This is Pharaoh’s Army

At the 1968 Rabbinical Assembly meeting in New York, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel extended an invitation to the keynote speaker, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. He asked that Dr. King join him in April for a Passover Seder in his family’s New York apartment. On April 4th, only a week before King was to sit at Rabbi Heschel’s table, James Earl Ray shot and killed Reverend King outside his Memphis hotel room.

Had Dr. King been at that Seder, he would have taken his turn around the table reading and discussing passages from the Biblical Exodus. King and Heschel might have recalled the day they marched from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery, Alabama three years earlier, arm in arm, standing up for equal rights and protections for all Americans, regardless of race or religion. Like those sitting around him, King would have remembered that the fight for freedom is an ongoing one; every generation has its own Pharaoh to enslave the vulnerable.

Although King never had the opportunity to sit at Heschel’s Seder table, his example of collaboration across racial and religious barriers should continue to serve as model in our time; only through cooperation can we effectively address the hardest problems facing humanity. The Pharaoh who ruled over the Hebrews in ancient Egypt is not gone; he and his armies still exist in various forms for millions of people around the world.

Modern day Pharaohs like hunger, poverty, and disease continue to enslave much of the world’s population. Eighteen thousand children die every day from hunger according to the U.N. food agency. Almost half of the world lives on less than $2.50 a day. UNICEF reports that one in every two children lives in poverty, and one out of every seven has no access to healthcare. Malaria is a curable and preventable disease that continues to kill a child in Africa every 30 seconds.

In his 1941 State of the Union address, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave his famous “Four Freedoms” speech. He spoke of a world in which Pharaoh and his armies no longer existed. He envisioned that in the not so distant future we would attain a world whose citizens enjoyed “freedom from want”—a world in which a mother would never have to choose between taking her child to the doctor and feeding her family for a week; a world in which a father would never have to sacrifice his daughter’s education to be able to provide for his family.

Ten years ago, 192 nations came together in New York City to reaffirm the promise of freedom from want. They established the U.N. Millennium Development Goals and pledged to achieve them by 2015. These eight goals address the root causes of global poverty: tyrants like infectious disease, hunger, and gender inequality. Now, five years from the deadline, none of the goals are on track to be accomplished. These goals, once beacons of hope in the fight on global poverty, are becoming broken promises to people across the world.

In sub-Saharan Africa, tuberculosis rates actually increased between 1990 and 2007 according to a recent report from the United Nations, despite the goal of halving tuberculosis cases and deaths by 2015. Contamination and polluted water kill more people than all forms of violence combined, and one million people still die each year from malaria, the majority of them children and pregnant women in Africa. Their suffering remains invisible to us an ocean away. Concentrated in the world’s poorest villages and away from the eyes of the developed world, they die silent deaths.

In 1955, the World Health organization developed a plan to eliminate malaria globally within 15 years. The funding from governments, however, soon dried up and in 1970 the disease still plagued much of the world’s population. Today, effective global malaria control would require an estimated $5 billion a year; according to the New York Times, Americans spent 10 times that amount on cosmetics and toiletries in 2006. Europeans spent $50 billion on cigarettes.

Modern malaria control, however, cannot be accomplished by money alone. Successfully combating the injustice of malaria requires cooperation across the lines that divide society—lines like religion, ethnicity, socio-economic status, and gender. In countries across Africa, groups are recognizing this need to work with one another in order to make real progress on eradicating the disease. In Mozambique, Together Against Malaria brings Christian and Muslim leaders together to utilize religious infrastructure to improve access to malaria prevention measures. In Nigeria the same is being done by the Nigerian Inter-faith Action Association, which will help distribute 60 million bed nets in remote parts of the country that are inaccessible to government agencies.

Abroad, populations are working together despite differences in order to improve the world around them, but here in the United States we often forget the value of cooperation. As Martin Luther King Jr. understood, it takes collaboration across the lines that continue to divide us to effectively address the major problems facing the world.

Miranda Rosenberg ’09 co-directs the 10 Net Challenge to raise awareness and funds for global poverty and malaria eradication.