A few years ago, 2008 to be exact, I had a rare opportunity. I like to think I rose to the occasion, but as it turned out, the impact was not what I had hoped. Except that many of the things I had hoped might happen, are now happening, apparently for other reasons, as I will explain.
As some Kossacks will recall, I edited an anthology a few years ago titled Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America. Suffice to say, my fellow contributors and I took a view that was rather contrary to the various conventional wisdoms about religion and politics at the time. I learned later that anthologies rarely sell well, and I also learned that the professional book buyers for chains didn't think that a book about the Religious Left that did not include Jim Wallis would sell. That was probably because Jim Wallis was the only religious lefty they had ever heard of. But I digress. This diary is not really about all that. Please bear with me.
In compiling what turned out to be 19 essays by 22 authors, I had undertaken a far larger project than I had imagined. But one of the highlights was editing a long essay by progressive organizing theorist Marshall Ganz, who was the top organizer for the United Farm Workers under Cesar Chavez at his height.
When I agreed to do what became Dispatches, I soon found a short essay Marshall had published in the Jewish magazine Sh'ma. In it, he explained how he had found his calling as an organizer in his quest to answer the questions posed by the ancient Rabbi Hillel: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? When I am for myself alone,what am I? If not now, when?"
"I began my journey as the son of a rabbi and a teacher in Bakersfield, California, found myself called to public work in the civil rights movement in Mississippi, discovered a vocation for organizing, and in the fall of 1965, joined Cesar Chavez in his efforts to unionize farm workers. After twenty-eight years 'in the field," I returned to Harvard, where I now teach a rising generation of students how to turn our share valued into the power to repair ourselves, our community, and our world. This is the work of organizing.
It was only as I began to do the work did I learn how central this calling is to our tradition."
Marshall, with whom I had the honor of working during Bob Reich's campaign for governor of MA, and later in founding Progressive Democrats of Massachusetts, kindly agreed to allow me to reprint his essay: "Hillel's Questions: A Call for Leadership."
But as I got more deeply into it, I found myself wanting more from Marshall. Part of the purpose of the book was to raise questions about what was being done, and how we might be able to do better in advancing social justice than we had so far. (As Pastordan put it in his essay "What the Religious Left is doing is not working!") I found something of Marshall's that I thought might do the trick. It was a transcript of a talk he had given to a group of students somewhere. He didn't recall giving it, and didn't think it adequately covered what he would want to say. And he was busy. But I was persistent. And so he finally said something like "Look Fred. I trust your judgement. You have blanket permission to reprint anything I have ever written, including the attached 13,000 word piece I just did for an academic journal. Or you can craft something based on my work and send it to me for approval."
Well. That was generous. But now it was up to me to figure out what to do with what I viewed as a huge opportunity, in the limited space I had. I was able to persuade the publisher that we had a great enough gift that it was worth giving the book a few more pages. And so I crafted an accessible hybrid essay from several sources, (but drawing heavily on his long academic paper), got Marshall's corrections and approval and the result was "Thoughts on Power, Organization and Leadership." Although not as many people got to read it as I had hoped, editing this piece was a profound education for me. I think it may be the essential Marshall Ganz. Or at least my version.
As it turns out, we were a little too far ahead of the curve. I now hear about Marshall's ideas being taught and applied all over the place. For example, I was astounded last year when I learned that a Washington lobby group was going grassroots and the organizer was schooled in Ganz-style organizing. (The times they are a-changin'!)
I was reminded of all this when I saw Marshall on Bill Moyers & Company this past weekend. On the Moyers & Company web site, is a short essay by Marshall Ganz that began with Hillel's questions and includes the paragraph below, which speaks to me.
By learning to tell a story of my calling — not my “career,” but my “calling” — I can communicate my values to others. By attending to the stories of others, and those we share with them, I can communicate values we share — a story of us. And by telling stories of the challenge to those values, the hope we can respond, and a path to action, we can inspire others to join us in action. Hope, however, is not the same as optimism. As Maimonides said, hope is belief in the plausibility of the possible, as opposed to the necessity of the probable.
I can look back now and see that the story of Dispatches was, as Marshall would probably point out, not so much about my career as it was my calling as a writer, editor, and sometime organizer for social justice.