The CJC at 90

It was God himself who called the Jewish people “stiff-necked.” He was speaking to Moses, the paradigmatic Jewish leader and teacher for all time to come.

It was a severe scolding, of course, regarding the behaviour of the recently liberated slaves, but also a warning to the octogenarian law-giver that public service on behalf of the Jewish people was not an easy undertaking. As if Moses (and his brother, Aaron) didn’t already know that by then.

But true to the moral weight that has always attached to the pre-eminent imperative of fighting for and ensuring the well-being of the wider community throughout the long millennia of Jewish history, public service on behalf of the Jewish people, indeed, has always been a compulsory undertaking.

Our ancient sages assiduously sought to encourage communal public service. “If someone occupies himself [or herself] with the needs of the community,” they said, “it is as if he [or she] were studying Torah itself.” In other words, there could be no higher purpose.

This week we celebrate 90 years of committed high purpose, of public service on behalf of the Jews of Canada, by the most widely recognized of this country’s Jewish communal public servants: Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC).

Over the past 90 years, the CJC’s lay and professional leaders  have been among Canada’s most accomplished, talented, achieving and caring individuals dedicated to a mission that was and remains advocating on behalf of the well-being of the Jewish community and safeguarding the human rights of the oppressed and the needy throughout the world. 

Just as Canada and the community have changed over the past nine decades, so, too, has the CJC. It has had to evolve – and one can argue, is still evolving – to serve, as best it can, the needs of the Jewish and wider community of Canada. The instruments of advocacy are different today than they were in the past, as are the issues.

Today some 75 per cent of the Jews of Canada live in two metropolitan areas, Montreal and Toronto. Some 90 per cent of Canadian Jews live in five cities. Today, approximately half of the Jews on earth live in Israel. Today, very few Jewish communities on earth live in fear for their existential safety – with the notable exceptions of the Jews of Iran and perhaps France, and, ironically, the Jews of Israel.

Even as they encouraged it however, the sages also understood that public service on behalf of the community was difficult, demanding and so often, thankless. Thus, they established a special blessing for Jewish public servants that has been incorporated into the Sabbath service. Typically, however, in their wisdom, our sages prescribed the requisite behaviour at the same time as they described the blessing that such labour would evoke. “And all those who work for the needs of the community faithfully [i.e., in good faith, for no ulterior motive or inappropriate purpose), God will ensure their reward…”

To the men and women of the CJC who faithfully work on behalf of the needs of the community, we ask for and invoke God’s blessing.