Accepting the Breslau-Goldman Award from the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington
June 1, 2009
[As Prepared]
Shalom, it is wonderful to be here tonight among so many chaverim – among so many friends.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you for inviting me to join you, for your gracious award, and for the work that so many in this room are doing every day to make our State stronger; to help build the stronger future for our children that we hold in our hearts.
Ron Glancz, Ron Halber, Susie Gelman, Michsa Galperin, thank you for your leadership. Rabbi Tessler it is an honor to visit your beautiful synagogue. Wendy and Harvey Reiter, Diana Huffman and Ken Levine, congratulations for your work chairing tonight’s successful event. Let me also congratulate Jocelyn and Danny Kifcher for the honor you are receiving tonight. And I want to recognize my good friend Susie Turnbull who is with us.
Once again, it is an honor to join you here tonight,… I know that we’re a couple months removed from the Passover holiday, when Jewish families close their Seders with the words “next year in Jerusalem.” As it happens, one year ago tonight I had the happy opportunity to visit Jerusalem, leading a delegation from Maryland.
In the months since, I’ve carried with me so many profound memories,… The sense of awe and wonderment that sweeps over you in the Old City. The beauty of Mt. Masada. The haunting memories of Yad Vashem.
But above all I remember my conversations with everyday Israeli people. The resilience you can see in their eyes. The love of family and dedication to community which comes across so vividly in conversation. This innate desire to give their children a safer, more secure world,..
… A world where they will no longer have to worry when they set foot on a bus or turn on their television and wonder if family and friends survived the latest rocket attack from Gaza. A world where Israeli parents will no longer worry when they send their children off to school. A world where they will no longer live in fear of those who strap explosives to fourteen years olds and send them to a kindergarten or coffee shop …
A world where the President of Iran will no longer call for the destruction of Israel, and then pursue a nuclear bomb.
Conversations with everyday Israelis remind you that the strongest bonds which tie together Israel and America are our shared values. A belief in the dignity of every individual. A deep embrace of community and our collective responsibility to advance the common good. A desire for our children to live in safety and security. A willingness to sacrifice in the present to build a stronger future. A sense of shared obligation to pursue Tikkun Olam.
In our brief time together tonight, I wanted to talk with you about these values we share,…values rooted in the Jewish tradition which are innate in the American character; values which inspire us to pursue Tikkun Olam by searching for ways to heal our world and make it safer for our children,… values which guide us to invest in the security and skills of our people, while pursuing a more sustainable future for our planet.
Shared Values, Shared Priorities, Shared Future
In Deuteronomy, it is written that God “upholds the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and befriends the stranger, providing him with food and clothing.” It is written as well, that therefore “you too must befriend the stranger” for we all were “strangers in the land of Egypt.”
It is a notion which suggests that the ancient Hebrews’ escape from bondage, was an escape into the freedom to participate in the fullness of community,…
It is a notion which suggests that in our own times, the greatest of freedom’s privileges is the freedom to choose a better future for ourselves and our posterity. To be willing to work and sacrifice in the present, keeping faith that tomorrow can indeed be better than today and that each of us share a responsibility in our own lives to help make it so.
In Maryland, our pursuit of a stronger future has led us to draw upon certain basic human aspirations in pursuit of progress toward the goals we share: strengthening and growing the ranks of an upwardly mobile middle class; improving public safety and public education; expanding opportunity – including the opportunity to learn and earn and to enjoy the health of the people we love and the land, water, and air which sustain us.
These fundamental aspirations have long been championed by the Jewish community – holding true to the belief that there is no such thing as a spare human being; that we are only as strong as our most vulnerable neighbors.
In Maryland, this belief in the dignity of every individual has guided us together to choose to work toward becoming the first State in America to end childhood hunger within five years.
It has driven us to choose to invest in places like Sinai Hospital, the Charles E. Smith Life Communities, the Jewish Council for the Aging, and in Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities.
And it has guided us together to make record investments in our public schools (our-best in the nation public schools, I might add). To ensure through the choices we’ve made together that our seniors never again will be forced to choose between buying medicine and buying groceries. To make sure no Maryland child ever again dies because his or her parents could not afford to treat a toothache. To offer the security of health insurance to tens of thousands of our neighbors who previously were unable to get preventative care that can save their lives.
In a similar sense, our shared aspiration for healing and repairing our world has inspired our work together to better care for our delicate planet,… whether it’s through choices we’ve made to press forward on restoration of the Chesapeake Bay, to embrace smart growth strategies, or to set some of the most ambitious goals in America for reducing energy consumption and our carbon footprint.
It’s this same aspiration for Tikkun Olam which has guided Israel to lead in the pursuit of cures and healing through the life sciences – exporting more healing per capita than any nation on earth, and inspiring us in Maryland as we look toward the life sciences to strengthen our own future. It was the biosciences, incidentally, which brought me to Israel last year – and where we see such great potential for partnerships between Maryland and Israeli companies.
I leave you tonight, with the notion I started with – and our shared aspiration to free our children from fear. For we will only heal our world if together we build a safer world. It is a notion which led so many of us who are here tonight to successfully fight for one of America’s toughest divestment laws to crack down on Iran.
It’s why we’ve made the choices in Maryland that allowed us to achieve the second greatest reduction in homicides in nearly a quarter century. It’s what gave us the resolve to take guns away from domestic abusers and to instruct several of our state government agencies to work together toward a common goal of reducing violent crimes committed against women and children.
Conclusion
We are a stronger State when we find our motivation in the timeless Talmudic truth that the highest form of wisdom is kindness. When we look into the eyes of our children and imagine the better world we hope to build for them.
The willingness to work and sacrifice in the present on behalf of the future is a beautiful part of the Jewish tradition and an innate part of the American character,… pursuing Tikkun Olam by healing our planet and it’s people and building a safer future for our children.
So many of you are working so hard to bring about this better future we prefer – and so let me close tonight, by thanking you once again for keeping faith that each individual can make a difference and all of us must try. Shalom.
