Speaking Truth to Power, with the Help of Silence

Case Study: Simon Greer of New York City Jobs With Justice

Simon's Story

A Personal Crisis
From standing along front lines and working for "Solidarity" in Poland to helping tourism industry workers on Hilton Head Island demand living wages and dignity on the job, Simon Greer has taken part in the fight for economic justice around the world. But after six years of organizing, four of them in South Carolina, Simon began to face a personal crisis.

Reflecting on his work, Simon remembers that he was quite effective at applying nonviolent tactics to put pressure on companies and that the coalitions he worked with won many labor battles. But, he said, "I was pretty mean by the end of it. [I] had come to a place where I was doing the work out of anger and out of hate, not out of love or even compassion." Now, six years later, he recalls how he saw people his own age dropping out of the work and many of the older people who stayed in "got to be pretty mean-spirited."

After his time in Poland during the Solidarity movement, in South Carolina doing union and community organizing, and a few years working in Washington DC as the Program Director at Jobs with Justice, he was struck by the words of a seasoned organizer who told him: "The tragedy with all this is that even if we win, we'll lose." Simon realized that "the people in power might be different, but the way we treat people wouldn't change. Certainly our policies would make a world of difference for many people, but how we behave might not change significantly enough to affect the change we seek." He felt called to learn how to "transform how we do this work."

Realizing that he was already "hardwired" to aggressively organize with people to build more power, Simon discovered that what he really needed was an "effortless, open, quiet, and humble" way of working. While living in Washington, D.C., he returned to a long-lost yoga practice and explored his relationship with Judaism. He also re-connected with the work and vision of Abraham Joshua Heschel, a conservative Jewish Rabbi and ally of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Civil Rights Movement. After taking a class on Rabbi Heschel's visions about both prayer and social justice work, Simon had a strong feeling that "these things have to connect. If they connected in this great man, they've got to connect in this work. I don't want to do my work and…leave it at the office when I go to yoga or when I go to synagogue. And I don't want to leave behind the feeling I have when I meditate or when I'm reading sacred text when I go to the office." Simon now sees this as a turning point in his life: "I don't think I would have made it [in organizing work] five more years if I hadn't gone this route."

New Beginnings: Jews United for Justice
Simon continued to work in and around the labor and social justice movements and looked for ways to bring spiritual practices to the workplace. In 1998, he founded Jews United for Justice (JUFJ) [link to www.jufj.org], where he began to create the organizational and personal space to introduce contemplative practices and philosophy into his social justice work.

JUFJ's purpose is to bring a visible Jewish presence and take action for economic and social justice in the Washington, D.C. area. As the mission statement says, "Jews United for Justice provides Jews with an opportunity to weave together their Judaism and activism, and creates a community in which they can explore and strengthen their commitments to both."

Simon describes JUFJ as residing in the tension between the increasing affluence of a large part of the Jewish community with work that feels "more foreign to the daily life of that community." Simon sees the increasing gap between rich and poor as one of the defining problems of our time. He says, "I think there's nothing short of a calling for both organizations [JUFJ and JWJ] to really rise to the challenge of leveling the playing field in terms of the power that the very wealthy and the mega-corporations hold as opposed to the power that people hold."

Living in the Space Between Opposites
Not one to be satisfied with either-or solutions, Simon thrives in living in the space of tension between apparent opposites:

Often I find people who [are] moving away from confrontational politics, moving to more mediation, dialogue, spiritual healing, and mindfulness... I think we could all meditate and, you know, the CEO at Monsanto started to and it didn't matter. So I have this tension in me: how do we maintain that there is a struggle in the world for power between the very rich and everybody else and also that the way we tend to do that struggle sometimes hurts the people we're engaged with, but it doesn't transform the world the way we want.

So I think the first calling is to do the work in terms of fighting for justice and the second one is to figure out how we bring a real mindfulness, a deep presence, faith in God, to the work that helps us do it in a different way.

Simon understands the strategic importance of nonviolence in fighting for justice and the role that his own contemplative practice has played in carrying this out. In 2000, he was in charge of security for the World Bank/IMF protests in Washington D.C. At the beginning of the protests, JUFJ put together a haggadah and a "global freedom seder." This proved very inspiring to both Jews and non-Jews looking for some deeper grounding and motivation as they went into what could easily have been a very tense and confrontational situation.

Simon told the story of an emerging confrontation between protesters and police at the march. He put a line of peacekeepers in between the two groups. The tension was mounting and one of the protesters lunged at the police.

