In mid-2005, looking ahead to an upcoming sabbatical from my congregation, I decided to shoot the moon a little. Like a child might, I wrote a letter to one of my heroes, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. I told him that I had three months in 2006 and another three months in 2007 to spend resting and renewing, and that I hoped to do some kind of service work in South Africa. I wrote that I was willing to do just about any useful thing, from washing dishes to filing to carrying his briefcase. Did he by chance have any suggestions for me? I got a response right away from his assistant, and in January 2006 I landed in Cape Town and started my work at the Desmond Tutu Peace Centre and the Desmond Tutu TB Centre. For the second half of my sabbatical, in early 2007, I split the deck and spent half in Israel and the West Bank, and then returned to Cape Town.
During my stays in Cape Town I met “the Arch” several times, had a shy breakfast with him once, and saw him in the headlines and in the trenches regularly. I spent all of my South African time in his world, with his people, and I saw his hand and heart everywhere. 

My draw to South Africa and to Archbishop Tutu was intuitive. Like many American Jews, I am anguished about the Jewish occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Like fewer, I have been to the West Bank several times in recent years. I have followed the pathway of the separation barrier as it divided Palestinian towns and farms.  I know one poor family whose tiny cinderblock home, unfortunately sited near the settlers’ Route 60, has been under a demolition order for ten years now. I met a Palestinian peace activist in a wheelchair, paralyzed by a soldier’s bullet. I saw the graffiti on the gate of the Palestinian girls’ school in Hebron which says “Arabs = sewage.”  I don’t know everything, but what I have seen has been dreadful and demoralizing.

I think I went to South Africa in search of some kind of hope. At least, that’s what I found when I got there. I am not an academic or a politician or a statesman and my reflections are knitted to what I saw. Even so, I spent nearly every day for four and a half months in the townships of Cape Town, on the commuter train and on the streets of the city. The poverty of the townships is mind-bending. The HIV infection rate there hovers around 20 percent of the population. Violent crime is endemic.

At the same time, a lively uprising of almost entirely black and coloured township dwellers has completely reversed the country’s neanderthal AIDS policy. While I was there, billboards around the city showed a bunch of people I didn’t recognize, local celebrities, I assume—and Archbishop Tutu—standing proudly. The billboard read,  “We all have HIV.”

Living as I do in California’s wine country, I was delighted to see a picture of the Archbishop in the Cape Times, inaugurating a multi-racial, worker-owned collective wine estate outside Cape Town. I laughed joyously with the crowd when I saw gay comedian and activist Peter-Dirk Uys impersonate Archbishop Tutu and playfully mock his magenta cassock and fingers full of rings. Uys finished his sketch by saying, “Archbishop Tutu teaches us all that ‘practice makes perfect.’ If you practice kindness and compassion long enough, you’ll be a nearly perfect human being!”

In the township of Nyanga, where I spent much of my volunteer time, I saw the terrible evidence of a poor and economically-segregated urban ghetto. But I also saw many endeavors of all sizes and scales around Cape Town—and many people of all skin colors—trying to bring a bit of equity to daily life there. At the smallest level, I met a doctor in a public hospital who, in her spare time, brings beads to the waiting rooms and helps poor, sick people make salable crafts while they wait to be treated. On a larger scale, the TB Centre, where I worked, hires and trains township folks to do public health outreach, testing and treatment monitoring in their home communities. But back to that small scale: in addition to doing their basic jobs, each worker at the TB Centre is asked to use five percent of his or her time and energy to develop additional projects to be of service in the site where they do TB treatment. Meanwhile, the fanciest shopping mall in Cape Town sponsors a township orphanage. And on and on.  

I saw a society in which malignant social forces had created abominable inequity, and consequent human suffering. Through decades of struggle, those social forces had at last been quelled. And now the hard boundaries of apartheid are beginning to soften a bit, in a kind of natural osmosis of generosity. I don’t think I met a white worker, teacher, student or businessperson anywhere in Cape Town who wasn’t doing something to ameliorate the suffering in the townships. At the same time township residents are gaining some degree of access to real jobs, schooling, transportation, sport, health care— the things that make for a real life. Vigorous affirmative action policies at every level are trying to hasten this merging and blending, along with people’s charitable efforts and ongoing struggles. Not nearly enough, not nearly as quickly as anyone would wish, not without inertia and counter-friction. But it felt like, at the very least, there was consensus across the vast spectrum of race and class that everyone should have social support for a decent life. Different parties have different ideas about how this might be achieved—but everyone agrees (at least publicly) that every human being in the country is equally entitled. In South Africa I found myself thinking many times: this is the first time I have ever been somewhere where the social conditions are better than they were a decade before instead of worse. 

