Hope is a Water Issue and Vice Versa

Mayyim chayyim, or "living waters" is a term originating in the Hebrew Bible dealing with laws of purity. For a person ritually unclean to become clean again, s/he would have to self-immerse in a body of natural, moving water in order to be restored to the community and to God. Practicing Jews today immerse themselves in a mikveh for ritual cleansing and renewal. The notion of water as purifying of course is inherent in belief systems worldwide, but Judaism offers a perspective that is much overlooked and very important for us in thinking about our world's water issues today: the root of the Hebrew word mikveh means "to hope," and the act of immersion is a transformation likened to rebirth. That water is inextricably linked to hope and transformation is a concept we should embrace and utilize in our policymaking.

That water scarcity and pollution lead to hope loss and desperate measures for many people around the world is well documented. After years of the West mislabeling the Darfur crisis as an "ethnic" conflict, water scarcity seems to lie at the root of the issue. In the recent special issue of "The Crisis," NAACP magazine, the feature article "Dismantling Toxic Racism" reflects how contaminated water supplies are often left untreated in African-American communities, which are also more likely to be the sites of toxic waste dumps and chemical plants. Rural hog waste lagoons are finally being banned after devastating Eastern North Carolina's air and water quality and affecting the health of many rural residents. Recently, the bottled water controversy has shed light on how corporations like Pepsi Co. have bottled public tap water and given us millions of pounds of plastic to litter the landscape.

Water is a mirror that reflects not only our physical actions with respect to the environment, but also our spiritual well-being. In order to transform ourselves and our world, we must return to seeing water in its spiritual sense: a cleansing and life-giving substance to which everyone should have access. Restoring hope around the world now and in the future will have a lot to do with water, so let's get to work.

YouTube Debates, Marriage, and Why I Want More

I did not watch the entire YouTube/CNN Democratic presidential debate, but I was struck by the responses of select candidates concerning the issues of gay marriage and the Darfur crisis, primarily because of how the issue of religion was (or was not) treated in both cases.

Concerning gay marriage, Rev. Longcrier of Hickory, NC asked the important question to John Edwards why it was still acceptable to justify excluding gays from the right to marriage on grounds of religious belief. He alluded to the fact that in previous comments, Edwards has expressed opposition to gay marriage based on his Southern Baptist convictions. Edwards admitted to having a great personal struggle with the issue, not believing in gay marriage on one hand, but feeling that as President it would be wrong to use religious belief to deny anyone fundamental rights. Senator Barak Obama argued that the term "marriage" is a non-state issue: all people should have the legal privleges of civil unions, and individual denominations should decide whether to call those unions "marriage."

While I prefer both perspectives to anti-gay marriage bans, I am unhappy with the responses. Both candidates relegated religion to the private realm without challenging the notion that religion can actually be used to liberate rather than oppress, which Rev. Longcrier began to argue before being cut off by Anderson Cooper. While I agree with Edwards that religion should not be used to deny individuals of rights, I would argue that there is an alternative perspective in our political heritage (as promoted during the civil rights movement) of embracing a spiritually progressive stance on political issues and reclaiming religion from the narrow interpretation defined by conservatives.

It is notable that none of the four candidates (Richardson, Gravel, Biden, Clinton) who answered the question about what is America going to do in Darfur expressed a perspective influenced by religious belief. While the Reform Jewish community, Unitarian and other progressive faith groups have spearheaded raising awareness about the Darfur crisis in this country, Darfur, like many other topics of spiritual and ethical dimension, such as immigration, poverty, war, etc, remains a religious non-issue in the high-stakes political arena.

But there is hope, and the field is changing. While there appears to be a growing chorus of voices across the political spectrum supporting protecting the environment, spiritually progressive voices such as the Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II, President of the NC NAACP and Rev. Ched Myers are speaking out about poverty and promoting a program of "Sabbath Economics," rooted in a Hebraic understanding about economic justice.

It would be nice to have a Presidential candidate who would be comfortable and effective in challenging the notion that God does not speak with the wagging tongue of the Religious Right nor watch the human crises of the world with the corporate eyes of indifference. Is that too much to ask?