On Passover, William Sloane Coffin, and being an effective agent for social justice

On April 12, William Sloane Coffin died. May his memory be a blessing.

Born into privilege (a wealthy, elite New York family, education at exclusive prep schools and then at Yale), Coffin became a devotee of liberation theology and one of our country's strongest voices for justice. After becoming disenchantment with his work in the Army's military intelligence unit and the CIA, Coffin became a Protestant minister and discovered the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr. As a Presbyterian and UCC minister, he fought against the Vietnam War and opposed the draft, took part in the Freedom Rides and other actions to promote civil rights, worked towards nuclear disarmament, supported the creation of the Peace Corps, championed many antipoverty measures, and even advocated equal rights for gays and lesbians years before many other progressive religious leaders were comfortable doing so. A firm believer in the power of civil disobedience, he was imprisoned several times for participating in protests and actions; he risked his position as Chaplain of Yale University in the 1960s when he protected young men avoiding the draft and as senior minister of Riverside Church in New York City when he took bold and unpopular political stances. Coffin positioned social justice centrally in his theology and his life as a person of faith.

As I read various obituaries over the past few days, what surprised me most about Coffin is that he came from a blue-blooded, wealthy, elite New England family and followed a highly conventional path for most of his first 30 years of life. Yet, something in his experience or temperament led him to question the foundations of that path and to identify with the suffering and the oppressed. Coffin's activism was not grounded in paternalistic pity or "charity" but in an identification with other people and an understanding of the interconnectedness of everyone's well-being. Although he could have chosen to lead a comfortable life, insulated from much of the suffering in the world, Coffin instead realized "you can be more alive in pain than in complacency."

At the Passover seder, we re-enact the story of the Exodus from Egypt. The Haggadah tells us that "in every generation a man must see himself as if he [personally] had gone out from Egypt." As Rabbi David Stern taught this weekend, it is important to recognize that instead of selecting the 3rd-person account of the going out from Egypt from the book of Exodus for the Haggadah, the rabbis selected the 1st person recounting of the story from Deuteronomy 26. Why did the rabbis pick the less direct, less detailed version of the story, the version mediated by an additional narrator? The passage in Deuteronomy 26 is a story about identifying with the story, about retelling it in such as way as to reclaim not only the historical sense of the event but also the sense of being personally affected and personally involved.

The most frequently-cited motivation for "doing the right thing" in the Chumash is precisely this same type of identification with the oppressed and the suffering. "Do not (or do) X, Y, or Z because you were strangers in the land of Egypt." The text is not asking us to do some kind of Rawlsian thought experiment and rationally determine what the best policy would be; the text is demanding that we understand ourselves as slaves and strangers in order to be effective in protecting the rights of slaves and strangers. Only empathy and an understanding of one's own oppression (not compassion, not pity, not sympathy, not a detached sense of right and wrong) will allow us to create justice in our communities.

We are often very short-sighted when it comes to remembering this. Witness the trouble we (the people of the United States) are having deciding on immigration policy when we are, ourselves, nearly all immigrants.

Here's my question for my readers: How do we cultivate this identification? How do we help ourselves understand the depth of the connection between ourselves and other human beings?

And a final word from William Sloane Coffin:

"When you see uncaring people in high places, you should be mad as hell. "