New faith-based office discussed at seminary

BANGOR – While the new White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives was being set up in Washington, people attending Bangor Theological Seminary’s annual convocation Tuesday pondered the notion of charity.

United States District Court Judge George Z. Singal of Bangor, an Orthodox Jew, turned to the Torah, his Eastern European roots and the Broadway stage to illustrate his speech, “Charity and the Art of Accordion Playing.”

Singal, who has been on the job six months, was born in an Italian refugee camp in 1944. Many of the judge’s relatives perished in the Holocaust. His parents fled their Polish shtetl, or village, after World War II and came to Bangor in 1949.

“In the musical ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ Tevye the Milkman [the lead character] comes home from his rounds on a Friday night to prepare for the Sabbath,” Singal told the audience of more than 350 people Tuesday afternoon. “Along comes the village beggar to collect his weekly tzedakah or charity from Tevye, who makes a conscious decision to pass along a proportionate decrease to the man. The beggar is angry and says, ‘Because your business is bad, why should I suffer?'”

Singal said the recently reported decreases in charitable giving linked to the falling stock market and an economic slowdown, run counter to the culture of Jewish tradition. The word tzedakah is derived from the Hebrew word for righteousness, and giving was as much a part of a normal day in the shtetl as eating, drinking and working, he explained.

Singal said that a friend, who had played the accordion as a child, gave him the unusual title of his speech. The friend, now middle-aged, recently picked up his old accordion and tried to play it again. He found that he could not remember how to play the keyboard with his right hand. However, the buttons he played with his left hand, the ones he could not see, he played perfectly.

“Until charity becomes a part of our existence and daily lives, we run the risk of forgetting and abandoning the concept,” Singal told the audience made up of ministers, priests and lay leaders of churches throughout the state, many of them BTS alumni.

The Rev. David Keller, pastor of the First Congregational Church in Concord, N.H., said that the trend in Christian churches is toward proportional giving, where parishioners pledge a percentage of their income. He said that, culturally, most American Christians view giving to charity as a choice rather than a duty.

“What impressed me most about the judge’s speech was the idea that when something good happens, like the birth of a baby, you give something to charity,” said Keller. “When the mother dies, you give something to charity. Imagine if we thought of every event that changes our lives as an opportunity to share.”

During the question-and-answer period after his speech, the Rev. John H. Thomas, general minister and president of the United Church of Christ, the denomination with which the seminary is associated, criticized President Bush’s plan to use faith-based charities to deliver more federal programs. Thomas spoke of current trends in the ecumenical movement.

“Churches have been doing this kind of work for a long time,” he said. “The fact that the Bush administration implies that the church has not been about this is offensive to me. … The church of Jesus Christ is not just a faith-based organization, it is the ultimate sign and institution of God’s design for the world.”

This year marked the seminary’s 96th convocation and the last year the Rev. Dr. Ansley Coe Throckmorton will reside as BTS president. Last year, she announced that she would retire at the end of the summer of 2001. The theme of this year’s three-day event is World Without Walls: Listening Faith to Faith.

“The convocation celebrates not only the ecumenical spirit of modern Christianity, but celebrates the interfaith dialogue as a critical imperative in our time,” she said, referring to the inclusion of Singal and Islamic scholar Jane I. Smith of Hartford Seminary in the program.

The Rev. Dr. Walter Brueggemann of Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga., was credited by seminary staff with attracting more participants than in recent years. An Old Testament scholar, he recently met with a small group of Christians from around the world.

“We agreed that the defining problem in the Gospel community for the 21st century is despair,” Brueggemann said. “Despair is the continuing notion that things no longer make sense. … When there is despair among the have-nots and despair among the haves, there is violence. … Hope is the antidote to despair. Hope is not optimism, hope is an act of faith.”

The convocation will convene at 9 a.m. today at the Hammond Street Congregational Church.