Remarks delivered by the Rev. Dr. William F. Schulz
Executive Director, Amnesty International USA
Member, UUSC Board of Trustees
Unitarian Universalist Society of Wellesley Hills, Wellesley, Mass.
December 12, 2005 

“When I went out to kill myself, I caught a pack of hoodlums beating up a man.” That is the first line of one of the poet James Wright’s most moving poems, about a man so tormented that he feels himself quite literally banished from heaven and is preparing to hang himself from a rope. But then…

When I went out to kill myself, I caught a pack of hoodlums beating up a man. Running to spare his suffering, I forgot my name, my number, how my day began. Banished from heaven, I found this victim beaten, stripped, kneed and left to cry.
Dropping my rope, I ran…
[For] I remembered bread my flesh had eaten, the kiss that ate my flesh.
[And] flayed without hope, I held the man for nothing in my arms.

It would be easy to feel small in comparison to that brave, if troubled, man. How many of us would run toward the pack of hoodlums and not away from them? I was in Liberia in the middle of a vicious civil war, when armed militiamen stormed into my hotel room unannounced with AK-47s drawn. I can tell you at that moment I wished I had fulfilled my college athletic requirement with track rather than ping-pong.

And, similarly, it is easy to feel small in comparison to Waitstill and Martha Sharp. How many of us would set out from our comfortable homes, leaving our small children behind, to travel to an unstable part of the world where we would match wits with the Gestapo and lead journeys across the Pyrenees?

And yet the fact that they did that means that any one else could have done it, that it was not beyond the bounds of the human imagination. If even one person in a generation makes a moral choice, it leaves the rest of us with less excuse for our ethical torpidity. William Lloyd Garrison founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1831, when the slaveholder Andrew Jackson was president. That removes any hope Jackson or his fellow slaveholders might have had to claim ignorance as a defense for holding other human beings in chains. And Elizabeth Cady Stanton began the fight for women’s equality in 1840, when women were excluded from the world antislavery convention; so after 1840 what was Garrison’s excuse for remaining a misogynist? May I note without further comment that Unitarian Universalists ordained our first openly gay clergyperson in 1972.

But of course not every one of us accurately reads the tides of history. I often ask myself what moral myopia I am subject to at this very moment, something that twenty or forty years from now will seem like unimaginable shortsightedness. And that is what strikes me as most remarkable about the Sharps. They went to Europe in February 1939. February 1939 was less than three months after the Kristallnacht. It was before the Nazis required Jews in Germany to relinquish their silver and gold. It was before the occupation of Czechoslovakia. It was before the German “Pact of Steel” with Italy. It was before the SS St. Louis set out on its fateful voyage to Cuba, and before its 900 Jewish refugee passengers were returned to Europe. It was before Germany attacked Poland, before Britain declared war on Germany. It was before the Warsaw Ghetto. And it was before Auschwitz, before Auschwitz became the name of anything other than a pretty little town in Poland. It was, in other words, before most of the rest of the world awoke to the true extent of the Nazi peril and the full measure of its threat to the Jewish people. It was in fact five whole years before Adolf Eichmann would offer to trade the lives of one million Jews for 10,000 trucks and the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Lord Moyne, would reject the offer, saying, “But where shall I put them? Whatever would I do with one million Jews?” The Sharps, their sponsors, and their colleagues were gauging the tides and gauging them with astonishing perspicuity. It is easy to feel small and blind in comparison to that.

But that is not the lesson that I suspect the Sharps would have us draw. “Dropping my rope, I ran… [For] I remembered bread my flesh had eaten, the kiss that ate my flesh [And] flayed without hope, I held the man for nothing in my arms.” In the face of his own anguish, confronted by the victim’s agony, our hero remembered those who had fed him bread, those who had kissed his flesh, and out of that reservoir of memory, that well of generosity, that storehouse of mitzvahs, drew inspiration to hold the man for nothing in his arms.

We honor the Sharps as heroes who saved hundreds of lives. But I am willing to bet that Waitstill and Martha knew that though they and the Dexters and Charles Joy were the ones on the streets of Prague and in the mountains of Spain who were actually holding the refugees for nothing in their arms, they were dependent upon a much larger circle of friends and acquaintances who made their heroism possible. The people who cared for their children. The members of this congregation who maintained their church. The supporters of the denomination who financed their cause. And, yes, the tailors who darned their clothes, the shoemakers who soled their shoes, the pilot who steered their ship, and the housekeeper who kept their rooms.

That, you see, is why we have institutions. Because not every one of us can save a man from hoodlums. Not every one of us can set out for war-torn Europe. Not every one of us can visit the refugee camps of Darfur or the U.S. detention camps in Iraq or Afghanistan or God knows where else. But every one of us can be a part of the lives of those who do. Every one of us can be a part of institutions that make such heroism possible and in that measure can claim a degree of kinship with the righteous among the nations. That Waitstill and Martha’s work resulted not just in the immediate rescue of hundreds of lives but in the creation of an institution that came to be known as the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, an institution that multiplied those rescues a thousand fold in the years that followed, is testimony that, acute as their reading of history surely was, they knew that they were but a part of a much larger circle of heroes and heroines who made their enterprise possible and without whom their legacy and the values it embodied could never be sustained across the decades.

“What doth the Lord require of thee,” asks the prophet Micah, “but to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?” But sometimes in order to do justice and love mercy, God requires of us not humility but a reminder. Rabbi Mendl of Kotsk, the leader of the fourth generation of Hasidim, was a soul on fire with the anguish of his people. After a lifetime of battling evil, the Rabbi was utterly spent. On his last night of sanity, he gathered the Hasidim community around him and then, in the words of Elie Wiesel, “Having learned of the new pogroms that were laying waste the Jewish communities of Poland and Russia, the Rabbi flies into a rage, pounds the table with his fist, and roars: ‘I DEMAND THAT GOD OBEY HIS OWN LAWS.’ And then he faints and is carried to his quarters. Where he remains for twenty years. Until his death.”

Sometimes in order to do justice and love mercy, a person must be a real nudnik, a pest, and remind God of His own laws. Waitstill and Martha Sharp were nudniks extraordinaire, who not only pestered God but gave Her a hand. We honor the Sharps as Righteous Among the Nations and bless them for bequeathing us a vehicle through which we too might hold God to account and those left to cry—hold them for nothing in our arms.