my optimism affirming. Others find it more than a little irritating and, well, slightly insane, considering current objective conditions on Earth. “How can you be so cheerful,” they demand, “when the world is going to hell in a handbasket?”

Here’s what I do when someone I’m working with is depressed about the shape of the world, the state of creative community organizing, the possibility of any positive change whatsoever. In these dark conditions, I view it as a moral imperative to try to get them laughing.

I start by saying, “Actually, deep down inside, I’m not cheerful at all.”

I pause and wait for them to say something. Usually what they say is some variation of:

“You’re not? But you seem so, you know, so, so . . . cheerful.”

Sometimes the only way to choose the precise word for the moment is to repeat what the other person just said.

“I’m not. It’s all a ruse.”

“But your cheerfulness seems so real.”

“Right. But you should never forget that I’ve been a professional performer for almost forty years. ‘Cheerful’ is one of my most famous roles. I can play it with my eyes shut.”

“So what are you really?”

“Deeply cynical.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. If you want to know what I really think, we’ve probably wrecked the earth beyond repair. We’ve corrupted the gene pool, poisoned the oceans, polluted the air. The only reason the human race might be spared a future of miserable mutations is that we’ll probably blow ourselves up in a nuclear disaster long before that ever happens.”

“Wow, that’s really a grim picture.”

“Yeah, well, life can be tough.” If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

“So how do you keep going?”

“Well, I may be a cynic, but I’m also a good trade unionist. I believe in a fair division of labor, and in doing your work well, whatever that work is. When the assignments in the Movement got passed out, I drew the task of being unreasonably cheerful in the face of disaster. It’s a dirty, rotten job, but I do it to the best of my ability.”

Believe it or not, people usually brighten up at that point, and we can move on to a discussion of what they might actually do about some of the things that are bothering them.

This is one of a creative community organizer’s major responsibilities: Be cheerful in the face of adversity and, to the extent possible, help others feel that way.

I don’t mean to trivialize the suffering, hardship, emotional and physical pain so many people go through. But laughter really is therapeutic, and hope does heal.

Southern writer Flannery O’Connor, quoting from a passage by theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, titled her final collection of stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge. That’s the faith of the organizer.

As creative community organizers, we should never encourage unrealistic hope, expectations that aren’t rooted in deep possibility. But any organizer who no longer honestly believes that people working together can make positive change happen should probably start looking for another job.

I don’t mean that organizers should be unrealistically optimistic, or that the only good fights are the winning ones.

But we should keep the faith.