Then it dawns on me, from the deepest wisdom, that we're all lined up facing the protesters, which makes it look like we're protecting the cops. So I instruct everyone to go front to back so every other person is facing forward. Half of us are now facing the cops, half are facing the protesters. I start leading this chant: "Whose streets, our streets," which is saying to the protesters and to the police that we control the street. Three or four minutes of this and the police fall out and the protesters get bored and move on.

If I did not have the practice I have, I wouldn't have had the wisdom to line people up that way… If that had turned into a violent confrontation and something really bad had happened, that would have been the story. The 25,000-person march would have been forgotten.

Simon recently left Washington D.C. after five years to become the new executive director at New York City Jobs With Justice. He says, "I hope that my work in New York will help model how you bring [contemplative practice] in. I think we could double our budget and double our staff and build that much more political power, and we'll still grind people up unless we find some way to create a space where everyone can figure out how they want to have a contemplative practice."

Personal contemplative practices

• Says a mantra to himself before "every significant leadership opportunity." The mantra, rooted in his Jewish practice, is: "Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheynu, Adonai echad." Simon translates it as: "Listen people, the infinite and the individual are one." He notes that it helps him to be present to every phone call, e-mail, and conversation. "It helps me remember when I'm really being a leader and when I'm just marking time. It also is disruptive, in a good way, of the pattern of work in modern Western culture. Usually I'm a multi-tasker, so I'm doing an e-mail while I'm reading a fax while I'm dialing the phone. It's hard to get present for three very different things, so it breaks you of some of these habits."
• Personal yoga practice
• Personal meditation practice

Organization Profile

New York City Jobs With Justice
Founded: 1992
Sector: Social Justice/Economic Justice
Location of work: New York City
Staff size: 8 staff and 3000 pledgers; dozens of volunteers
Annual budget: $350,000
Contact information:
330 W. 42nd St, #1905
New York, NY 10036
tel: 212.631.0886
fax: 212.947.0835
Website: http://www.jwj.org/

Organizational Challenges

Individual members and organizers come initially with narrow organizational self interest… the challenge is to overcome this self-interest and being able to "connect to a larger whole," to be part of a larger coalition.

Organizational Contemplative Practices

• Relational Practice: Sacred text readings
  Jewish and other spiritual texts are integrated into staff meetings, retreats, and organizational trainings as a starting point for discussions. For example, Simon presented a session on the idea of delegation by noting that it's not just "a new management term; it's an age-old concept. The fact that there's just this one little me and I can only do this little bit. I think Judaism really prepares us for that with this notion that God is everything out there that we can't understand." In addition, Simon invites others to bring in readings: "I don't care if it's Exodus and Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from the Birmingham Jail, but some text that grounds us in the deeper meaning of the work."
• Stillness Practice: Silence
  Organizational meetings start with a few moments of silence.
• Generative and Relational Practice: Poetry
  The JWJ field director wrote a poem based on the Jobs With Justice pledge that was read aloud at a conference. Simon said, "The 'I'll be there pledge' resonated because it is a spiritual tool. People see that it's not just about 'my little fight.' It's about all of us together. When she wrote the poem, it wasn't that she had stolen a Jobs With Justice concept and made it spiritual; she had just given language to people who knew this was a spiritual experience."
• Relational Practice: Increasing awareness
  Simon uses management/supervision settings to introduce practices that help staff increase their awareness of how they work with their power and their time.
• Ritual/Cyclical Practice: Shabbat
  Simon helped to introduce the practice of Shabbat (the Jewish practice of setting aside one day of rest each week) to the JWJ annual conference, with 700 people in attendance. Simon remembered:

  We brought a rabbi to help lead the Friday evening opening piece of the conference. Rather than what I've seen at a lot of places where religious people are given a room off to the side, or Jews are given a room to go pray, this was done centrally. Before the whole crowd, he talked about Shabbat. He had everybody look into each other's eyes and I thought "This is the worst move of my entire career; what a disaster." You could feel the tension in the room and he just kept moving right through it.

  During the course of the weekend, I have one memory of a couple of African-American college students standing in a corner. As I walked by, I heard them singing "Shabbat Shalom," and I thought, "I guess it worked." I think that would be the largest scale effort to put the Shabbat stuff right in people's faces at a mostly labor conference, where this should not be done!

  Simon feels that the practice of Shabbat was a "powerful addition" to the conference and to the organizers' work. "I think the more we can free people who fight for justice from feeling overworked, the more we create a space for them to find a way to heal themselves, separate from their work."