A Moving Prayer For Minimum Wage

The March for Minimum Wage was a very surreal happening. My journey started as a last minute decision in Amherst, Massachusetts and it materialized a couple days later on the streets of Philadelphia.  It was a Friday during Pesach and everything seemed larger than reality. There were the various teach-ins at Rittenhouse Square where chanichim, ma’apilim, and people from outside the movement sat together and talked to each other about different issues. The topics of the conversations ranged from the about different aspects of minimum wage to questions about how faith plays a part in our activism. While that was going on, people commemorated Good Friday around the square, recreating the stations of the cross, which added an additional sense of seriousness and holiness to the conversations we were having and the struggles we were talking about. It seemed like everyone was gathering at the square: religious people, workers, organizers, politicians, students, professors, community members, and members of Habonim Dror. We were all looking for our own way to interact and engage with the struggles of workers, and at the same time we were all collectively actualizing a value that we all hold dear: social justice. Some of us were workers, living on an impossible minimum wage, and some of us were people who wanted to stand in solidarity with them, understanding that our values don’t mesh with the current reality we live in. And at the teach-in, the march, and the rally, we were all standing together, meeting each other, sharing our stories, and hearing each and every voice, something that I rarely see anymore. To me, there was a sense that we were not only there to engage in social justice, but also to pray, with our voices and our feet, for a better world.

There are a couple of images from the march that really impressed themselves in my mind. One was watching two chanichim explain minimum wage and what the rally was about to a young child. It was inspiring to see youth that the movement has educated understand and feel connected to workers’ rights, so much so that they wanted to actively share that passion with others. Another occurred during the march from Rittenhouse Square to Independence Mall, where I marched with chanichim I have worked on and off with since Madatz on one side and my mother on the other, shouting chants and holding up posters that showed our support for raising the minimum wage. As we walked down the streets of Philadelphia, singing songs of freedom and wage increase, being filmed and waved at from every angle by onlookers on the street, and being joined by different people who were struck by our message, I felt, for the first time in a long time, what it means to be a part of a movement, what it means to stand for something and then take action towards it. And people in chultzot were leading the way. One thing that ran through my head the whole time was that, for a powerful moment, it seemed like Habonim Dror had reclaimed its place as the vanguard of social activism, a place it has not been for a while.