Evan Wolfson: SPEECH: Praying with our feet

Evan Wolfson was honored by Kolot Chayeinu ("Voices of Our Lives"), an engaged, progressive, Jewish congregation in Brooklyn, at Praying With Our Feet, Dancing With Our Souls, Kolot Chayeinu's Annual Gala Celebration & Dance Party. In accepting his honor, Evan galvanized the audience with a call to action.

 

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It is a joy to be here with so many of my friends, in this congregation and from around the country. I am deeply moved.

One of my favorite lines in theater comes from the play, Amadeus. The mediocre composer, Salieri, rages against God for making him more popular than Mozart, whom Salieri alone recognizes actually has the superior talent. Salieri curses his ill luck at "being called 'Distinguished' by people incapable of distinguishing."¹

You have spared me that fate; how especially touching it is to be honored by people, and an organization, whom I so much like, respect, and honor.

I would like to give a special thank you tonight to:

• my nearly lifelong friend, Russell Pearce, who was a gay-rights activist before I was, was and is a connector who brings people together, and was and is one of my earliest and most important mentors in a humane and inclusive social justice vision;
• Rabbi Lippman and the other honorees from this congregation, Lisa Auerbach and Lisa Zbar, as well as the marriage-equality activists among you;
• the Freedom to Marry staff and steering committee members here tonight;
• my brother-by-birth, Michael Wolfson, here with me tonight, always; and my brothers-by-choice — my college roommates, Ken O'Brien and Michael Berney — who traveled to be here for this celebration , and my sister-by-choice, Michele Hirshman;
• and my wonderful sweetheart, Cheng He.

Thank you also to this unique and loving congregation, Kolot Chayeinu.

As a high-powered and engaged gathering of people who believe in both the soul and the feet, the dream and the action, you know that we must together do our part to mend the world.

You know that gay people are not the first to fight against discrimination, nor even the first to fight for needed change and an end to discrimination within marriage.

You know, as I describe in my book, Why Marriage Matters, that marriage has always been a human rights battleground on which our nation has grappled with larger questions about what kind of country we are going to be:

• questions about the proper boundary between the individual and the government and who gets to make important personal choices in life; questions contested in battles over divorce, sex and intimacy, and even the use of contraception;
• questions about the equality of men and women or whether people should be allowed to marry the "wrong" kind of person; questions contested in battles over marital status and sex roles, and even race restrictions on the choice of a life-partner;
• questions about the separation of church and state; questions contested in the difference between religious r-i-t-e-s of marriage and the civil or legal r-i-g-h-t to marry.

As a nation, we have made changes in the institution of marriage — and fought over these questions of whether America is committed to both equality and freedom — on the human rights battlefield of marriage.

We are met on that battlefield once again.

We must remember and learn from the history, the people, and the movements who have gone before us — including history's original and most enduring liberation story and metaphor, the Exodus.

What better example than Exodus for the very theme you have chosen for this gathering tonight: "Praying with Our Feet."

As Michael Walzer points out in his book, Exodus and Revolution, the Children of Israel were not carried to freedom on "eagle's wings" — they had to march, and it wasn't easy.²

As they prayed with their feet on their march to freedom — to a vision and attainment of justice and liberation and enlarged possibilities for all humanity — they had to be brave and take a leap of faith, ever single step.

They had to endure the wilderness to get to the Promised Land.

Moses and Miriam and the others who led the people to freedom had to get them there through pain and difficulty, through the resistance and attacks of their enemies, through the people's (and even the leaders' own) fear and hesitation, and through the step-by-step engendering a sense of entitlement and empowerment that are necessary for — and in turn create — transformation.

The marching had to happen despite — and the Torah teaches us, because of — the people's kotzer ruach, their "shortness of spirit," the dispiritedness caused by oppression.³

This slave-mentality, the Torah relates, was expressed in the people's frequent "murmurings" against Moses, Joshua, Caleb — and against the exodus from slavery itself.⁴

Maimonides tells us: "the deity use[d] a gracious ruse in causing [the people] to wander perplexedly in the desert until their souls became courageous... and until, moreover, people were born who were not accustomed to humiliation and servitude."⁵

This dynamic was also described by Karl Marx, albeit, characteristically, a bit less charitably: "The present generation is like the Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness. It has not only a new world to conquer, it must go under in order to make room for men who are able to cope with a new world."⁶

I wish Tony Kushner were here to help us make Marx feel better — and yet it is true that we have, shall we say, generational momentum on our side.

As the Exodus story reminds us, it will take some of our own people and allies — as well as the others we must reach — time to rise to fullness and fairness.

And, Lord knows, we'll hear "murmurings."

To get to — or bring about — the Promised Land, we, too, will have to march, not fly, because that's the way it works.

We learn from Exodus, not to mention other social justice and human rights movements with whom we ally and overlap, that the proclaiming, the vision, the work, the ask, the engagement — time and information moving hearts and minds — not only are the path to winning, but, in part, are the transformation, the win itself.

From marriage a reality in Massachusetts to Canada, from movement underway in Spain, South Africa, Taiwan and Israel to California, Washington State, New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York, we have shown we can do this — and are also showing non-gay people that families are helped and no one hurt when the exclusion from marriage comes to an end.

All across the country, hearts and minds are opening as the fair-minded majority of Americans get the information and time they need to embrace fairness.

But it does take information, and it does take time.

We cannot move the middle, we cannot end this exclusion, if we fail to press forward, and lead, and win first where we can. We cannot move the middle, we cannot end this exclusion, if we collude with our opponents in depriving the reachable-but-not-yet-reached of the time and information they need and deserve.

This means we must not take murmurings — "too much, too fast, too soon" — or take "no," or "not now," or "not so fast" — for an answer, any more than others seeking to end discrimination have in our nation's past. We must not fail to push past discomfort to give people our real stories and asks, and the time to absorb them.

We must not internalize refuted right-wing attempts to spin a mandate for bigotry from a narrow election, or succumb to the scapegoating of gay people, marriage equality, or progressive positions that our opponents seek to stoke through their falsehoods.

Democrats, progressives, fair-minded Republicans, and our other friends and potential allies will never be anti-gay enough to satisfy our opponents. If they flinch or falter in the courage of their convictions, if they flee or fail the civil rights question of gay people's inclusion and full equality, they will find themselves gaybaited — as we saw this week, AARP'ed — anyway, and our families will be injured, and all progressives and the country will be the losers.

We must help our allies find the voice of authenticity and make the moral case for ending discrimination in marriage, beautifully expressed by yet another court this February, right here in New York.

New York's high court will most likely this year rule on whether to end marriage discrimination in this state this year.

We literally have a matter of months to work, month to month, person to person, group to group, here and now to create the climate of receptivity that encourages those judges to do the right thing, reassured that non-gay and gay New Yorkers will support and embrace their ruling.

To engage prominent New Yorkers and others, we need the talent and connections and commitment in this room. We need you to take action.

Kolot Chayeinu, Voices of Our Lives, is not just the name of this congregation, but is, indeed, the key to winning social justice.

We move the opinion-leaders and the public by helping more non-gay people hear the voices of our lives — your voices, gay and non-gay — the personal ask that provides the information people need, again and again, over time, beginning now and here.

As Walzer puts it, "the way to the [promised] land is through the wilderness. There is no way to get from here to there except by joining together and marching."⁷

Tonight let's "dance with our souls"; tomorrow let's pray with our feet, do our part, truly reach out to others now, and thus bring America and our New York closer to the vision of a Promised Land of milk and honey — of the pursuit of happiness, liberty, equality, including the freedom to marry — and justice for all. Thank you.

 

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