For me as an American, as a Jew, as a rabbi, this was a beautiful thing to see.  I was regularly in tears, frolicking in the surfside pool at St. James Beach alongside bathers of every race. The small cross-cultural friendliness of the train moved me daily. When I went into a café and saw customers of every skin tone drinking coffee, I shook my head in awe.

I was in Cape Town when the unfortunate cartoon of Mohammed appeared in a Danish newspaper. The population of Cape Town is about a third Muslim, and there was a big response there. Thousands of Muslims marched in the center of town—peacefully, with babies in strollers festooned with balloons. Over those couple days, government officials met with press folks, Muslim leaders and clerics of all the local faiths. They hammered out some kind of an agreement, which called for a bit of restraint on all sides.  “That’s how we do things in South Africa,” said a spokesperson in the Cape Times the day this agreement was announced. 

For me, these small intimations of reconciliation broke my heart open and filled me with joy. It is possible for former enemies to live together. It may be harder to heal economic apartheid than legal apartheid, but at least a society can point its collective energies and resources in that direction.

So when I see the graffiti on the separation barrier in Bethlehem, which says “apartheid wall,” I am moved a little differently than the next Jew might be. There are ways in which the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza resembles South Africa’s apartheid state and ways in which it is different. I think that examining these details is a useful thing to do. But for me, having seen Israel and the Occupied Territories in the full horror of their antagonistic separation, and having seen South Africa in the aftermath of its own horrible state of government-enforced apart-hate, I find the apartheid analogy hopeful and, in its own way, joyful. Because apartheid ended, and I can see that life— real life, life as I might hope it would be in a society I love—is possible in the aftermath.

In words that I cherish and revisit regularly, Archbishop Tutu writes:
God does have a sense of humour. Who in their right mind could ever have imagined South Africa to be an example of anything but awfulness; of how not to order a nation’s race relations and its governance? We South Africans were the unlikeliest lot, and that is precisely why God has chosen us. We cannot really claim much credit ourselves for what we have achieved. We were destined for perdition and were plucked out of total annihilation. We were a hopeless case if ever there was one. God intends that others look at us and take courage. God wants to point at us as a possible beacon of hope, a possible paradigm, and to say, “Look at South Africa. They had a nightmare called apartheid. It has ended” (No Future Without Forgiveness, Image, 2000).

I went to South Africa because I was in need of hope. I found hope there—personified in great measure by the beautiful countenance and tireless presence of Archbishop Tutu. I woke up one morning a few months ago to hear his unmistakable trilling voice on the radio.  He was in Sudan (along with Jimmy Carter and Graca Machel, among other noble “elders”) calling warring, murdering leaders there to make peace. Just hearing his voice lifted my heart and reminded me that change for the good is possible, even in what seem to be intractable situations.

Archbishop Tutu has spoken tough words to Jews, as he has to other warring and oppressing peoples. I have read many of the Archbishop’s words, including his speech in 2002 in Boston, which was recently cited by Jewish leaders in Minnesota who sought to prevent him from speaking at a local college there. (I was happy to learn, a week later, that the Archbishop has been reinvited to speak, with a thoughtful apology from the college President.) His call to us is strong: to remember our own experience of the Holocaust, to cease degrading and destroying people under our power today. We may agree or disagree with his message and his politics. But there is no hatred there, only a call to peace from a hero of peace who continues his lifelong ministry of calling warring peoples to peace and reconciliation. 

I return regularly to one line in the Orchot Hayyim of Rabbeinu Asher, the Rosh, the thirteenth-century master who composed a list of ethical principles still recited weekly by many Jews. The Rosh teaches us to “rejoice when you hear reproof, as if you have found a great treasure” (Orchot Chaim #45). We would do well to pay attention and to take heart from Archbishop Tutu’s admonition to the Jewish people, as we would hope for the President of Sudan to pay heed. 

I feel that it is a blessing to live on this planet at the same time that Archbishop Tutu is alive with us all. He speaks to the yearning of all human beings, including Jewish yearning, to live in peace and dignity with our neighbors, and he bears witness that such peace and such dignity is a real possibility, even for the “unlikeliest lot,” even in the most stuck place. Why would we not want to hear that message?